2020-12-20

I was sitting at the last row in a classroom of the elementary school I went to. The row was made of three groups of two tables, and I was in the central group, on the left table, next to who used to be my best friend when I was in preschool. We were in the middle of a music class, and I was studying the way I have been studying after graduating from high school: barely any note-taking, just listening to the class. My friend grabbed my notebook and forced me to take notes.

There were graded questions that I was copying down, but I did not realize they were questions and that I was supposed to answer them. The last question was graded 4 points out of 20 and we had very little time to answer before the end of the class.

I only realized I was taking a test when it was time to give our answer sheets back. I tried to grab a double sheet of paper (an A3 sheet folded in half, the most common sheet used for tests in high school) and draw the usual template on it: name in the margin, subject centered on the first line, and two red lines spanning the whole sheet and separated by 4 lines for the teacher to leave a mark and comments. I messed up the lines a bit, drawing them using an orange pen instead of read, and that made me think I messed up the entire sheet.

An oven just like the one I currently own was below the blackboard, on the left, and its clock was different than my IRL oven: the screen had thicker, orange segments (when my oven has green segments). The time it was displaying was quickly changing, which I explained in my mind by the AC frequency being too low. This oven was apparently syncing its clock with other ovens online, causing its clock to change between values like -27:-27, 13:12 or 13:56.

One of the students was not in class today but was present remotely, maybe from an airport. He was trying to answer the questions using some expensive piece of music writing software that not all students had access to. Another student, maybe a classmate of mine from elementary school, told the teacher and they suggested that “the plushie” pays for the software for everyone else.

The plushie was a smolhaj (nickname of a discontinued 60 centimeters-long version of the IKEA Blåhaj) who was apparently given to all the students by the school.

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