Author: KokkieH

Boredom

This is a piece I wrote for a creative writing course I did last year.  The assignment was to write a scene showing a character experiencing boredom, but it should not be boring.  I have since expanded it a little.

The following is based on real events, with some embellishment.

Boredom

David rounded the front desk for the umpteenth time.  He’d lost count of how many kilometres he’d walked up and down the aisles.  He stopped at attention and turned around like a soldier on parade, completely quietly, of course.  The only sound in the hall was the scritching of pens on paper and the occasional cough from one of the students.  Scritching.  Is that even a word?  It sounds right.  David decided to look it up later.  No dictionaries allowed in the exam room.  Right now he’d even read a dictionary.

He rounded the front desk for the second time since he’d lost count.  By now he had inventoried everything in the hall:  floor tiles, window latches, light bulbs, bricks…He decided to add them together; without a calculator.  The mental arithmetic took him all of forty-seven seconds – he had timed himself by the clock on the wall.  Maybe something more challenging:  square roots.  Yeah!  He hadn’t tried those in a while.

David rounded the front desk for the third time in four minutes.  He glanced at the clock and about-faced.  Excellent!  Only two more hours to go.  David started back down the row with a spring in his step.  It’s the little things that make life worthwhile, you know?

He managed to keep that up for two circuits and seventy-eight seconds.  He started humming in his head a tune from a video he saw earlier that morning on the net:  Dumb ways to die, so many dumb ways to die, dump-di-dump-di-dum-dum…He stopped.  Why were all the students looking at him?  O crap!  He was singing out loud again, wasn’t he?  He stared at them crossly .  They continued writing.

David rounded the front desk for the…Dammit.  He’d lost count again.  He looked at the clock.  Only one hour, fifty-six minutes to go…

Copyright © 2013 Herman Kok

As a bonus, here’s the song (got to wonder what type of mind comes up with something like this):

On how smart phones are making us dumb

When I wanted to shock the kids I used to teach, I’d just tell them that I only got my first cell phone after I had left school.  My father didn’t want to struggle to reach me, so when I left for college he gave me his old Nokia.  It had an extended battery.  Thrown with enough force it could bring down a cow. (No, I never tried).  Most of the time the thing lay in my cupboard in the hostel and I only switched it on to phone home (why do I suddenly have an urge to watch E.T.?)

Having a phone ring in class was the most embarrassing thing that could happen and to send a text while having a conversation was the worst faux pas you could commit.  I had one friend who was a self-confessed cell phone addict and we teased her endlessly about it – it was that unusual.

Fast forward a few years and I was working with teenagers who had cell phones at least since they had started high school.  For the first time I experienced what it felt like to try and have a conversation with someone who was having a conversation with someone else at the same time (especially after Mxit came into the picture).  Luckily I was an authority figure, so I could make them put their phones away, but I’m pretty sure they were still typing texts in their pockets while listening to me.

Then came the smart phone. Continue reading “On how smart phones are making us dumb” →

KokkieH Reviews Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell

1984 by George Orwell
Cover design by Shepard Fairey
Publisher: http://www.penguin.co.uk

Just in case you’ve never heard of this book before (you barbarian), a few quick facts: Eric Arthur Blair, under the name of George Orwell, wrote it in the late 1940s.  He died shortly after publishing it.  He wrote a few other novels during his life, but none so famous as Animal Farm, which preceded Nineteen Eighty-Four and is about a bunch of farm animals who rebel against their master and start running the farm for themselves but is actually a satirical allegory of the rise of communism in post-revolutionary Russia.

Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four carry the same message: they want to warn us of the danger of not thinking for ourselves and giving too much power to those who govern over us.  According to Wikipedia these two books together have sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author.

Most people in the English-speaking world are forced at one time or another to read Animal Farm during high school (I can recite significant portions of Animal Farm from memory – occupational hazard of being an English teacher), which is a shame, really, as they end up hating what is really a delightful little novella.  On the other hand, for some reason people think there’s something wrong with them if they have not yet read Nineteen Eighty-four, or at least, that’s the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that it’s the book most people have lied about having read.

If you haven’t read either of these, but are planning to still do so and don’t want me to spoil it, you might want to stop reading about here.  If you’re not planning to read them, read on – at least next time you lie about having read it you’ll sound a bit more informed 😉

Continue reading “KokkieH Reviews Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell” →