Gaston's New Story

My story begins with a hilarious joke that I played on this girl in my class named, Mary. Put simply Mary is an overachieving teacher’s pet. At the time of the joke I thought that she pretty much deserved it. This joke that I speak of was that the night before Mary and I had to give a presentation in front of our Engineering class I sent her an email that said I was not coming to school the next day. She of course freaked out but, none the less she stayed up all that night preparing for the presentation she thought she was going to present solo. I of course came in the next and got a good laugh out of the whole thing. She and a few others did not find my little joke as funny as I and many others did. Although this may seem like the ending of my story it is not. My story is about what happened after my misdeed, in fact you may just view these as the consequences of my actions, as I do, or just see them as bad luck.

This first of the consequences happened shortly after the actual joke was played. On a long weekend I went with one of my best friends to the annual Thunderboat Regatta at the bay. The Thunderboat Regatta is basically like NASCAR in the sense that it’s high speed racing and attracts a lot of country folk. The thing that’s different is that cars aren’t what are being raced, instead hydroplanes are raced on the water. It’s all very exciting watching the boats travel at high speeds then suddenly seeing one of them flip and burn. While at this event I broke my hand while playing a game of “two hand touch” football with my friends and some good ol’ country boys who know them. Now when I say “two hand touch” I mean that that particular rule only applied to the smaller kids. The bigger kids had to be tackled. Unfortunately for me I was a big kid. Some of the kids we were playing with were much bigger then I am. Whenever I got the ball I usually went out of bounds. The last pass of the game I caught the ball in the middle of the field, and in the middle of all the bigger kids on the other team. Suffice it to say that I ended up at the bottom of a lot of bigger guys. That’s how I broke my hand. I was in my cast for a couple of months. On this cast Mary wrote “Karma”.

The next of unfortunate thing to happen to me was that my laptop completely died on me. The fact that my laptop broke didn’t really matter to me at the time. I eventually got it fixed and didn’t lose any data. It’s the fact that my laptop broke after I was already more then halfway editing my group’s music video for our Math Core Intensive class. That weekend I had to recapture all the video on a desktop at home and redo all the editing. It took me many hours that weekend to redo all the work. I got the music video done on time for class the following Monday.

You’d think that after a computer gets fixed it would stay fixed. Unfortunately for me this was not the case. While I was finishing up the last half of an essay about the Roaring Twenties my laptop again died. This situation was a lot worse then when it last broke. This is because when it first broke I had a weekend to redo my work. When it broke the second time I was in the middle of finishing an essay that was due the next day and I still had to edit another essay that was also due the next day. I stayed up late that night rewriting my essay about the Roaring Twenties and I was fortunate enough to find an up to date version of my other essay on my email account.

The most recent things to happen to me were both technology related, of course. On Spring Break I was looking to spending some good quality time at home not doing anything. The category of not doing anything includes playing video games on my Xbox 360. Unfortunately, my 360 began encountering a hardware failure during the first week of Spring Break. So video games were out the door for me as was time on my laptop because it was still being repaired from the last time it broke. I got my laptop the second week of Spring Break and I have yet to send in my 360 for repairs. The last unfortunate thing to happen to me happened at school. The second day back from Spring Break I walked into class and I accidentally bumped my leg against the corner of a table. When I took my cell phone out of my pocket to check the time I noticed something weird indeed. The screen was stark white with a black crack going across its length. I had broken the screen of my cell phone when I bumped into that table. Fortunately for me the phone still received and could make calls. I got a new phone the same day for free because the phone was still under its warranty.

Now in the beginning when I broke my hand I treated it as nothing more then just the consequences of playing a game of tackle football with bigger rougher people. When my laptop broke the second time I still thought it was nothing more then some bad luck. Then I wrote a mean short story about the joke I played and read it in front of the class. Mary with her emotional fragility that plagues all women did not respond well to my story. After that my laptop broke again along with my 360 and my cell phone. Now I am starting to think that maybe just maybe I’m getting my just desserts. That those events were my bad Karma coming to get me. It could also just be my paranoid self thinking that there’s something bigger out there trying to get me. Those events could and probably are just a bit of bad luck and it’s a coincidence that it happened after I pulled that stupid and immature prank on Mary. Feel free to think whatever you want but just remember this: Don’t play a joke on a person with voodoo dolls, especially when that person doesn’t have a sense of humor.