Last night my life culminated. Everything else from now will be a pitiful epilogue. I strolled home from a late and especially fruitless night at varsity around 1.30am to my bachelor pad which is a block away, and quite nice. I try not to be habitually so late home but it was a Tuesday and I didn’t have other plans and I kind of lost track of time.

I arrived at the front door to the apartment building to realize that although I had the keys to my apartment, in my frenzied exit that morning, I had left the swipe card that controlled access to the actual building, inside. The building is one of those faceless high-risers that one can exist in for a million years and never bump into neighbors. At least, that is my excuse. You can hear them. You can hear them and their stereos loud and late at night after a terrible forty hour day, but you never see them.

There is a buzzer on the front door that you can use to call any of the apartments and they can let you in by hitting “9″ but I am already in the black books of the Management because of a little incident involving April Fools Day – so I was not about to call them at one on a school day morning. After a little consideration, I also gave up on the idea of calling a random apartment and masquerading as a telephone surveyor testing people’s ability to dial arbitrary number sequences. It was about the right time of night for such tele-surveys, but they mightn’t buy the plot – it sounded too useful.

So I did what any computer guy would do, I doubled back to the warm comfort of my office. My machine at home is permanently online, so I ssh’ed in and a little vgetty and Modem::Vgetty action later had arranged Ye Olde Linux Box to act as an answering phone and to answer phones with a pulse of pure “9″ (which I have subsequently found to be a pair of tones at 852Hz and 1477Hz). As insurance, I set cron to redial the box at half an hour intervals, disconnected it from the internet and doubled back home.

It worked like a charm and I slept peacefully and gleefully in my own bed. It was the sort of night that dreams are made of.