I knew that somebody had been secretly reading my manuscripts from the ink blotches formed on the margins, which told me that someone other than myself had touched my manuscripts. Why? Who? I took a magnifying glass out of my desk to take a closer look at the fingerprints. A set of prints overlapped mine, and I decided to test the new set of prints carefully without getting my own by using an ink pad and a ten print card ( a card that police officers use to identify fingerprints and I obtained one from a friend who was a police officer). With the mysterious prints arranged on the ten point card, I carefully picked them up and began my walk to the police station. But several complications arose; it began to rain, I tripped several times on the way there due to the uneven sidewalks, and when I was just steps away from the police station, I fell into a puddle.
Staring at the ruined ten point card, I let out a frustrated sigh, then got up and threw away the ruined card, and I walked back home to try another way of identifying the culprit who looked at my manuscript. Once I entered my house, shivering from the cold rain that had soaked my clothes to my skin, I walked into my bedroom and took off my socks,shoes and coat, placing them near the heater to dry. I looked for dry, clean and warm socks to put on my frozen feet, then walked back to my little office where I kept my manuscripts. When I opened the drawer, there were new smudges on my other manuscripts! Frustrated, I rushed to the nearest phone and called all of my friends, asking if they had been in my office, but they answered, “no.”
I finally decided to look for my sister, I found her in her office and she was snickering while typing excitedly to someone. I knocked and asked her if she touched or looked at my manuscripts, but when she gave no reply, I rushed over to her computer and gasped when I saw that she was typing to one of my friends about the content in one of my manuscripts. I tapped her shoulder and asked her why she looked at my manuscripts. She answered, “I could not wait to read them.”
I looked at her, shocked and angry, then told her to never look at my manuscripts again without my permission! But the one thing that confused me about her confession was that the prints did not match hers; they were someone else’s prints. I then peeked at the computer screen, and saw that my friend had read them after my sister told her how good the content was in the first few paragraphs. I sighed, then went to my office and made copies of all my manuscripts for my sister and friends. That way, they can all read and comment on each of my manuscripts before I decide to publish them. Also, now I can keep an eye on them.