My Friend Alexandra and I have many common interests. The two of us are quite fond of Ancient history. Needless to say that when a particularly interesting program shows up on one of our favorite channels, (history, science, art etc.) We inform each other about the coming event. Most of the programs come on at night and since neither one of us are able to drive at night, we watch the programs on TV together, so to speak; she at her residence and I at mine. This time it was all about King Tut. There was not a program about King Tut that we hadn’t seen, sometimes more than once. But we were going to watch this one, because the advertisement said that it had never been seen before. I place little credence or next to none in the honesty or truth of claims made in advertisements, commercials, paid programming, infomercials, anything that even faintly smacks like a sales pitch.

“If it hadn’t been for all that gold that was discovered, chances are we wouldn’t even be talking about King Tut,” said Alexandra. Alexandra was right, but I had my own issues with the situation.

“He wasn’t a king, he wasn’t even a boy king, he was a pharaoh”, I responded. He was, in all possibility the son of Akhet Aton, the only pharaoh in Egyptian history to overthrow the gods and their entire priesthood and supplant them with one god, Aton the sun, whose son he considered himself to be. That little pica dilly eventually cost him his life. Alexandra insisted on the king thing. I thought the difference was in the fact that pharaohs had lots of wives and concubines, kings had one wife at a time and lots of mistresses.

Alexandra and I agreed to watch one more special about Tut Ankh Amon, formerly Tut Ankh Aton. It was different and it provided new information. True, he was a boy, about fifteen when he came to the throne. He was nineteen when he died and laid there in the sands of Egypt for a little over three thousand years until he was discovered by a British archaeologist. And now, at the beginning of the third millennium AD he was going to take one more trip. The boy king was going to be scanned from his pointed little head to his little toes. We watched as the scanning apparatus was situated and the mummy, carefully unwrapped, (even boy kings have to get naked in order to get scanned) was moved in to the machine. There were new details about his life that surfaced with the scan. We listened to the play by play discussion of the experts, one Egyptian, a couple of Germans and two French experts in forensics able to determine what could be told from the skin, the bones and other matter. Near the machine, a little lower than the others sat individual typing information, I thought. The scan was almost complete when the Egyptian uttered the unutterable in Egypt in, the French were doing the same in French, the Germans were totally quiet, and the machine had stopped cranking away. King Tut was apparently stuck. Then the camera slowly panned to the man down below who sat, you might have guessed that, in front of a computer. The monitor on that computer showed an all too familiar message: A FATAL ERROR HAS OCCURRED.

I laughed. I laughed so hard I couldn’t talk. Alexandra had no idea why. She never had a fatal error on her computer. I had my share of them. I felt a sense of relief to see it happen to someone else, some one more important than I am; King Tut and his entire entourage. Was it the Mummy’s Curse? Would they be able to extricate the mummy from the scanner?

The whole undertaking had a happy ending. The individual running the computer must have been trained by someone like Clarence. The computer’s fatal crash was caused by a faulty air conditioner. A small, ten dollar fan was brought in to cool off the computer. It appears that all the material prior to the crash had been properly saved. If Clarence would have watched the show he would have told me how important it was to save-save-save.

In the end they were able to create an image of the boy king from all the scans they had gotten. I looked at that bust of the former pharaoh and I couldn’t help but laugh. He looked a lot like my brother-in-law with ears protruding rather largely, a short round chin and a deviated septum. He looked nothing like a ruler of the upper and the lower Nile, or any other prince regent. But then, when you take away the crowns and the jewels and the heavy make-up, any human being looks just like any other human being. Tut Ankh Amon was the last of his line, the last of a dynasty. His death was not an act of retribution, caused by the priest of Amon. Cause of death was an injury to the knee cap that became infected. He died of gangrene. If there s a moral to the story; As far as computers are concerned, it pays to SAVE-SAVE-SAVE.