Chapter 12

Walking down the hall toward Gloria’s desk I knew I had to get working without any more delays. But I had a problem. I wasn’t sure if anything I looked at, a document or one of the pictures on the walls, was stored as a movie with several images all strung together or as something like a single camera snapshot.

I waited for a second to see if anyone was listening. With the absence of a reply, I just tucked that question away, thinking I’d let that surface later.

Another thing that had me confused was that thing they said about scanning and saving a ‘Page’ in a book at a time. To read, most people go a word or two at a time. A few even read a group of words as large as a half a line at a time. Reading a whole line of text at once is only for trained readers.

Trained speed readers scan down the center of a page, quickly grabbing a line at a time in the space of time it takes the normal reader to read a single word. Reading an entire page in one clump, that’s only for the real experts at speed reading. I’d seen it done but how was I to put together a whole page like that so I could store it as a single image and not as a mile long string of words?

In college I took an extra-curricula, non-credit, speed reading course. While I did get good enough to read entire lines at a time, scanning down the middle of a page using a finger as a guide, I didn’t get much past that.

Just to put things in perspective, if I remember correctly, my fastest time reading a page was around ten seconds. It’s a killer to tell a friend you read a 300 page novel in a half-hour. I know it can be done. It took work and concentration. But I did it!

In the beginning it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of effort. The more I did it though, the easier it got to get up to that speed. But, as practice makes perfect, I’ve slowed from that speed. The old adage, “Use it ... Or Lose it!” is true about many things in life.

Reading a page about every ten seconds converts to a little under three thousand words a minute. Compared too the average adult reader’s speed of about two hundred words per minute that was reading as fast as a speeding ... Bullet.

No, I didn’t want my chain of thought to linger on THAT!

The spooky thing about training for speed reading is you’d think that reading faster you’d miss stuff. Actually, going faster, reading comprehension goes up. It has to do with the way our brains work I think. When a person is reading a word or a few at at time, the brain converts the sight to sound and then interprets it.

It’s a very slow process. It’s the way beginning readers are taught. Read a word and sound it out, word by word. We all start out that way and unless it’s pointed out we can also take more than a word at a time, we all just read slow.

With a course in speed reading, you learn how to eliminate the auditory delay. The brain takes in a big block of information and interprets the visual image directly. That’s the way we look at everything else so why not do the same thing with reading?

With the auditory function out of the way, the brain does less work to get the information. It’s able to digest more content, more quickly and thoroughly, increasing comprehension. Cool. Eh?

So, as I muddled over what and how to do it, I struck pay dirt. I had worked out my own solution! Scan an image. Just LOOK at it. The whole image, a book page, photograph or even an ENTIRE ROOM! Let my brain capture the WHOLE THING!!! All in one image. It would be automatically stored.

The real neat thing was my new Spirit had the ability to sift and review images. I now had a perfect ... well, maybe not so perfect ... photographic memory. Images would be easy to scan and later I could retrieve the pieces needed from them at the time they are necessary.

Of course, no matter what I did, I was wrong. Marilyn was on my case again. “Why are you scanning those pictures in the hall?”

Now, I’d thought it was good idea. I lumped that with, “You never know!” Of course I reminded Marilyn she had never SEEN them because she was blind.

After thinking that I shot back to her, “How could it hurt?”

She was back even quicker at me with, “Don’t waste your time with that right now. Get to Gloria’s desk and see what’s on and in there.”

I yelled back at her, “Control Freak!”

After pausing a second, I laughed and said more softly, “Just kidding!”

Well, by the time she finished chastising me for wasting time, I was at the desk. Of course, the first thing I saw was the master appointment book, opened to ‘Monday’ with the bold and double underlined notation: 9:00am - Page Jim Bartlett - Show him his new office.

Boy that hit hard. “It ain’t gonna happen,” I thought.

Marilyn was right there with a soft, long distance hug, and a “Sorry,” softly whispered in my ear.

I felt real melancholy, pulled the chair back from Gloria’s desk a little and slid into it. After taking a deep breath I felt my mind wake up. The first little tidbit I caught was, “I’d moved the chair.”

“With my own hand I’d moved the chair. I was sitting in it as proof!”

It felt like a ‘High-Five’ when I heard Marilyn say, “Way to go!”.

“Lots easier than you thought wasn’t it,” added Tammy.

I was still mulling that over when for some reason I thought about the yelling I got for the pictures in the hallway. I didn’t realize it for a few seconds until I figured out my brain was trying to tell me something. It had found an irregularity and was focused on the third picture I’d seen in the Hallway.

It was two guys with big smiles on their faces. The bigger guy had his arm around someone in a Graduation Cap and Gown. Looking at the image more closely I realized it was my school colors. The mortarboard proved that. It was split diagonally across the top with one half blue and the other orange.

Then I concentrated on the caption underneath the picture. “Toby Storm at his Nephew Tom Blake’s Graduation.” That one stunned me. Yes, no question about it, that was my ‘Friend’ Tom in that picture.

I sat back in the chair, way back. It’s the little things that happen, if you pay attention, that can give you the Big Picture. Tom and I had met at college. Even though we didn’t hang around a lot together, we did have a couple of classes together over the four years.

We were always friendly and chatted once in a while over a morning coffee at breakfast. By the time we were Seniors and legal, we occasionally had a beer or two at a bar near the campus.

Right after graduation, Tom had told me to apply at Randolph Industries. He’d heard they were hiring. I wasn’t surprised when we started the same day. He’d told me he’d liked the place, knew they were hiring and had applied there for a job there himself. Somehow he knew that they were going to be expanding. So once on board, advancement was almost certain.

Shaking my head, one word slipped through it, nepotism. That really hit hard. Had I only gotten the job because I was his friend AND his Uncle was a Senior Partner? By then, I was shaking my head and looking straight up at the ceiling.

All things that go up, must come down and so did my vision. I sat back up and wound up staring straight ahead at a blank spot on the wall, letting out a big sigh. I felt like I should put my elbows on the desk, place my head in my hands and have a good cry.