Richmond, it is generally believed, is an island of civility and genteel good-manneredness in the ocean of crudity and buttweasels that makes up so much of the world today.  Even so, there are, every now and then, events which shatter this happy illusion of civilization and decency, turning brother against brother and threatening to summon forth the primal apelike nature of man in all it’s terrible glory.  What could possibly bring out this most base and ancient facet of human nature, you may ask?  The answer is that most lusted after thing in all the world, the four-year-old Henrico County surplus iBook.  And now that I’ve piqued your curiosity by appealing to your more salacious instincts, let me go way back a couple of months and start at the beginning.

            It all started about four years ago when Henrico County (named after King James’s eldest son, Prince County) decided that in order to make all it’s high school students more tech-savvy, it would issue iBooks to all of it’s incoming freshman class students.  This would have been an absolutely brilliant idea, except for the fact that when you give a bunch of high school kids, they rarely all rise up and with one voice exclaim, “Yay, now we can all work on improving our graphic design, HTML ad coding skills, all of which will improve our prospects for earning a living in the fast-paced technology-dependent society of today!”  Instead, they do what high school kids usually do if you give them computers, they download stuff of questionable legality and taste (like John Mayer CDs), play Solitaire in class, and try to hack into secure school files.  And those are the good ones.  Among the others, there was at least one kid who, upon hearing that iBooks are bulletproof (and really why wouldn’t they be?) Swung his into a wall like a baseball bat.

            So, here it is, four years later; the iBook program has cost about a bajillion dollars, Henrice County has not, amazingly enough, become the new Mecca of the Information Age (in the sense that every year millions of Cybermuslims make a pilgrimage there and a few hundred people end up getting trampled to death an/or stoned).  So, in an effort to cut their losses, the Henrico Board of Guys Who Decide Stuff decides to just sell all the old iBooks off at $50 apiece on such and such a day, first come, first served.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Me and a few friends were actually planning on staying up all night and then getting there first thing in the morning to buy some of them ourselves.  A few days later however, it became clear that the proverbial Golden Apple of Discord (which, wittily enough, also happened to be a literal Apple, though more of a translucent aqua blue one) had been thrown amongst the various titans of the Richmond Metro Area.

            All a sudden, every single high school parent in Henrico was outraged that the iBooks were being sold on an open market, rather just to the residents and students of Henrico County.  Other city residents countered, saying that since it was a public auction, everyone ought to have a chance for them.  The battle raged across the editorial pages of the Times-Dispatch as if the city was debating whether or not to reinstate the sport of flaming baby-kicking (don’t worry, it’ll be  making a comeback in the Spring of ‘06).  The Henrico Coucil of Muckety-Mucks (I having already forgotten what I called them a paragraph up) pointed out that they were just trying to unload a bunch of old, mostly broken down laptops and make a few thousand bucks for the county at the same time, but the Dachshund of cheap consumer electronics had already been hurled into the waiting jaws of the Hungry Hungry Hippo of Avarice, and nothing could be done until this bitter little morality play ran itself to the gory and horrific end.

            But wait, things got even stranger after that!  Inquiries about the iBooks started pouring in from near and far, and it soon became clear that people were planning on flying in from states as far away as Wyoming, while others were making arrangement to come from other countries such as Canada and California.  Now, remember for a moment that these really are a bunch of four-year-old computers, most of which have seen some pretty hard use, so while $50 might be a real bargain, at $200, they’d be a total ripoff.  Nonetheless, people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars on short-notice plane tickets, just so they could fly to Richmond and stand in line in hopes that they might get an iBook (I might take this opportunity to point out that a person can buy a perfectly serviceable new laptop for something like $500, if one cares to do a little shopping around).  This new development of course, only made the people in Henrico screech all the more screechily as everything went completely freaking insane.  Seriously, you know that scene in Soylent Green where everyone is all rioting and stuff because there aren’t enough little green pop tarts made out of dead people to go around?  It was shaping up to be just like that, but without Charleton Heston.  People were literally getting outraged about these stupid obsolete, beat-up iBooks as if their fundamental rights were being taken away.  You think people get angry about Iraq, or high gas prices or naming sports teams after Indians?  You ain’t seen nothing yet.  In all honesty, if this had gone on a couple more weeks, people would have started forming gangs and beating each other over it.  It really would have been sort of scary, except that it was mostly just retarded.

            So, in the end, the Henrico Council of Wiseguys decided, fine, high school stedents could have first crack at the iBooks, and then the rest would be sold off to county residents.  Problem solved?  Not even close.  You see, it seems that when all these students and their respective moms showed up to buy the iBooks that had caused Richmond the most suffering and hatred since the Civil War, it turns out that most of them expected to be getting the actual specific iBook that they had had in school.  Which, since these things had all been sitting in a warehouse somewhere all summer, was just about the dumbest thing they could possibly have expected other than believing that they had won some kind of awesome victory against the forces of evil.

            So, to sum it all up, people are friggin’ crazy when it comes to getting cheap stuff, so if you ever want to take over the world or throw an entire city into chaos (and really, who amng us doesn’t?) just offer up some cheap, used computers and watch humanity degenerate into a seething throng of troggles, troggles who want iBooks (because of course, troggles are invariably all about Apple products, as opposed to PCs, though now and then you run into a Linux troggle).  In closing, allow me to point out one other thing, that The Linux Troggles would be a totally sweet name for a band.