The world is strange.
Someone should investigate.
A once-weekly – under normal operating conditions – investigation into the obvious things nobody investigates
Last week I was sitting in a classroom before a literature test.
Around me: racing hearts. Shallow breathing. The quiet repetition of dates and names of people who died two hundred years ago and would probably be horrified to learn their life's work was being used to induce physiological stress responses in seventeen-year-olds.
Me: nothing.
Not because I was prepared. But because I could finally see what was actually happening in that room.
Last week I was sitting in a classroom before a literature test.
Around me: racing hearts. Shallow breathing. The quiet repetition of dates and names of people who died two hundred years ago and would probably be horrified to learn their life's work was being used to induce physiological stress responses in seventeen-year-olds.
Me: nothing.
Not because I was prepared. But because I could finally see what was actually happening in that room.
Last week I was sitting in a classroom before a literature test.
Around me: racing hearts. Shallow breathing. The quiet repetition of dates and names of people who died two hundred years ago and would probably be horrified to learn their life's work was being used to induce physiological stress responses in seventeen-year-olds.
Me: nothing.
Not because I was prepared. But because I could finally see what was actually happening in that room.
A
group of people had gathered at a specific time, in a specific place, to write down information they would forget within twenty-four hours. The system calls this education. Holmes would call it something else. Adams would laugh — quietly, because he understood it wasn't really funny.
That was the moment I stopped taking the system for granted.
And I haven't seen it the same way since.
It turns out that once you start noticing the absurdity in one thing — in queues, in bureaucratic language, in lift rituals, in the way people respond to how are you — you can't stop. The world is full of things nobody questions, because nobody questions things that nobody questions.
Sherlock's Oddities is about those things.
Twice a week. Three minutes. One system, one situation, one moment where the world reveals itself to be slightly stranger than it appeared that morning.
Holmes brought the method. Adams brought the perspective. I brought a literature test.