When Wesley Smith’s colleagues asked him—some with an eyebrow hoicked satirically—what he was doing with that gadget (they all called it a gadget), he told them he was experimenting with new technology, but that was not true.
He bought the gadget, which was called a Kindle, out of spite.
I wonder if the market analysts at Amazon even have that one on their product-survey radar, he thought. He guessed not. This gave him some satisfaction, but not as much as he hoped to derive from Ellen Silverman’s surprise when she saw him with his new purchase. That hadn’t happened yet, but it would. It was a small campus, after all, and he’d only been in possession of his new toy (he called it his new toy, at least to begin with) for a week.
Wesley was an instructor in the English Department at Moore College, in Moore, Kentucky. Like all instructors of English, he thought he had a novel in him somewhere and would write it someday. Moore College was the sort of institution that people call “a good school.” Wesley’s friend in the English Department (his only friend in the English Department) once explained what that meant. His friend’s name was Don Allman, and when he introduced himself, he liked to say, “One of the Allman Brothers. I play a mean tuba.” (He did not actually play anything.)
