With Christine’s labor due to be induced early Monday morning, my mother-in-law, Ann, will be arriving Sunday to take care of Lila. With Ann’s arrival imminent, I thought it the perfect time to share a recent anecdote about her that may well be my favorite anecdote about anybody ever. Sure, that may be overselling it, but I’m willing to risk it.

First, some background. Ann is a wonderful mother-in-law – funny, kind, thoughtful – but being organized is not one of her strong points. Exhibit A: About four years ago she embarked on a huge trip throughout Asia; she would start out tutoring in Viet Nam, and from there go sightseeing in about seven different countries before tutoring again in China. She lives in Rhode Island, and her main flight to Viet Nam left from New York, so she took the train down to NYC that morning, figuring she’d have the day to hang around with Christine. Her flight, she told us, left at midnight, and the extra time was ideal because she had bought a brand new digital camera for her trip, and left it in Christine’s dad’s car when she got to the train station. So off they went to buy a new one.

They returned back to the apartment that night, and we all had dinner, and then, around 9pm, she put on her coat and saddled up with her giant backpack, in preparation to go get a cab to the airport. Christine then looked at her mom’s itinerary, and saw that her flight had been at noon, not midnight. Which, of course, makes all the sense in the world in retrospect. Anyone who has ever landed at an airport at midnight on a severely delayed flight can attest to the fact that it isn’t exactly a hotbed of departures.

So after a few phone calls, Ann was able to get a reservation on the next day’s noon flight. I was a bit concerned, because the next morning Christine and I had to leave at around 5am, as we were going on a trip to Sundance; This meant Ann would be the last person to leave our apartment. As I’ve pointed out before, I’m a bit compulsive about locking the door behind me, so the idea of leaving the job to someone who I could now envision sauntering out of our apartment while the iron was left on and resting on a book of matches unnerved me.

But off we went. As we sat at the flight gate, Christine called her mother. I could hear Christine’s voice turn into an odd mixture of concerned and frustrated. “What do you mean you can’t find it?” she asked. Turns out that in the 12 hours since we’d checked her plane ticket, Ann had lost it. No, I don’t mean she lost her mind, I mean she lost her plane ticket. Our apartment wasn’t that big, there were very few places to lose a plane ticket. Once you’d looked under the couch, you’d pretty much eliminated half the possibilities. But she really lost it.

When our plane took off, she was still looking for it, and we assumed that she'd find it in time. When we landed in Utah, we called our apartment and -- hey! Look who was still there! But I’ll say this, to her credit: when that third flight came around the next day, she was right on it!

Some more background: Ann is not technologically inclined. A hell of a cook, a great business sense, but when it comes to teaching her how to use her own computer, you might as well just flick a Valium into her open mouth as she’s asking for the help, because she’ll become just as catatonic and disinterested midway through your answer anyway. She’ll ask, say, how to download her camera’s pictures into her computer, and as soon as you start pointing out the correct jack, you can see her attention sail far, far away to a magical land where there’s no such thing as USB ports and everyone writes on stone tablets. I think she tunes out because just by starting to explain the mechanics of her dilemma, it is immediately clear to her that you have midjudged the answer she wants to hear. The correct response to, “How do I get my pictures on here?” is “You give it to me and I do it while you watch HGTV and then you come back and presto, your pictures are on your computer.”

Okay, now you know all you need to know. She has a laptop and a desktop computer, and a different email address on both from two different providers. She keeps recipes on her laptop, and she had six that she wanted to print out. But her laptop isn’t hooked up to the printer, and her desktop is. Somebody suggested she just email them to herself at her desktop, and then print them out from there. Brilliant and simple! But as Ann was starting to do it, she realized what she thought was a horrible flaw in this plan: If her desktop computer noticed that she was emailing herself, it might grow suspicious, and suspect foul play. More specifically, she thought the computer would think someone was trying to break into it.

I have been trying to wrap my head around this logic for a couple of weeks, and still can’t do it: did she think the computer was alive, and fiercely suspicious? If she thought it was alive, it makes me reconsider why she’s so impatient and uninterested in getting computer instruction: Perhaps it’s because she’s already spent hours shouting instructions into its CD-ROM drive to no avail, and is convinced that trying to get the stubborn thing to do anything is futile.

So, faced with her email conundrum, she came up with a solution. She would trick the computer! How? She would email the six different recipes in six different emails, and though they would still be coming from her personal email account, she would throw the computer off the trail by writing “From Betty” on each subject line. Yes! The computer would never see that coming! “What’s this? Ann is emailing herself! Danger, danger, dang… oh, wait, never mind, they’re just from Betty. False alarm, let ‘em through.” Mind you, there is no Betty. This was just a random alias that Ann selected for its sheer banal believability: no one would ever suspect someone named Betty, especially a sentient computer!

So off went the emails. And then she promptly forgot about them. A few days later, she was at her desktop and logged into her email there. In her inbox, up popped six emails in a row, all marked with the subject line, “From Betty.” And what did she do? Bask in the glory of a scam well pulled? Gloat that she had defeated technology, proving once and for all that in the battle of man vs. machine, man would always emerge triumphant?

No. She forgot that she'd sent them herself, and then panicked, extrapolating from the cryptic subject line that someone was sending her porn (Betty porn?).

So she quickly erased them all.

The end.

Thanks in advance for watching Lila, Ann! Just beware of our refrigerator: it’s really really paranoid and may call Child Services if it sees you making a tuna sandwich the wrong way.