Five short stories by James E. Gaskin

The All-Knowing Laptop
Everyone wants a crystal ball to show them the future. But what if your laptop's screen saver showed your future? Wouldn't that be great? Maybe not, if you were on an airplane 35,000 feet above the ground.

Coding Red
Corporations enforce discipline in a variety of ways: some gentle, some not. And while everyone thinks now and then that their boss is the devil, Harper and his co-worker and new girlfriend Julie have a story about their work environment that will make your boss seem far less diabolical.

Bill Versus the Scanner
We commonly threaten our technical equipment in the hope verbal abuse will make the tools behave. But if office products could be persuaded to behave with verbal threats, how would they get back at us when we make them mad?

Feeding the Mainframe
Mainframes are old news, dying, nearly dead, a fossil. So why are there bones in the data center that's being emptied?

Touch Any Key
Techies have been cajoling newbies to “touch any key” for decades to show that a computer is harmless and won't hurt the user. But what if the computer wanted to make it possible for something else to hurt the user? Does that count?