A new mystery has arisen, and it may actually rank higher on the Baffle-O-Meter™ than the startling and secret new genetic evidence that reveals Steve Jobs was in fact born on this planet after all. Faithful viewer Scott Kramer noticed something peculiar about the Mac OS 8.6 installer. In his own words, "693-2025? OK, after expanding the binaries and mounting the .smi's, we get a folder called 'Mac OS 8.6 Update' ... perfectly normal. But do a 'Get Info' on it, and we see '693-2025' in the comments box. What might this be?" Indeed, eagle-eyed Scott is correct; our mounted 8.6 disk image also contains the mysterious phone number in its Get Info comments box. Intriguing, no?

In a basic web search for that phone number string, we found a couple of pages that list "693-2025" as a contact number. The first is a real estate listing for houses in "The Meadows" of Solano County, CA, which lists (707) 693-2025 as the number to call for more information. Curiously enough, the second page we found is another real estate listing-- but this one's in Japanese. Not being familiar with the language (though Mac OS 8.5's multilingual web support allowed Netscape to render it beautifully on our screen), we can't give many details, but one of the houses in the middle of the page has a phone number of TEL091-693-2025. Two real estate listings sharing the same phone number in different countries... Coincidence?

Now, please note that we are not suggesting that people actually start calling this number in various area codes trying to find some bizarre evidence that will connect Apple with the Whitewater scandal, the Kennedy assassination, or the frightening trend of KFC and Taco Bell sharing the same restaurant. The last thing we want is lots of poor folks who just happen to have that phone number getting lots of calls waking them up on the weekends and interrupting their dinner time-- leave that to the telemarketers, okay? We don't need a repeat of that whole Tommy Tutone/867-5309 thing. Having said that, we admit that we did try dialing the mystery number as a toll-free 800 line. Imagine our surprise when a recording began with "Hi, Sexy! You've just connected to the hottest phone service in the country!" Hmmm... Just what are those Apple developers up to in the operating system department?