The Mysterious Appearance of a White Box
I should take more care what I wish for. For sometimes, it comes true ... most notably, if you have a really playful friend (which, in all honesty, is exactly what I (secretly) wished for, clearly without considering the consequences, notably the fact that I have to be prepared for surprises).
So. This evening, around 9 o'clock, the doorbell rings. I use the buzzer to open the door, but no one comes in. "Stupid kids" I think and return to my Mac. A few minutes later my flatmate returns. I tell him about the incident. He looks at me strangely and then suddenly suggests that someone might have left something in the letterbox.
"Come on!" I go, but he still goes to check. Some moments later I hear a shriek, and he returns, carrying a white box ...
A white box, usually used to carry around money. With a lock (of course). But there's no key (figures). And, stylishly enough, a message on top, with burned edges and all, exactly how you'd imagine a treasure hunt.
Keep it secret, keep it safe.
More Information is to come.
What can we learn from that? Let's see ...
- The first line is a direct quote from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. So it's someone who knows those films pretty well – or someone who suspects that I know those films.
- The second line has a slight error – "Information" is capitalised. Since the rest of the text is not (title-)capitalised, this slip suggests a person having German as their native language (in which "Information" would be capitalised as a noun).
- The text is set in Zapfino, a font that comes pre-installed on Mac OS X, but not Windows. So the person is likely to be a Mac user.
- Hardly visible on the picture is the fact that the letters shine. So it is obviously not printed out using an ink-jet printer, but with a laser printer, probably even a colour laser printer. The person must have access to such a device.
I'd say that's already a nice basis to track that certain person down.
Okay, I think I pretty much know who it is, anyway ^_^
Let's see what happens next ...
Update!
Woah! I completely overlooked the biggest clue of them all: The message is written in English!1 Now, quite a lot people know that I have no problems with English, but there are (apart from the people from the English Department) only a few German speakers that in certain contexts switch to English to talk (or rather:) IM/twitter/mail with me.2
That narrows the suspects down to three people that use English instead of German with me. Two of them use Windows, respectively Linux. Which leaves only one using a Mac ...
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Which obviously tells you a lot about my relationship with English: it is just no longer a foreign language anymore, it is simply another code into which I learned to switch so effortlessly that I don't even realise the switch anymore. In fact, after reading something, I probably couldn't tell you a few days later whether the information was in German or English – it just became information. ↩
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Wouldn't that be an interesting topic for a linguistic paper about code switching? ↩






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