THE OFFICE

A Story by Ayomide Wayne

A Story of A Principal - Student confrontation, with a couple of Microsoft Puns

So last week I got into a fight with this guy over OneNote like this. It was really messy, and I got called by the Principal into the dreaded den of the Lion.

‘It would be easier to Access NPF’s database than walk in and out of this room unscathed’. The profundity in this analogy laid in the fact that the Nigerian police force didn’t have a database.

“Ayo, you have to change your Outlook on life”, Principal Sam said as he took off his spectacles. He too was a spectacle.

He wore a different pair for different occasions. He wore a round ugly one on the assembly. Another ugly one to class, when he did his regular inspections, and a blue-black framed one with a long skipping rope attached to its ends. Rumour had it that he wore that pair when he wanted to invoke the power of the rod.

However, I’d not seen this one before. This was probably his Office Lens, they too were as ugly as the rest.

This den of the Lion was feeling a lot like the kennel of a dog. Principal Sam barked a bunch but didn’t bite. He’d started with some warmup niceness

“Ok! What do you want to do when you leave School?”

“A Writer Sir!”

“A Writer?” He echoed in disbelieve.

I could see him scrambling to get his thoughts back. My ambition had tossed him off course. Well, thrown him off course.

Tossing such a man would be difficult-his stomach alone hold a lot of buried dreams, we said this a lot in class.

“Ok! Imagine--Let’s say you meet a Publisher and he wants to…”

He went on and on and on, on how my ‘terrible’ habit of always fighting would ensure that I did not Excel. My mind had drifted long after his first few sentences, I couldn’t make out a Word he said now. I was too busy daydreaming. I might have fallen into an actual slumber had Cortana, his assistant, not walked in, a few minutes into my struggle with sleep.

She said nothing. She just dropped OneDrive on the table as she went back to Skype with her boyfriend.

And this was when he started barking. He noticed his not-very-wise words didn’t Sway me and then opted for one more killer punch, one last PowerPoint.

“You need to change or else you will leave this school. I’ll see how you’d become a writer then”

“Oh! I am already a writer sir! You can’t teach a creative Edge”

I’d pushed the ex-lion to the wall, his bark had withered.

“Get out of My Office” He whimpered.

This Big, hard man had become a small soft man. His office had become a literal MICROSOFT OFFICEMicrosoft Office