Moment of Morbid Curiosity
Weekends are a pretty slow time for me now, not a lot for me to do. I haven’t the money to fix up anything around the house, though there is plenty I could do there. There isn’t anywhere to go, I don’t seem to have any friends left. It is just me, the empty walls, and our puppy.
When we still had chickens here, our puppy used to run back and forth along the fence line with one of the chickens. My spouse liked to say that “Chickens don’t play .. but…” Our puppy still goes out to the yard each morning and looks to see if the chickens are back, and every morning I have another weep.
Anyway, it is a weekend, and there isn’t a lot to do, but for whatever reason
my spouse left their laptop here when they left. They took everything else, all
the pictures of our children, gifts, gift cards, furniture, cook ware. Even a
few tools. But their laptop they left. Sooo .. out of morbid curiosity I booted
up the laptop in recovery mode, changed my spouses password, and logged in as
them. A quick find in the home directory found that the only real file they
left behind was a password export of our all the passwords in our password
vault. I assume they printed these up when they left.
Upon starting up the browser and restoring the previous session I found that they had signed out of all their online accounts and then tab-reloaded everything, I assume for good measure. What they didn’t do was clear their browser history with all the query params.
What I found out was and wasn’t shocking…
Up until 02/04, my spouse had made arrangements to have our little trailer inspected so it could be properly registered, they had worked on some spread sheets, and had generally been making plans for things here at home.
After 02/05, the day that I told my spouse that we were pretty much done as soon as our lease was up if things didn’t change, there was suddenly not a lot of browser history. What they did do appears to have all been done on 02/09.
- Grab a copy of all our passwords from the password vault in text form (I assume they printed these on paper).
- Grab a copy of our bank statements
- Issue a battery of bank transactions (which I found out about later).
- Grab a copy of my paystubs.
- Grabbed a copy of their medical records
- Set up a USPS forwarder.
- Attempted to redirect the graduation supplies for our youngest, which didn’t work since they arrived here.
All of this more or less makes sense I suppose, though the rapidity of it all implies that this really was a snap-decision by my spouse without much real planning.
What is more interesting to me is what didn’t happen. There are no:
- Links to Ryder or U-Haul or anything.
- Links to a lawyer.
- Attempts to contact our children or friends.
Certainly some of these could have been done on the phone, but usually when dealing with a lawyer there is going to be paperwork; I promise, I have plenty of experience with this at this point.
So yah, when our child told me that they were “pretty certain they have a lawyer”, either they assumed, or they were lied to.
Still, curiosity satisfied…