Attentive Child

As one of the more outgoing members of the I.S. department, I was tapped to lead the second half of the tech department's 20 minute presentation on what we do and to tell them a little bit about the Internet and the city's fledgling website. The first 10 minutes of the presentation was to be led by Rick, our networking guy, who had set up 12 laptops in a conference room to show the kids how cool it was that you can "ping" a server in Japan and have that signal returned in under 400 milliseconds.

The sons entered our conference room and rushed to the laptops like jackals pouncing on prey. They immediately began to find every game installed and to show the younger kids how to change the desktop picture and other tricks. Rick gave up after about 3 minutes, leaving me with 17 minutes to fill and a crowded room of boys who were hyped on bags of candy given to them by the Finance department 30 minutes earlier.

I got their attention briefly when I pulled out my camera. I took some of their photos and was going to build a web gallery with them quickly by hand, soliciting design info from them to show them how to change colors, fonts, and layouts. The first thing I found was that 10-year-olds have this strange disease where the moment before you take their picture their face goes all wacky.

However, before I could really start I had lost them. Two older boys were playing video pinball and were distracting six other boys in the back of the room. So I shut down their game. They started it back up. So I stood them in the corner. I began talking about the history of the Internet and the Web and Marc Andreeson and Mosaic, but they weren't having any of it. I'm asking them questions and trying to engage them but I couldn't get them to look away from their laptops or quit playing.

And that's when I grabbed the yellow whiffle bat.

It was leaning in a corner, and I have no idea why it was there, but I smacked it on the table and they all paid attention to me. I started into how servers make up the Internet when one of the two older bad kids found pinball again and, suddenly, I had lost them. My window of opportunity was lost. I passed out my beautiful, carefully written handouts to which one kid said he didn't want one. I apparently told him "to live it, love it, learn it" and to sleep with it under his pillow, according to my oh-so-amused co-workers later in the day.

By then it was time for them to leave. On the way out, one kid told me that I was funny. I said thanks! "Funny looking," he said, giggling like he'd just said the funniest thing, ever. I reached for the yellow whiffle bat and he scurried away. "You don't have kids, do you?" asked one co-worker standing at the door to take them away. "No..." I replied, exhausted. "You'll do fine," she said, smiling.

Replies: 3 comments

the greek gods are chuckling at the irony...

Posted by trace Tuesday, July 2, 2002 at 10:00 PM EST