Week 14 story: Check your checking

 

Patrick telling spongbob to write his essay

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This story can now be viewed in my portfolio here.

This story is not your typical tale. Not because it is specifically spectacular, but merely mundane. It is not a story about battling beasts, but one of defeating demons.

The story begins with our hero, you. Yes, you are the protagonist of this very story. I cannot say whether this is a story of the future or past, nor can I say if it is dream or reality, but I will say that it is a story of triumph. Now, let’s begin.

You have sat down to commence your work. Your deadline is quickly approaching and there is still much that needs to be done. You are furiously typing away at your computer, trying to get everything done by the end of the day. You thought that you had given yourself plenty of time to finish this, but the clock keeps ticking forward, closer and closer to the time this needs to be done by. You admittedly may have procrastinated a little too much, but it’s fine… it’ll be fine once it’s turned in.

As you are typing, you happen to catch sight of your phone. The phone calls to you, not a phone call, but the phone telling you, “check me.”

You tune it out and say to yourself, “I mustn’t check that but choose this” and you continue working.

The clock refuses to slow down and seems as if it is moving faster than usual. You begin typing faster, for you know that slowing down may mean not finishing in time. You hear a ding from your phone, and it says to you, “Check me, you’ve got mail.”

You know that you cannot stop, in fear of losing the race to the clock. You say again to yourself, “I mustn’t check that but choose this.”

The clock has ticked on as you have been trying to ignore your phone. You are slowly beginning to fall behind in this race. You are finally getting back into the rhythm when you hear a buzz; you hear your phone buzzing. The phone speaks to you and says, “Check me, I think you have a message.”

Really felling the closeness of the deadline, you say to yourself, “I mustn’t check that but choose this.”

You begin to become curious as to who may be trying to contact you at this time but completing this is too important to let the phone distract you. Your fingers start moving faster than they ever had before. You see you are misspelling words here and there, but any pause may mean that the clock wins. You finally complete your assignment.

The phone starts calling out to you louder than it ever had before, so loud that there was a ringing in your ears, it begins chanting, “Check me. Check me. Check me. Check me! Check me! Check me! CHECK ME! CHECK ME! CHECK ME!”

You can barely gather your own thoughts but know that the deadline will pass if you don’t submit it now, thus you say to yourself, “I mustn’t check that but choose this.” You manage to get it turned in on time. All the stress of rushing to finish, and get it turned in on time, slowly fades.

You think to yourself that you did pretty good, regardless of the minor errors here and there. Now that you have had a moment to recollect your thoughts and no longer under a time crunch, you decide to finally check your phone. The phone had nothing on it, not a missed call, an unseen text, not even a new email. Apparently, all of it was just in your head. Even though all of the noise and distraction, temptation of procrastination, was just in your head, you were still able to resist and get everything done on time. Nicely done, and good luck on resisting the urge to check your phone the next time you are pressed for time and have something to complete.

Author’s note: This story was inspired by The Sprightly Tailor. In the original story, a king promised a tailor vast riches if he could sew him some pants in one night. The caveat was that he had to do it while inside of the haunted church. He agreed to this, regardless of knowing what may happen within the church. That night he went to work at the church and during the night a great beast appeared and stuck his head out of the floor, asking the tailor if he saw his head. The tailor replies with, “I see that, but I must sew this.” This exchange continues up until the monster is almost completely out of the floor, but the tailor finishes and runs away just in the nick of time. I thought that putting a modern spin on it would be fun, and I made it a deadline and a phone because those both seem very relatable. Another reason I made it a phone is because many of us have some level of addiction to our phones, and this can manifest in checking behavior; excessively checking your phone to see if there is anything new. I wanted to try something new, so I decided to try telling a story in second person. I felt like the story was fairly relatable enough to be able to do this, and at the very least it is kind of fun because it mixes things up.

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Story source: Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1892).

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