“Did you put away my laptop last night?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
My other half, Sally, was turning over the house.
“I can’t find my handbag …” she said, “I think we’ve been robbed!”
Sure enough, our louvre windows had betrayed us in the night.
We called the police, our bank, our insurer, and a locksmith. And then we took stock.
“… at least your laptop’s backed up.”
I’d recently installed CrashPlan, software that automatically backs up everything to the cloud whenever the computer’s online. Sal’s files were still there to be found in the online back-up – accessible from any of our other computers.
Taking heart from this, we got on with our lives, but CrashPlan simply could not let go. Every morning, it sent an email warning: “You haven’t backed up since …” that fateful day. I’d come to accept this extra bit of white noise in my inbox until, one day, I woke up to: “Your last back-up was 47 minutes ago.” That caught my eye.
I logged into CrashPlan. It had just completed a fresh back-up. There were a number of new files on the laptop, including: a photo of a chaise lounge, a fruit machine game and a tax invoice for a domain name just registered … something about ‘cougar sex’. And lo … the tax invoice showed the registrant’s name and address.
I rang the police.
“I know who has our laptop.”
“What? How?”
I tried to explain.
“When you say you have their address … you mean you have an email address?”
“No, an actual name and address. Do you want me to email it to you?”
They asked me to come in to make a statement.
After two hours with a technically literate but paraphrasing police officer, I reviewed ‘my statement’. It was a dreadful piece of writing that I’d never want to put my name to. I signed it straight away, rushed home and logged into CrashPlan. I watched for the cougar.
Things were quiet. She’d saved no more new files.
I started watching obsessively, and had to limit myself to logging in just twice a day.
“I wonder what she’s been up to …” I would say to myself, brushing my teeth, while looking in on her each morning and night.
While I couldn’t control the laptop, I could see every file that was saved.
One day, an old bank statement appeared. It showed that last Christmas wasn’t so good. She’d spent it at a pub, withdrawing cash – for the pokies, I guessed.
I could see she was making space on the laptop by deleting our files. Even certain of our photos – which could have worked quite nicely on a ‘cougar sex’ website – were trashed. I felt relieved to see that this woman had no interest in stealing our identities or dignity.
And, as her website took shape, it became clear that it was about her: a single mother – a young grandmother, in fact – looking for love.
I started to feel sorry for her. Was I suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Or Reverse Stockholm Syndrome? I wasn’t even sure who was captive to whom.
I was flicking through her photos one day when a police officer rang.
“We got the search warrant.”
“Really? That’s great … I guess.”
“We went to her house. We got your laptop.”
“Wow. What did she say?”
“She said someone she didn’t know – a friend of a friend – left it in her car.”
They charged her and brought the laptop home to us. We immediately deleted the cougar’s files, happy to have her wiped from our lives. Though, I must confess, once in a while, I still stalk her on Facebook. I wonder if she does the same.
CrashPlan still hums away.