Middle-aged Machines

Middle-aged Machines

Bryan Harrell

Humor

18 pages

Late Teen to Adult

Warnings: Minor violence

 The story focuses around Bob, a photocopier, Tracy, a cell phone, and Dave, a computer. These three machines all fall in love with Gill, a woman who works in an insurance agency. The story revolves around what the three do to try and get Gill's attention.

Writing Style: 8/10

 Normally I'm not a huge fan of stories with limited dialogue, but it seems to work well with this story. Since machines do not have any traditional ways to speak, this mainly focuses on what they are thinking and the antics that they pull to try and get attention.

Plot: 7/10

 The plot was a little confusing for most of the story. I wasn't really sure what it was that Harrell was trying to get across and I thought it was a slice of life story in the beginning. When it started switching characters, I was even more confused as to what was going on, but at some point it all seemed to make sense and the plot was clear, boosting it back up to a seven.

Originality: 7/10

 This type of story has definitely been done before. Still, I think that Harrell brought a great twist to it by making it so that there were three machines vying for the attention of one woman. Most of this that I have seen has been one machine trying to get the attention of many others and failing over and over again, but this shows how there can really be multiple people (or in this case, machines) that are trying to win the attention of one person and how their plots in acheiving this differs.

Enjoyability- 8/10

 Once I figured out what was going on, this was quite an enjoyable read. It was short and Harrell did not drag it out, The three main characters were well written and you could really feel for their plight and smile at the farfetched plans that they concocted.

End- 10/10

 The end really made me laugh. It was worth reading through to it just to read that last line and know that it was the truth.

Overall- 40/50

This book is available on Kindle.

For more about the author, visit his blog.

Next week's story is The Kind of Birds by Ross Dupree