Tuesday, January 16, 2007

In The Year 2107...

I work at a gigantic archival storage facility.
To say more about the logistics of my job would be too boring for you to adequately comprehend.
However, one thing happened today that even I find interesting.
We process, store, retrieve and ship millions of bits of information. My day-to-day life revolves around the never-ending search for the exact information our clients require, whether it be in hard-copy [paper] or computer-data [tape, disk, etc.] format.
[OK, when does the part that is NOT boring kick in, Cipriano?]
→Today, I retrieved five boxes of ancient files [of a nature I cannot divulge here] and was just about to seal them shut on this special machine, made for just that purpose.
As I was doing so, my co-worker informed me that these boxes were to be shipped to another location where they were to be stored and then re-opened [here is the neat part]….. in one-hundred years.
One-hundred years?
That's almost a century!

Immediately, as I lifted the next box onto the banding machine for the sealing procedure, I had this amazing sense of how profoundly dead I would be when that very box would be re-opened.
It was sort of creepy a bit.
What will the world be like, when that box is unsealed, and some guy or gal [or maybe by then there will be a third gender?] will peer into its contents?
All of a sudden I had this wild urge to write a little note and slip it inside one of the boxes.
But what would I say?

“Umm. Hey! How’s it going? Uhhh… I sealed up this box way back in the year 2007 and I have… I mean had a blogpage called Bookpuddle. If you go there and check the archives for January…..”

No, that’s stupid. How about…

“Hi, person of the future. I am writing this in 2007. Do you drive a spaceship? If you do…. just think, this note was written by a guy who had to drive a CAR to work. Yeah. A CAR!”

No, that’s pretty bad, too.
In the end, I never wrote anything at all.
Now, the Spaceship-driving alien-type hermaphrodite-creatures that will open those five boxes will never even know that I existed!

************

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ooh, that's pretty exciting. That's the first time I've seen "profoundly dead." Excellent word choice, heh.

Anonymous said...

Oh, there must be interesting things in those boxes to seal them up for 100 years. My imagination is leaning toward the devious side, secret government documents and all that :)

Anonymous said...

That IS fascinating! And I like the fact that you finally revealed a little bit about what you do (I've been "profoundly curious" for a long time. Or just damn nosy).

You mean to say that you didn't even drop in a green singing frog? Shame on you!

Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my rag-time gal...

Isabella K said...

You should've written the note.

Cipriano said...

Perhaps you are right Isabella.
I should've asked like a really profound question.... like...
"Dear Mr. Future-man. Is Budweiser still the King of Beers?"