Day: August 24, 2021

The Elephant in the Room

Fandango22 Comments

“Seriously, Alec, can’t you see the elephant in the room?” Leah whispered to Alec, her co-worker who was sitting next to her at the large conference table.

Alec physically scanned the room. “If there’s an elephant in this room, Leah, I can’t see it,” Alec whispered back. “Can you give me a hint what you’re talking about?”

“Alec, you can be so thick at times. It’s Tina’s kakorrhphiophobia,” Leah said.

“Her what?”

“Her fear of failure,” Leah responded. “You can see the beads of perspiration that formed on her forehead as she slowly rose to give her presentation. That’s because she was promoted beyond her level of competence. She’s always been a vacuous suit, a follower and not a leader. She doesn’t have the energy it takes to run this division, like I do.”

Alec smiled. “Now I see the elephant in the room, Leah. It’s green with envy, just like you’ve been since you found out you were passed over for the job.”

Written for these daily prompts: Ragtag Daily Prompt (elephant), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (hint), Word of the Day Challenge (kakorrhphiophobia), Your Daily Word Prompt (vacuous), My Visual Blog (follower), and The Daily Spur (energy).

Truthful Tuesday — Getting Around

Fandango9 Comments

Frank, aka PCGuy, has published another one of his Truthful Tuesday posts, and this week Frank wants to know…

If you live somewhere that it’s essential to own a vehicle for day-to-day living, if public transportation where you live were to suddenly be improved to the point that it became a viable alternative to taking your own vehicle, would you still feel the need to own a vehicle? On the flip side, if you do live where there is decent public transportation, do you still find it necessary to own a vehicle?

Before we moved from San Francisco to the suburbs in the East Bay, we had a car but we rarely drove it. There were, within three blocks of where we lived, multiple bus lines that could get us virtually anywhere within the city that we needed to go. And with our senior citizens discounts, it was ridiculously cheap for us to take the bus.

Yes, we still owned a car. But 90% of the time it sat in our garage. We did use it when we visited our son and his wife, who live in the East Bay. Or when we had a large shop to do at the grocery store. But maybe that amounted to using our car once a week at the most.

Once we moved to the East Bay in early 2020, we started using our car a lot more because there is no public transit in our immediate area. But shortly after we moved to our new place, the pandemic hit and a lockdown was imposed, so our car driving was minimized. We even leveraged grocery delivery services.

A few weeks ago we bought an electric car. In that two week period we’ve only put around 140 miles on it, including a drive into San Francisco (about 80 miles round trip). So we’re not really driving all that much. And I feel good about driving an EV when we do drive, as it’s not spewing pollutants into the atmosphere.

To Frank’s specific question: if public transportation where we live now were to suddenly be improved to the point that it became a viable alternative to taking our own vehicle, would we still own a car? Yes, but we would definitely use public transportation as much as possible.

Fandango’s Story Starter #8

Fandango25 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you an incomplete “teaser” sentence and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that partial sentence. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

He could feel the beads of perspiration forming on his forehead as he slowly…

If you care to write and post a story built on this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and to tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with this teaser.

And most of all, have fun.

FOWC with Fandango — Hint

Fandango26 Comments

FOWCWelcome to August 24, 2021 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “hint.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.