Lyle and the Laser Pointer

One time I was surfing through some of my favorite web comics when I spied an animated ad on one of them. It said that if I could pin the moustache on the face of the woman moving back and forth across the screen, I would win a laser pointer. So, I pinned the 'tache to her animated mug and six to eight weeks later I had my laser pointer.

At first it just sat unused on my desk. It turns out that I have fewer things I need to point at than I had at one time thought. Finally, the day came. A millipede was crawling up the wall, and I wanted to show my attack spider Lyle where to go. Okay, I'm sure Lyle could have found the millipede without help, but I wanted to use to damn pointer. I took aim and pushed the button. Suddenly, where Lyle's lunch had been, there was a lazer pointer shaped hole that ran straight through my wall. Poor Lyle was so scared, he ran right back into his cage and wouldn't come out for a couple of hours.

I realized that I had in my possession one of the most powerful weapons man has ever created. I found myself have visions of world domination, of world leaders begging to do my bidding rather than being vaporized from space Real Genius style. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like too much work. I was rather upset, because I had really wanted a laser pointer I could use to point things out without destroying them.

I left it sitting on my desk for a few weeks until I caught a repeat of one of the Star Trek shows. I'm not sure which on it was. It was the one where they kept beaming down to planets and the guy no one had ever seem before kept getting killed by some squiggly alien just before the captain got laid. Anyway, I remember that engineers in Star Trek seemed to always fix things by reversing the polarity on it. It was kind of like the space adventurer equivalent of ctrl+alt+del. So, I grabbed the pointer (poor Lyle starting whining), popped it open and switched around some stuff that seemed polarity related.

When I was done, I looked around the room for something I didn't much care about to point at. Finding no good candidates, I opened the window and took aim at them house across the street. I pushed the button and suddenly, the house vanished, replaced by some sort of hole in time and or space.

At that point, I was pretty much fed up. I mailed the laser pointer back with a note explaining everything that had happened and asking if the would just send me a frisbee instead. It's only been four to six weeks since then, so I haven't heard back.

You know, I hope that first laser beam, which I can only assume is still traveling through space, doesn't burn any holes in any planets inhabited by war like aliens. I mean a laser beam is something easily traced back to its source, given that it travels in a straight line. Maybe I should move.