From The Storyteller
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Hello All: Sharing another one of my glorious opportunities to demonstrate my humanity seems reasonable for this week's story. Enjoy, Doug
Dumb “What would make a battery-powered clock quit working”’, Elaine to me after trying a new battery. My response, “We’ll get another today.” Wal Mart to the rescue, and by 4:00 p.m. we had a new “Atomic Clock”. The idea of an “Atomic Clock” naturally got me wondering why this clock was different and how it worked. After a quick internet search, I learned that one second of time is 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation from a vibrating atom of cesium. Drawing upon a learned ability, I called an audible and quit looking. This learned ability is the capacity to quickly decide, “I can better spend my time elsewhere”. The ability was acquired later in life because, as a kid, I grew up with “If you start a book, you have to finish it - like it or not”. One adult day I found a book so boring I put it down unfinished and walked away. I was not sent to library hell, and I had gained this new ability. Since then, I’ve used I have used it often, with one glaring exception. The exception was a book so poorly written I actually complained about it to Elaine several times. Yet, did I put it down and walk away? No! I plodded on hoping this miserable book would somehow come together in the end. This hope overrode my ability to put it down unfinished. With the last page read, I declared to Elaine, “This is the worst book I have ever read all the way through.” She only smiled. I recall this achievement often because it it meets my definition of dumb and causes me to smile as it reminds me that I’m still vary capable of doing dumb stuff. Moral: We never totally outgrow dumb. |