A calm, satisfied smile creases his handsome and almost perfect face. His strong hands poured a steaming cup of rich dark coffee into a ceramic mug. The dashing gentleman briefly looks through the Venetian blinds of a spacious and beautifully furnished kitchen, and considers what must be the perfect morning gleaming over a well-manicured lawn. Handsome man sits on a large futon couch in a living room decorated with a combination of contemporary classic style and just enough color and kitsch to be considered edgy. With one hand drawing the coffee cup to his mouth, the other reaches for a laptop waiting atop the futon. Time to start a hard day at the home office for the handsome man. He begins his work in a pair of light blue striped pajamas and a retro-looking t-shirt (the kind with the piped trim on the collar and sleeves), slightly messed up, yet stylish, hair, and very hip square, black glasses. "Working from home was never this good."
Then, in a sudden, if not violent, burst of color and total molecular reconstruction, everything in sight becomes a surreal rainbow colored world of strange creatures bouncing up and down, giggling and dancing. Yes, the alien world of the Teletubbies takes over as Tim Mandrake peels his 3-year-old daughter off his back and flips her to the couch.
"Honey, don't I remind you of the guy in the Dell commercial? Not too buff, handsome right out of bed and can buy and sell stocks right in his PJs," Tim spouts down the hall. "Whadaya think? I work from home and I am buff…well, I work from home and I have messy hair! OK, I get it. You dig him! Say it! You dig him!"
"Oh yes honey, I dig him. Ooh baby. Shut up and get over here and give me a kiss," snaps Emma Mandrake, loyal and loving wife of the unassuming and obviously self-conscious contract writer.
Not quite the stunningly perfect plastic, metrosexual model playing the part of high-power broker who works from home. Tim worked from home as well, but his office is a 10 x 10 box of a room added on to the garage in sharp contrast the spacious corner room over looking the ocean as seen on T.V. Tim liked to call himself a freelance writer or at least he wished he could call himself a freelance writer with any sense of certainty.
Although he had a couple books in his brain and an itch to write marketing communications, Mandrake had settled in as an education writer-slash-editor. This meant, among other things, he wrote test questions for the ever-popular standardized tests that we hated by just about everybody except politicians who use the exams to assure the people that public education actually had a future. Included in his job description was reviewing and editing the content of a new educational software designed to move underachieving high school students along through the educational gauntlet and out into the real world with a diploma. His most recent assignment was the final review of the up and coming Mind Box Learning System.
Finally, Tim was able to capitalize on his usually annoying knack for finding minute grammatical mistakes. No cereal box, billboard, or list of ingredients was safe from what he called his "eagle eye." His gift, his talent, his stupid human trick, never ceased to amaze or irritate Emma who could give a rat's butt about whether a sentence had poor syntax or whether a word was spelled wrong on a coupon mailer. Depending on "where she was at," her husband's penchant for finding mistakes was also one of the reasons she admired him. To her, it spoke of how smart she thought he was and further pointed to the potential she saw in him that he tossed off as a product of his college years when he was fashioning himself as a pseudo-intellectual in the English department.
The Mind Box Learning System was about to roll out to the masses and Tim was the final eye to look over the multimillion dollar educational portal to success for the misunderstood and working high school students. The MBLS offered four years of high school in a multimedia format designed to keep a student interested with interactive "learning games." All Tim had to do was click through the lessons, engage the interactions, check the spelling, and point out any non-politically correct content. He checked it out all right but what he found was definitely not on the style sheet.
Over the course of a sweaty summer in the Mandrake home office, Tim scanned every screen shot of every lesson of the Mind Box language arts and math programs. While he found numerous sexist references, an ungodly amount of misspellings, and basically poor instructional design that was marketed for high school students but written at a 6th grade level. If it worked for newspapers, why not for cutting-edge education? He looked for inconsistencies in the activities and looked for consistencies between the lessons .
The number of inconsistencies provided a good laugh as Tim cashed his check each week, musing at the fact that he was paid because of someone else's poor writing. But it was the consistencies that began to bother Mr. Mandrake. After the first couple of lessons he was impressed with how each lesson seemed to flow into one another. He was equally impressed with the fiction passages that accompanied the reading comprehension lessons that were an integral part of the courseware. But there was something funky, in the passages, or perhaps the themes of the stories and companion questions. Maybe it was just the stinking color scheme but something bugged the crap out of Tim every time he went over a lesson.
Not known as a guy who could just let things go, Tim went over and over the lessons. His wife called him obsessive-compulsive, he called himself thorough. Clicking through the screens began to irritate him so Tim finally printed off all of the language arts passages. In what could have been an outtake from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mandrake taped the pages on the walls in his office, side-by-side and in order. Once the daisy-chain of documents went around the room, Tim continued the line underneath the first and so on. Using different colored highlighters, he began to highlight common words in each of the passages, sans the conjunctions and little words. He knew he saw something that wasn't there. The passages were all on different topics and had different characters, plots, embedded mistakes to allow for the test questions but Tim knew there was something similar, some constancy, some gnawing thread of something. And no, he couldn't just let it go.
And why should he let it go? Something wasn't right, like a rogue tag on a t-shirt, or that little piece of skin sticking out next to a finger nail.
