The exercise:
Write about: technology.
The background image on the blog randomly decided to stop appearing correctly on my laptop, but the mobile version still works. Haven't been able to figure out how to fix it yet, so I've just gone with an abstract option that looks... fine.
Hopefully will get it sorted out shortly, or at least find an image that I'm happy with. It was probably time to update the look of things around here anyway.
2 comments:
I don't know if there's anything special about your laptop, but I can tell you that the background issues have been there for a couple of days on a Windows browser (Brave, which is a Chrome derivative I believe) as well. If your phone is an iPhone then it's possible it's a Windows issue I suppose.
The new image is... bright :)
Technology
WrongStart was Sixticton's premier learning facility which sounded rather better when you didn't know that it was actually the only school that the town possessed. For a while there had been a college-level educational facility known as Asbestos Hall but that had been closed down when the town discovered that its name was less in honour of the local mineral and more because it was, quite literally, stuffed with the stuff. Asbestos Park, the town's sculpture site, had been its playing fields and was the only reminder now of how many sickly, coughing executives Sixticton had produced.
James sat down gingerly in what the Headmaster insisted on referring to as the 'cockpit' in his classroom. Watching with the bright, curious eyes of children who are hoping that something was going to go horribly wrong were his class. As the arms and tables of the 'cockpit' closed gently around him there were a couple of 'ooh's from the children, and then as nothing else happened, a couple of disappointed sighs.
He braced himself, feeling extremely uncomfortable to be going first on this new technology, and tapped on a touchscreen to bring up the first slide of his lesson plan.
A projector flickered to life and, displayed on the wall next to the whiteboard in high-definition, was exactly what he was seeing on his screen. He nervously tapped at the keyboard to add a line underneath and exhaled shakily as the projection showed exactly what was visible on his screen. After a few more minutes he started to relax, feeling comfortable with the new teaching device.
Then a small child raised their hand to ask a question and he realised he hadn't worked out how to turn the microphone on yet to call on the child. He scanned the panels and screens in front of him, looking for a familiar icon and finally, just as he was starting to panic, found it. He tapped it and it lit up.
"Yes?" he said, and because the volume defaulted to Maximum the word blasted across the room so forcefully that it pushed desks and chairs backwards and shook the rear wall.
"Oh shi--" he said as things started falling off the wall and smashing. "Bloody hell, where's the volume control?"
The children were curled up on the floor in the foetal position and sobbing, hands pressed uselessly over their ears and someone, probably Emma from the classroom adjoining his, was banging on the classroom door and there was a faint trembling that might have been a sonically induced earth tremor, all of which contributed to him stabbing at the volume control -- and missing.
There was a moment of silence, which came as a relief, and then the technology activated the emergency ejection mechanism that he'd accidentally selected and hurled him, at speed, upwards.
At a speed, in fact, which didn't allow the technology to open the ceiling fast enough for him to safely eject through it.
"It's just teething pains," murmured the Headmaster as when remained of James dripped down from the restored ceiling onto the traumatised children. "Volunteer to be next?"
Greg - I'd set the mobile background as something different, as the previous background wasn't an option. Now... I still need to find a better one than what I've chosen. Before it becomes permanent by default. Or laziness.
Well, that started out innocently enough. And ended horrifically enough. The build from the start to the end was deftly handled.
And those poor kids are probably wishing they'd been placed in Miss Snippet's class after all...
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