An important note to the reader from Tom Angleberger Some of you may know that before I wrote the Origami Yoda books I used to be a newspaper reporter For years I covered everything that happened in this town down in the mountains of Virginia called Crickenburg And one of the hundreds of stories I wrote was about a big change at the sewage plant That was around the year 2000 and back then Crickenburg was growing like crazy and that meant there were a lot more people flushing toilets So they made the sewage plant bigger I had to go down to the sewage plant to interview the plant manager and MAN did it stink I stayed as far away from the big pools of brown goop as I could I got the facts and got out of there Then I wrote them up and the paper printed them I thought that was the end of the story But just recently I found out that there was a lot more that happened after that It was a lot crazier messier stinkier and yes POOPIER than I ever knew A few months ago this guy called me and told me he had found a big stack of really weird papers in the storage room of the old Qwikpick gas station on Franklin Street One of the things in the big stack was my story about the sewage plant
I said'd like to take a look and yes there was my story although the newspaper had turned yellow over the years It was the rest of the papers that were really interesting though They told an absolutely crazy story about these kids trying to go on an adventure I'll let you read all about it yourself After all that s the whole point to reprinting their official report in this book I haven't been able to find the kids but I bet they'd be really pleased to know their report got printed up But before you read it let me tell you what it was like back in 2000 Kids weren't running around with camera phones A camera and a phone were two separate things and most kids didn't have either Most of their parents didn't have cellphones yet or if they did they spent most of their time complaining that they didn't work very well People were just getting used to digital cameras but they were big and chunky and sometimes the photos were pretty cruddy plus they were expensive Most families had a computer by then but there wasn't as much to do with it no YouTube or Twitter and I think Facebook was maybe just getting started And the Internet was really slow so you couldn't watch streaming TV and there was no easy way to download
music either I'm having trouble remembering what we DID use computers for back then actually All of this meant that if you lived in a pretty boring town you couldn't just go online and find something cool to do You had to try to find something cool in the real world And that's what these kids had been trying to do Did they succeed Well you should find out for yourself So III stop now and let you start digging into that big crazy stack of papers the dude found at the Qwikpick also known as The Qwikpick Papers Tom Angleberger
