Not A Blog™

This is a Friday Flash I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I never posted it because I don’t like it at all and I don’t think it’s very good. However, due to a busier-than-usual weekend, I had nothing else prepared for today. This was in with my drafts, kind of like a backup for my backups. In other words, my first eight plans to write an entry for today failed; this is Plan 9.

My earliest memories of my grandfather, the noted biologist B. Charles Daniel, were of him telling war stories. All his stories revolved around the battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. It was his hobby, I suppose, as the Civil War was decades before his time. But he told his stories with incredible detail, and they were always in first person. It never failed to put us in the action. By the time I was ten, I knew as much about the struggle for Little Round Top as any reenactor, yet my grandfather never participated as one, as far as I knew.

Occasionally, someone would ask him what his first initial “B” stood for. He would reply with a gentle smile, “what do you think it stands for?” and after a few moments, change the subject. Asking my mother—his daughter—was also no help as she simply said she didn’t know. I began to suspect it was rather like the “S” in Harry S. Truman; it didn’t stand for anything.

Shortly before he died, my grandfather received the Nobel Prize for his work in linking bioluminescent markers to other genes in order to passively study biological processes. I don’t understand most of that sentence, but evidently it was important work.

But time moves on and the impressive accomplishments of the long deceased are forgotten under the weight of more important things. My logistics supply company has gone through many personnel changes recently. As president, I was struggling to fill the gaps.

One young man, C. Dan Ellsworth, looked bright enough on paper. But there was one thing on his resume that stuck out, to me in particular. He claimed to have won the Nobel Prize—in some sort of biochemistry, no less. Why someone would pad their resume with such an easily disproved point, I have no idea. My HR manager told me that when she asked him about it, he replied, “that was an earlier time.” I’m much too busy a man for this sort of nonsense. Needless to say, he wasn’t hired.