Kids, Komputers, and Kolleagues

The Keep Writing Challenge for today is to write a 150-word story using the prompt "plunge."

Kids, Komputers, and Kolleagues

It had seemed so easy last month when I’d agreed to this! Now I was standing in front of my son’s first grade class and found myself unaccountably nervous.

This is crazy. I am a successful computer analyst. The state police trust me with their computer systems. I know this stuff backward and forward. These kids are 6 years old, for cryin’ out loud!

I had worked to simplify terminology to make my job understandable to children, so, smiling at the teacher, sitting all ears in the back of the room, I plunged in.

“I work at the police station, but I am not a police officer. My colleagues and I…..”

I continued, telling the children about how we study people’s computers to help the police punish the “bad guys.”

“Anybody have a question?” the teacher asked.

I quickly conceded abject failure when I heard the one question proffered, “What is a colleague?”