The fifty year paper

It's the last day at my old high school in Rotterdam, and I must prove that I am worthy of the school, and of passing on to the next phase in my life, by writing a paper. The paper needs to be about a subject that I know nothing about, and has to be submitted at the end of the day. I go home to work, but there are no results because I am unfamiliar with the subject, and the internet, computers and Wikipedia are still decades into the future.

I decide to retreat to a distant, quiet place to be able to better concentrate on the job, and I find myself in a wooden cabin in the woods near the fictional town of Twin Peaks in the US. Every morning the cabin is also a hotel where I have breakfast, and this hotel looks like the police office from the Twin Peaks TV-series.

While working in isolation it starts to dawn on me why I need to work on this subject: to lift myself to the next level. Once I understand this I have the the knowledge and the energy to finish. When done I enthusiastically call the teacher who has been assigned as my mentor (it's one of my former managers from work), and he travels to my cabin to have a look at the results.

He tells me my paper is quite good, but needs a few little changes to make it eligible for submission. However, he also indicates that it's way past the deadline and, even worse, that a lot of time has passed since I started my work on the project. In fact, almost fifty years have passed, and we are two decades into the twenty-first century. Everything has changed except me and my mentor. We have become anachronisms.

I manage to return home, and the world indeed has changed. A lot. However, I still want to submit my paper, because I'm proud of the results I worked so long and hard for. When I arrive at my old high school many students are hanging out in the schoolyard, and the front door is open. Students pass in and out of the building, but I am unable to get through the door.

I decide to set up a tent in the school yard and wait for the right moment to enter the building. I live like a nomad for days, if not weeks. With the help of my mentor I finally succeed in entering the building, and I'm on my way to the office of the head master to submit my paper. However, while on my way I forget where in the building the office is located, and I feel lonely and lost.

I enter classroom after classroom with the intention to ask where I need to submit my paper, but though I can see the students and teachers, they don't see me. I can walk right through them, and they don't even notice. In one particularly chaotic classroom I find two boys in a cupboard, kissing.

I see the head master in the last classroom I visit, where he is teaching. He notices me, and I feel immensely relieved. Finally! I tell him how proud I am to have finished a paper about a subject I was unfamiliar with, and how the whole process has changed me in a positive way.

The head master is not interested in my work. Though he accepts my paper, he only looks at it superficially and throws it aside on his desk. "The content is outdated", he says, "and there are pages missing" I find the missing pages on the floor, but the head master has already resumed his teaching and doesn't seem to notice me any more.

When I leave the classroom panic strikes. I spent fifty years writing a paper in which nobody is interested, and I ended up in the future where nobody recognizes or even notices me. I start to run towards the exit, but the further I run, the more the corridor extends into the distance.

I wake up.

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