Junk Mail

Chapter Five - Missing Persons, Mums and Mild Confusion

Ben got home really late that day. When he walked through the front door and saw the clock in the hallway, he realised time had flown past while he'd been at work. It was already two o'clock in the afternoon! Ben felt so tired that he just wanted to go to sleep, especially after the tiring brain workout he had had in the basement. After getting his piece of junk mail marked (fifteen minutes after he'd sent it), Ben made a few minor corrections and got his work sent back again. This happened at least another two times, until Mr Illuminati (who was actually Andrew Davis) got fed up of Ben and told him to take the rest of the day off. Ben was expected to be at work again by ten o'clock the next morning.

Ben couldn't wait to tell his mother that he had finally gotten a job, so went to search for her. When he'd searched the entire house (and by entire house, he meant just the living room) and still couldn't find her, Ben sprinted up the stairs to his bedroom and got out his metal detector. It was a well known fact in the neighbourhood that his mother had two fillings, and Ben was relying on that fact to locate her so he tell her about his new job.

Ben ran the metal detector all across the living room, from the floor to the ceiling, and then strategically moved through the rest of the house. Ben went to the dining room after he'd been to the living room and ran the metal detector all over the wooden dining table, the cardboard TV he had made the previous autumn (so the real TV had a friend, and so that his family didn't look as though they were discriminating against types of TVs) and finally all the ceramic photo frames his mother had put up of herself (mainly headshots from her non-modelling days). Ben didn't find his mother there, but continued anyway. He went into the garage and then the kitchen, and then into the garden where he trailed the metal detector all along the empty washing line. At one point, Ben's neighbour questioned him, so Ben ran the metal detector over his neighbour too.

Ben was almost at the point of giving up when he finally decided to check his mother's bedroom. The door was shut but when he knocked, she opened it.

"What on Earth are you doing with that metal detector, now?" Ben's mother asked, fixing her lipstick at the same time so the words came out strangely. "I told you to give it back to the guy in the park you stole it from!"

"You stole it, not me!" Ben huffed. "And could you keep the noise down please? I'm trying to look for you and you're distracting me."

Ben's mother rolled her eyes and said, "Why don't your eyes just search up and then maybe you'll see me. Why doesn't anybody see me? Why? Oh, why?"

Ben cursed things like "Weed" and "Pot" under his breath, before turning to look at his mother. "Mum, I'm the one who did a degree in Online Activities, not you. And if I want to search for something, I have to use a search engine, or if it's like a PDF document I can look for certain words by pressing Ctrl+F. Now you're not a word, are you? You're a person, mum, a real human being! I can't look you up online, so I have to use other electrical things which my degree taught me. I learnt, during my Online Activities course, that there are multiple ways of doing things and this is one of them. It's the only way."

"Ben!" Ben's mother screamed as he knocked over her most expensive perfume. "You can't use online stuff in the real world."

Ben huffed and wondered why the uneducated were so dim-witted.

"Mother," he started. "Why would I take a course and spend millions of pounds on my education if I wasn't ever going to use any of the skills I'd learnt along the way? Do you honestly think that I was never going to come across the need to use the search function in real life? If you did, can I just say that you need to do an Online Activities degree? I'm using it right now to find you. This is a search for you and my search for you is my function, so I am using the search function thus my degree has taught me something valuable and was great value for money. Now if you'll stop distracting me, I'm going to go and look for you elsewhere. And if I don't find you in the attic, I'll cut off my extra long toe, because I bet that's where you'll be!"