Photo by Junior Dowie 'PASSWORD INCORRECT, Please try again.'
Hell, seven tries and no success. "Let's see: stud, Shauna, girlspet, what could the password be? Shotta, dog..."'Password incorrect. Goodbye.'She redialed.
'Welcome, please enter your password.'"Let's see: Bling Bling.'You have six new messages.
'Eighteen-year-old Shauna eased back, a grin on her face as she looked at me triumphantly. "I knew I could get in, just a few more tries, just think like a guy.
"She pressed a few more buttons and put the phone on speaker, letting me listen to all the messages her boyfriend had received that day.
"See what I have to go through," she sighed, "all these girls call him everyday and I have to know how far he'll go. This way, I get to know how many calls he gets, who's trying to get him and who he's responding to.
"Girls night out was proving to be interesting. No problem so far I thought. Except that she's at my house in Kingston, and has just broken the code to Michael's voice mail, 18 kilometres away in Portmore.
"I don't snoop because I want to," she explained while craftily pressing a few numbers, (to make sure, she tells me, that he doesn't know that they were already played when he checks them). I do it because lately I can't seem to trust him, he's always getting pages and phone calls while we're together and I swear he has someone else."
"Whether it is going through your mother's handbag for change, reading your friend's email or listening in on a phone conversation," Tika pitched in, "we've all snooped at some point in time as the desire to play Sherlock Holmes often gets the better of us."
Does snooping do more harm than good?
Tika, 16, was convinced that going through her friend's e-mail was a good idea because she felt that she was being used. Scanning through a list of the items in her now ex-best friend's trash can, she came across scathing e-mails about her sent to other girls in her sixth form class.
"It was the lowest thing I'd ever done, but afterwards I wished I'd never known."Even though she apologised afterwards, I could never shake the suspicious feeling and we stopped talking after that."
"If you're going to snoop, do it properly," 20-year-old Melanie cautioned. "Make sure you don't get caught."She said that a few years ago she was going through her older sister's letters and, discovering what she thought was a steamy elopement letter to a guy, showed it to her mother.
She discovered later that it was actually the words to the '80's song 'Leaving on a jet plane'. Her sister still locks the door to her room door whenever she steps out of the house.
But back to Shauna. Michael called a few hours after we returned from the movies. It's funny, he told Shauna, something had gone bad with his phone. Someone, he complained, had already checked his messages and he could swear that some of them had been erased.
-P.C.
