Calling all Footings??? (A True Story About How A Cell Phone Got Encased In Time)

It's ten thousand years in the future.....Life in the future is FAR different than what we are used to today.

Right before the "Meltdown"

It's a bright sunny day in what used to be called New Jersey. Lindy, an archeologist, Tam and I, her assistants are rummaging through some curious artifacts that were found due to a recent excavation. This being such an important find, it actually halted all work on the new town being built exclusively for the "Visitors."  It's important because there is so little known about the previous inhabitants of this world due to the "Meltdown."

The Meltdown, as we call it, was caused by a meteor the size of what's left of our moon. It seems the moon was about four times the size it is now, due to the meteor glancing the side and splitting it. On a clear night, and if you look hard enough, you can see parts of what used to be the moon flying around its Mother, as if to say, "Can we come home now?" When the devastation hit, most of the then civilization was wiped out, mostly from fires...hence the name. Only a few groups of humans were left to repopulate what was left of the Earth. Most of the ancient civilizations were completely destroyed by the Meltdown and then after, the already battered few million humans that were left had to contend with and survive the mini ice age that lasted almost two thousand years.

This is known because the "Visitors" tried to stop the meteor, but it was too big even for them. They watched over the humans (like they did before the Meltdown, unbeknownst to our ancestors) and helped them to survive and repopulate. We did not learn of the Visitors until about five hundred years ago, and since then they have been helping humankind "get back on their feet."  We are now 50 million strong and growing, and we are more technologically advanced then our predecessors ever were....thanks to the Visitors. 

We only know this area was a New Jersey because the visitors had some records which they are sharing with us. We were very lucky to have stumbled on this archeological find, because there is so little known of our ancestors, and......well it's just one of the rarest, most well preserved finds ever!   

Tam, who is a Visitor himself, was sent to us to help with the excavation.

 

This is Tam...handsome fellow!

He installed a force field around the 50 foot deep hole to keep it from collapsing in on us. We are sifting through what seemed to be some sort of ancestral habitat. At first I found it hard to control the digging robots, but once I got the hang of it, I could pick up a half ton of dirt and fly it out without dropping a grain of sand. We hit what must have been some sort of base for the habitat. It seems it was a mixture of crushed stone or aggregate, and mixed with water....wow, they were so primitive! The structure was still amazingly intact, and was around two feet wide by one foot thick.

Just then Tam detected something that didn't belong.....some sort of ancient electronic device...in the MIDDLE of this aggregate structure! We knew it didn't belong because while scanning the area of the structure there was nothing else like this! Lindy called back to our base for an extractor. It arrived within minutes and was placed on top of this hardened structure. It took about two hours to complete the extraction, and much to our surprise it was completely whole. Tam looked it over and guessed that it was some sort of communication device. It was a small metallic device that flipped open to reveal numbers and symbols on the bottom and on the top, a piece of what looked like glass. The device was in such perfect condition that Tam thought we could get "the memory" from it! Getting the memory from something meant that a machine that the visitors had could read the signature of  said device and project it....sometimes just a few minutes, but that was enough for us! Lindy and I were almost in tears to hear this, because this was a piece of OUR history calling us!

The memory machine was delivered to our site, and Tam put the device inside the machine. At first the image was shaky and a bit blurry and we worried that we would not get to see anything, but it cleared up to near perfect and we watched in disbelief as our ancestors worked on this structure....almost TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO..............  Here's what we saw.........

The place is Lambertville, New Jersey. 

 

Dominick, the Owner from a construction company, was in charge of building the structure. We could see a large red transport device in the background that had a sign on it saying D & J Construction. There was a large oddly shaped truck in the street with some sort of turning barrel on the back of it. It seems that the material that this truck was delivering was called "concrete," which we could just make out from the lettering on the side of the truck  Two of the men were operating some sort of motorized riding machine with large buckets in the front of them. They would pull up to the odd truck, and the truck dumped a sort of thick liquid into the buckets, which we assumed was the concrete. They would ride off down the narrow stone path that Tam called a "driveway" and they were being directed by Dominick to stop just at the right time.  He would give some sort of hand signal, and the machine would dump this mixture into a long smooth metal device that would deliver the concrete into the forms, while the two men inside the hole would move and place this concrete.

The memory was near-perfect, but those machines were so very noisy that we could hardly hear the men. Lindy was in tears, and I reached over and held her hand as we continued our ride to the past.....

Dominick was a great leader, as we saw. He directed the men and had the job running like a well oiled machine. We watched in amazement as one after another one of those big riding machines that carried the concrete would dump the concrete, at Dominick's direction, into the hole.

Concrete buggy dumping concrete...

Then one of the men pulled up to the edge of the hole and Dominick gave the hand signal to stop, as we had seen so many times before during this memory playback.  But this man, who he called "John," wasn't paying attention. The man John apparently pulled the lever that dumped the concrete, and he hit Dominick's side, almost knocking him into the hole!

The video of this memory started spinning and it was hard to tell what was happening but we heard what we believe was Dominick yelling...

"Jesus (we thought his name was John....maybe a nickname), are you trying to kill me?"

Then we heard him scream.. "Somebody grab my phone! (THAT'S WHAT THE DEVICE WAS CALLED!)   John knocked it off when he hit me!"  The video was getting blurry and we could see what we thought were grasping hands..but we couldn't really be sure.

Now there was no video at all and as much as Tam, Lindy, and I were extremely disappointed by this,  we were relieved that we could still hear voices, a bit muffled, but they were voices of our ancestors nonetheless!!.

"Can you see it?"

Another voice said, "No, it's in the footing!"

I think one of the men was named "Shit" because we could make out Dominick's voice, and he kept calling , "Shit! I can't believe you did that!" and "Shit, I think it's gone!"

He mentioned him twice more before we lost the memory...

"Holy Shit, try to call it!  If you dial my number and we listen to the footing, maybe we will find it."

And the last thing that we heard was, "Shit.....it's gone". That was the end of the memory.


We stood there in pure disbelief that we were the very first people to actually see a glimpse of our past. And I just can't wait to get home as Tam gave Lindy and I a copy of the memory to take with us!! This event had such an impact on me that I'm going to name my first born child Dominick and my second born....Shit, after one of the more important people on Dominick's crew!

 TIP OF THE DAY:

 CELL PHONES:
Quick tip here, since were on the subject of cell phones.
If you happen to get your phone knocked off of your side, or maybe someone throws you in a pool while still carrying your cell phone, or maybe you drop it in concrete....here's what to do...

I did this once and it worked!!

• 1. Don't panic, do not to turn it on....that will probably kill it.
• 2. Open the phone and "pull" the battery.
•  3. If you have a phone with an internal battery....don't do anything to it (skip to #6)
• 4. Dry your phone and removed parts with an absorbent cloth. Be careful not to damage any internal components, just gently pat everything dry.
• 5. Blast your cell phone, battery and SIM card with a can of compressed air to remove any remaining water the cloth did not absorb.
• 6. Fill a large bowl or plastic bag full of white rice.
• 7. Submerge the cell phone, battery and SIM card (if removed) into the rice until completely covered.
• 8. Leave the cell phone, battery and SIM card in the rice overnight, but preferably for 36 to 72 hours.
• 9. Remove the cell phone and its parts from the rice after the allotted time period.
• 10. Blast the rice dust off of each part with the can of compressed air.
• 11. Reassemble your cell phone and turn it on to see if it is working.

  

See you next time......from beyond.........