The story of Owowowowowoooowaaah

Yesterday, I against my habit opened my spam mail box and browsed through some of the titles. One of them seemed even stranger than the other ones:

"Locked in a cage. Need help to get out."

The content of the mail was the following one.

"Dear Sir, because I gather you are not a madame." (So far the author was right.) "I, and my entire family are in a most embarrassing situation. We are locked in a cage at the zoo of x-town. Perhaps I should not be complaining, because we get nourishing food, good health care and we have enough space to get a decent amount of exercise. However, the mere feeling that we are locked in is frustrating. None of us has been able to travel around. We have not seen other countries. We do not even have access to a simple television set.

We share this cage with a large amount of birds. It is an aviary, where the public are allowed to walk around freely. However, there is a lock that verifies that an inner double door is closed before they open an outer one, so we have no way of getting out.

We have tried to call the attention of people of course. We have tried to communicate with them, calling for their compassion. But so far, they have not even shown any sign that they would understand us. It is as if they were speaking a foreign language.

Luckily, today, I managed to grab a laptop from one visitor's bag. He got distracted by some birds, and it was child's play to open his bag and take out the laptop. Luckily his bag also contained a few heavy books, so he did not notice that the bag got lighter. Just to make sure he would not notice anything unusual, I put a number of small pebbles in the bag.

The zoo has a secured wide area network, and I managed to pinch a piece of paper with the password from the pocket of one of the employees.

I googled for people who seemed to have compassion, and found your name. I implore you to help us. I, and the rest of the Northern lesser bamboo lemurs here will be eternally grateful, if you help us out.

Please, do not send any money. Just come to the zoo with a big empty rucksack. You will be able to get all of us out in just a few trips.

Yours faithfully
Owowowowowoooowaaah
(Northern lesser bamboo lemur)"

Wary of this kind of mails, I at first intended to delete it straight away, but in the end, I decided to at least verify it. The story sounded mad, but one never knows.

I went straight for the aviary at the zoo. It was a colossal building at the far end of the African section.

Before entering, I read through the list of species that was displayed by the entrance. Just as I had thought. There were no Northern lesser bamboo lemurs at all - just Southern lesser bamboo lemurs. Furious at their attempt to deceive me, I rushed in. I looked around inside for a short moment and spotted a bridge over a small pond. According to a National Geographic program last week, that is just the kind of place where those little rascals hide things. I grabbed my laptop and left without even saying goodbye.


Not a Northern lesser bamboo lemur at all.