Hi. I'm just an ordinary calculator, belonging to an ordinary person and leading the ordinary life that most calculators do. I help my young lady with the stupid calculations that she doesn't have the brains to do herself and get her through her engineering exams.
People think life as a calculator can be boring but that's not true. Apart from getting to hear all the abuse and praise (yes, there is praise too!) that students heap upon their courses and teachers, I also get to see firsthand what they go through, and why they go through it. And apart from dry academic stuff, I'm also a firsthand witness to how young students behave in general, with their friends, with acquaintances and with strangers. And most of all with themselves.
I'm a dumb witness so I get to see without any pretense. Without these kids trying to be fake or trying to hide how they feel. People can be so nasty at times and so nice at others. And some people can be really so nasty and really so nice.
I got separated from my lady two days before her exams. Careless woman just left me in the classroom one day while trying to complete some class report, three hours overdue at that, and she had to call for help, and someone else picked me up after that. My lady lost all hope of recovering me, and hunted and hunted, so I heard, and was on the brink of buying another one to replace me. It's her luck that a sequence of nice young cultured gentlemen passed me on, one to another, until I landed up with a young man sitting two benches away from her in the exam hall. And he very graciously returned me to her, and I can tell you there was very sincere gratitude and genuine relief in her eyes. Which was needed, since she has begun to lose hope that there is goodness of heart and mind in this world.
The moral of the story is don't ever lose faith. Faith in what? In the innate niceness of people. It's difficult to believe people can still be good. I could very well have been kept by some unscrupulous young ruffian, or been sold by some member of the domestic staff for a little extra pocket money, or perhaps just been lying around for days in some lost lonely corner, seen by the eyes of none, my life wasted and deprived of the purpose for which I was built... but someone bothered to pick me up, maintain me and restore me to the person to whom I matter the most.
And that's why I also say: WRITE YOUR NAME AND CLASS ON YOUR CAL-C!!!
