Zip, Then Fasten   Zip, Then Fasten 

Josephine March 

The challenge: To write a story that included the phrase "First zip, then
fasten." 

Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP, smiled as the clock struck noon. Now that
his morning's sentry duty was completed, he looked forward to lunch with
his friend, Ray Vecchio, followed by an enjoyable afternoon off. He
planned to spend it taking care of his laundry and made a mental note to
himself to purchase some more Argo Gloss Starch for his drawers. He and
the wolf, Diefenbaker, covered the distance to Ray's police precinct house
easily.  

As he entered the bullpen, Fraser was surprised to see Ray hunched over
the personal computer which had recently been added to the clutter on the
detective's desk. He made as if to strike the monitor with his fist, then
snatched a diskette out of the drive and slammed it on the desk. 

"Trouble, Ray?" asked Fraser pleasantly. 

"Yeah," returned his friend. "Frannie scanned a picture of the kids. I'm
supposed to use my e-mail account to send it to Ma's sister in Florida.
Only I can't even get it off this disk!" Ray swore in disgust. 

"May I?" enquired Fraser pleasantly. 

"Yeah, be my guest." 

Fraser busied himself at the machine for a few moments. 

"There's really nothing to it, Ray," he said, turning to the aggravated
detective. "Let me show you what to do." 

"Right," Vecchio was still disgusted. 

"First of all, the scanned picture is very large. You'll want to compress
it. We use a utility called PKZIP to do that. Here, just drag the filename
of the picture over to this icon that looks like a "C" clamp. That will
compress the file for you." 

"Sure thing, Benny," Vecchio's eyes had a glazed look. 

"Next you'll want to mail it to your aunt. Click on this icon that looks
like a letter and fill in your aunt's e-mail address. Did you want to send
her a personal message?" 

"No thanks, Benny. Just the picture." 

"Ah. Well then, click on this icon that looks like a paper clip and type
in the name of the file. Rather like fastening a paper photo to a paper
letter with a clip." Fraser followed his words with actions and the e-mail
was shortly on its way to Florida. 

"So you see, Ray, there's really nothing to it. Next time you want to send
a picture to your aunt, first ZIP, then FASTEN." 

The characters in this story are the property of Alliance Communications.
The story is the property of Josephine March. You may not reproduce it for
any reason without the express written permission of the author.