Prototype (an acrostic poem)

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Putting together yet another try was one of the most satisfying things he did

Reaching down he snapped in the last fitting and took a breath, ready to see if it worked

Of course, building all these iterations was also one of the worst things he could do

They reminded him of the numerous failures he didn’t plan for, that he was a bad engineer

Only he knew there was almost zero chance that the first one would work out of the box

That was the stuff of myths, legends, and dumb luck

Yearning to know if this was the one, he flipped the on switch

Prepared for sparks to fly and flames to claim one more attempt

Except this time it didn’t burn.  It still didn’t work, but that was still progress?

Putter Clutter (a 100 word story)

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He looked at the clutter around him.  Neglected, half-finished dreams littered the desk, table, and sections of the floor.  At one point each project had held so much life and promise, but now they were on life support, or worse yet zombified corpses.  He wondered what was the best approach going forward.  Maybe he should just put everything away and pull out pieces when he was ready to resurrect them, but that would mean confronting his failures, and he wasn’t emotionally prepared to do that just yet.  Besides, he had a brand new idea, and he knew it would work.

Error (an acrostic poem)

Everything was going wrong tonight

Red squiggly lines announcing my failures

Reducing my creative solution to nonsense

Only through hard tedious work would I solve this problem

Reaching for the whiskey bottle, I decide to give up

 

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