MINNEAPOLIS — During his annual laptop hard drive cleanup, 48-year-old Twin Cities writer Wesley Monroe discovered that “New folder (2)” is just ominously sitting in the Documents folder.
Created May 6, 2019, “New folder (2)” seems to have some sort of intended purpose, but that purpose has completely escaped Mr. Monroe’s memory.
“I honestly have no idea what this folder is for, but that lack of knowledge makes me hesitant to delete it,” Mr. Monroe said. “I see a photo of my daughter sitting on the couch eating a chipwich, another photo of my son looking out the window, a few random .7z files with cryptic names, and an Excel spreadsheet containing numbers, but no column or row labels. None of it makes sense. What was it for? What was the purpose? I can’t delete but I don’t want to keep it. It’s just there taunting me”
“My big brother can immediately identify any one of the 2,300 Shutterstock images he has saved in his Downloads folder for work, but this ‘New Folder (2)’ thing is really throwing him for a loop,” said Monroe. “And now he’s worrying himself even more, telling me that ‘New Folder (2)’ implies the existence of ‘New Folder,’ which is nowhere to be found.”
Mr. Monroe thought that the read-me.txt file in “New folder (2)” would provide a clue as to why the file repository was created only to be left untouched for half a decade, but all it contained was the phrase “Revision 1.2.8.”
“I feel bad that my husband is so frustrated about this, but I’m just happy that it isn’t a folder full of porn,” explained a visibly relieved Julia Monroe. “It has such a generic, non-descript name that I thought it was rather obvious that there had to be porn in there.”
When asked why her husband would keep pornographic images on his computer when it’s all available online, Mrs. Monroe shrugged and replied, “I don’t know, maybe just nostalgia from the dial-up BBS days.”
The mystery folder also contains a 2,520,191 KB file named s3-rtppol.iso, which Mr. Monroe believes could point to some game or DVD-ripping project he had going, but he already has a folder for GameCube ROMs and MCU torrents on his D: drive. It’s so entirely out of place that there must be intention, but it’s also so random as to be rendered meaningless.
At press time, Mr. Monroe was in the process of changing the name of the folder “Tax Files – Old” to “Red tablet app backup 2015.”
