Jackolyn Tours The Light-Switch Factory

In all her short life, Jackolyn had never seen a factory before. When she had been younger, a "baby" she would say, she had assumed that everything just WAS. She had never once contemplated that light-switches, which were the output of this particular factory, came from anywhere outside her house.

It’s not that she assumed that light-switches grew on tress. She had been rather like a squirrel who does not comprehend where acorns come from and why, but is fully aware of exactly where they occur and how to handle them. She never assumed they were produced by magic, but rather she never assumed anything. Acorns occur on trees, light switches occur beside doorways; acorns can be picked and eaten, light switches can be flipped to produce light.

When her father had told her that he was going to give her a tour of the light-switch making factory he owned, she had been excited. Not because her father kept talking about how she would own the whole factory herself someday, but because the phrase “light-switch making factory” was a clue leading to a wider world for her. She imagined all kinds of fantastic things that the name “factory” could belong to: a hole in the ground where tiny gnomes worked night and day; a million tiny spiders that weaved their webs into solid light-switch shapes; huge beasts that burped out light-switches after consuming copious amounts of spaghetti.

In reality the factory turned out to be a long, dirty building filled with machinery so loud she wished she had a switch that turned off her ears. This miserable place was where her father came everyday while she was in school? Amongst the pain in her ears was mixed a pain in her heart for her poor father’s daily plight.

“This is where we construct the dimmer switches,” her father said, holding up his hand in an extravagant gesture of introduction over an assembly line with dozens of busy robotic arms bent over it. Jackolyn nodded and smiled at him, entirely out of pity. At that moment, she made a decision that would shape her future. She decided that once the whole factory belonged to her, as her father said it would, she would tear it down and build a jungle gym in its place.