You wake up a little bit early. Do you want to spend some time playing the piano, or just relax and then go to work?
You: play the piano.
You can't. You could read music before you could read English, and you have perfect pitch, but your piano tutor early in your childhood told your parents you did not have any talent, and shut down your music lessons with her or anyone else.
You: go to work.
You turn in a first assignment and you know it was good. Your boss calls you into a meeting, says that his boss (who saw your work and raised no objections) was "livid" when your boss chose to protect you by saying "Early planning stages, nothing to show" on a very second day and would have been even more furious if he had seen your terrible work. You are told, "Your only two friends in the company are in this room" and that you should be "very afraid of anyone else finding out" about your sorry work.
You: go home.
You adapt a classic joke:
I was trying to help a friend's son look into colleges, and yesterday he handed me the phone, really excited, and said, "You have got to speak with these guys." I fumbled the phone, picked it up, and heard, "—online. We offer perhaps the best-rounded of degrees, and from day one our students are equipped with a top-of-the-line Dell running up-to-the-minute Vista. Besides the ins and outs of Office 2007, we address back-end issues, giving students a grounding in Visual Basic .NET, striking the right balance between 'reach' and 'rich,' and a thorough groundings in Flash-based design and web design optimized for the Internet Explorer 6. Throw in an MCSE, and marketing-based communication instruction that harnesses the full power of PowerPoint and covers the most effective ways to make use of animated pop-ups, opt-in subscriber lists, and—""
I interrupted. "Internet Exploder 6? Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Exp—excuse me, but what is your organization called?"
"The A-rist-o-crats."
You sleep a sound sleep.
We hope you enjoyed being a Genius for a Day—Play again!
This gamelet written by CJS Hayward, author of Orthodox Theology and Technology: A Profoundly Gifted Autobiography and Profoundly Gifted Survival Guide, both of which include The Wagon, the Blackbird, and the Saab.