Little Bobby Caruso
Little Bobby Caruso was probably the biggest jerk an eight year old kid could ever possibly be. He just wouldn’t listen. Well at least during that particular school year in Lumombolla County. He had the Devil in him according to Mrs. Farnsworth.That is if she saw fit to tactfully circumnavigate the school board’s dictates on mentioning or directly referencing Christianity, or in this case its antithesis, on what was still officially an institution that was a publicly funded ward of the Great State of Ohiowana. A lot of the teachers, well, the ones that were human, shared the view of Bob MacCaul. They could be summed up by noting his comments on the morning of 5 November which were, “I’ll tell you Mike, the kid really is a jerk, but man can he play.”
And play he did. Whatever you had he would have fun with it. Legos? He was building a castle. A dead pigeon and a piece of chalk? A cross between volleyball and hopscotch. Little Bobby Caruso was the best player around and most of the teachers just didn’t get it. Or want to get it. Most of them were robots.
The majority of teachers of Lumombolla County were replaced with robots about four years ago. The school board was finally seeing the benefits of leasing land to deep oil exploration from Winnipeg and decided they needed to put their fine county on the map. Board director Ace Brockway’s teeth and rugged, windswept looks were made for dazzling local television news fans and he knew it. After his first taste of fame as the Regional Director of Lumombolla County Department of Ways and Means and his subsequent fan letter (“my word do you have some lovely pearly whites…”) from his debut on Channel 3 Home of the Beaver, Ace knew he was put on this earth for something and the only way to pull it off was with some robots.
He knew nothing would put Lumombolla County on the map like some robot teachers would and, controlling the budget, he could make it happen. Mrs. Farnsworth was officially in charge of the robot teachers, but unofficially in charge of not letting these bastard machines pollute young minds with their fancy talk and logic. The robot staff had been familiar with the concept of a jerk since two stable releases ago. It was a backdoor, something funny for Mike Parker in TEACHBOT headquarters to bestow on Ohiowana’s unwitting citizens.
The robot teachers could classify a jerk by their unwillingness to conform. Thus little Bobby Caruso was a jerk to the first degree because he wanted to play more than he wanted to follow Ohiowana Elementary School Coursework Release 3.450. Mrs. Farnsworth would in other situations agree, but never could have possibly foresaw how far their damned logic went. When she told TEACHBOT453 to make Little Bobby Caruso stop playing at all costs, that he finally would. Nobody, not Mrs. Farnsworth, not the Lumombolla County School Board, ever thought that he would ever stop. They never thought that TEACHBOT453’s programming wouldn’t tell him that “at all costs” didn’t include ripping off his arms.