My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

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Rolston snuck his toes up the side of the grey dumpster, swung his body up and got his footing on the pile of garbage inside. This was a true diver’s paradise, three sixty yard dumpsters in the gated parking lot of an abandoned high school. The dumpsters were full of old giant green chalkboards, bad shag carpet,wooden chairs with the right hand arm rest forming a surface to rest your books – they didn’t stack well, arms and legs were at all angles – “this is gonna take some digging” Rolston said to himself. His whole body was alert, his feet spread wide on the uneven surface of junk, ready to leap if the pile gave way or one surface shifted. It was like gaining sea legs, but these were dumpster legs, and it took only the smell of garbage for the muscle memory to come back to him.

Right near the top of this first dumpster he saw a clock face set in a wooden case. “That might be worth some dough”, he thought and moved like the killing fields towards his quarry. This dumpster was virgin territory, unpicked. The clock’s long body slunk down into the pile out of sight. Bad news. Who knew if appendages came from the clock that would now be caught up in untold layers beneath him?

Rolston would have to look. The first obstacle was a small round table, probably from the special ed room. It was blocking off the lower two thirds of the clock. Using a long 2 x4 from an old theater production as a pry bar he hoisted up the table. He saw the multi colored channels of old chewing gum nearly lined the underside rim of the table. Dark stains showed where an eager janitor had dealt with the problem earlier. But the clock itself seemed to be resting in a smooth burrow hollowed out of the jetsam.

It was going to slide out. But the table was locked in by old filing cabinets, and the cabinets were trapped under more old tables. It was still a two man job, and Rolston was not ready to go for help. “Let’s make it a one man job” he whispered to himself and looked out across the landscape.

First he found a fulcrum. The dented silver fire extinguisher would do. He slid the 2 x4 back under the table and this time Rolston stood on the 2 x 4, raising the table again and with his hands free, he pulled the clock from the greedy angles of garbage.

It was heavy. The back side of the clock was full of loops of paper with numbers and punch holes. “Ephemera?” he thought to himself. Losing interest in the metal, wood and glass that made up the majority of the clock, Rolston unwound the separate loops of paper from cogs and wheels with the fingers of a seamstress stitching silk.

Interesting. It appeared this was a pre-digital alarm clock. It must be the master machine for all the bells and alarms that ring in a daily fashion at a high school. A closer look at the brittle paper showed indeed small boxes numbered one through sixty repeating over and over and over. And this paper was backed with foil and set on the thinnest of plastic. By punching out the minute you needed, the bell would ring. Scotch tape, dark along the edges from age, showed where bells were turned off and taken out of the schedule. The plastic backing allowed this paper to feed endlessly through the metal cogs and not break down.

“I will save our analog history!” Rolston cried out, rising from his crouch over the fallen clock, ribbons of numbers streaming from his fingers that clutched onto this moment in time.