fandomhigh | Intro to 21st Century American Culture - Monday

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Intro to 21st Century American Culture - Monday - Period 5

When the students arrive, they see a row of tables along each side of the classroom. The row on the left has a number of telephones and the row on the right has a number of computers.

"Afternoon, everyone," Lorelai said once they'd all arrived and taken their seats. "Today we're going to learn about modern technology. Communication is a very important part of our society and, currently, the most efficient and widely used methods of communication are the telephone and the internet."

She went on to give a brief history of the telephone and the internet.

"Now, half of you can play with the phones and the other half can play with the computers. In twenty minutes, we'll switch, so everyone has a chance to try everything. Marty, Jaye and I will be around to help if you need it. And those of you who have already mastered these skills can offer help as well."

[~~wait for~~ ocd up! Class Info Post]

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Luke was doing the hunt-and-peck thing too, glancing back and forth between the keyboard in front of him and the Basic alphabet in his notebook.

"Where's an R2 unit when you need one?" he whined.

"What's an R2 unit?" Aeryn asks, glad to have a reason to not look at the keyboard anymore.

"Droid," Luke said, "about so tall--" he held his hand at roughly waist height. "They're intended for astronavigation but they have a knack for being able to read just about anything." He wrinkled up his nose. "It would stop me from having to type."

"Unfortunately it's something they expect you to learn here," Aeryn says, directing a glare at the computer as she goes in search of the frelling @ key, which just looks wrong to her. "What's your problem with typing?"

Luke's cheeks went bright red. "It's the wrong alphabet," he grumbled.

Aeryn nods, almost sympathetically. "That was me last year."

Luke glanced up, looking hopeful. "Really?"

"I'm not from here, I know an entirely different language, and I have translator microbes which mean I can understand nearly anything I hear, but that's not very helpful when it comes to reading," she explains. "And now it's much easier except when the alphabet is in the wrong frelling order on a keyboard."

"They are?" Luke looked down at his alphabet again. "Why would they do that?"

"I have no idea, except some idiot human was the first person to come up with it, and he was surrounded by other idiots who agreed it was a good idea."

"Meh," Luke said, going back to poking at the keyboard. "This is going to take forever."

Aeryn isn't even going to trouble him with the fact that people on the computer don't seem to know how to spell. "What are you trying to look at?" she asks.

Luke had totally not been typing "how to use the Force" into a search engine. Really.

"Um..." he said. "I haven't decided yet."

"Well, what's something here you don't understand?" she asks. "And I'm not allowing 'everything' to be an answer."

Luke shut his mouth. "Everything" was going to have been his answer.

"The obsession with coffee," he said, lowering his voice.

"It's a caffeine addiction as far as I can tell," she tells him. She does not say that it's one of the things she missed when she thought she was leaving Earth for good. "So, here."

She leans over, hunts and pecks for the letters, and hits enter. And promptly gets a message asking "Did you mean: coffee?" Because the English language is stupid. "Click on that," she says.

Luke did so. "What's a Starbucks?" he asked, squinting at the screen.

"It's a chain of coffee shops," she tells him. "Once you get outside of Fandom they're everywhere. You can't miss them."

"Okay," Luke said, clicking onto the link. "There's so many kinds," he said. "At home it was just caf, it came out of the machine and could take rust off of a speeder's bumper."

"Oh, they have coffee like that here," she assures him. "People don't seem to drink it on purpose, though."

"Do they use it to take rust off of speeders?"

"I don't think they have speeders here, but it's probably a practical application on cars and bikes."

"I know what a car is!" Luke said, sounding pleased with himself. "But I have a feeling if I poured someone's coffee on one I might get shot."

"Well, mayb- Wait, you can get away with shooting someone for that?" asks Aeryn. "They didn't teach us that in driver's ed."

Luke shrugged. "Don't see why not. You can get shot for a lot less back home."

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