As a former audio engineer I can tell you for a fact that the way your phone rings when the lotto commissioner is calling to tell you that you’ve won a million dollars is no different than the way it rings when your best friend is calling to give you bad news, or when a telemarketer is calling to try to sell you new windows. The sound is the same. How do we know, then, in those instances when we just sense that something is wrong when the phone rings? Probably something to do with Jung’s “collective unconcious.”
This past weekend when the phone rang I knew something was wrong. It didn’t take but more than one look at my honey’s face to realize something was, in fact, not right.
Her best pal, we’ll call him Moose to protect the innocent, was calling to say that his relationship with the boyfriend, we’ll call him Bear to protect the not so innocent, had exploded.
Moose and Bear met through a personal ad on match.com. They’ve been dating nearly a year and Moose, being a hopeless romantic, had already decided several months ago that Bear was “the one.” Bear seems like a pretty nice guy; he’s been to our house a couple of times and seemed to really love Moose. They seemed to be a good fit: same romantic sensibilities, same interests, politics that are different enough to be interesting but not enough to cause real friction, slight enough age difference to not really matter. Apparently, all is not as it seems.
Bear just finished moving into Moose’s house. They’ve adopted kitties, they’ve painted rooms and rearranged furniture so that they can have His, His, Theirs, and Guest rooms in the house, Bear’s declined to renew the lease on his apartment. It seems, though, that Bear kept the lease on his match.com personal ad.
While doing the laundry on Sunday, Moose found a printout of an e-mail Bear had received from someone responding to his match.com personal ad. Could have been innocent enough: you have an ad and forget to turn it off. Send a nice note to somone saying “Ooops, sorry about that. I’m flattered but thank you no, I have a boyfriend.” This was not the case; the printout was clearly the end of a lengthy, rather explicit exchange that was to culminate in a face-to-face meeting.
Once again, a case of modern technology butting heads with innate human stupidity.
Since finding out my mother and her boyfriend are swingers from accidental computer findings it’s become my policy to totally avoid contact with someone else’s personal computer. Computers display the action, but not the context.
Not that that applies to Bear who just sounds like a manipulative arse.
But with the collective unconscious thing, I heard of an interesting study that leaned more toward the precog angle of it. In the study they sat a person in front of a computer, and then they would flash images and then the person would hit a key on the computer to note they’d seen an image.
The interesting thing is that without any prompting, any patterns within the experiment (that would allow educated guessing), or cheating, people were hitting the key BEFORE they could actually see the image. They knew the image would come up before it even did. Neat, huh?
Gosh, gotta love bein’ a geek!