| Inventor | |
February 1, 2015
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| He was an inventor. His specialty was to customize machines to each customer's needs. Usually, these types of orders became very expensive. Usually products become cheaper when they are made in large amounts, it's called mass-production. The more they make, the cheaper the products are. So, nobody thinks of making machines for one customer. But, he was different. He was a skillful engineer. He used to be a worker at a big electric appliance company, but he quit rather early than the usual retirement age. Actually, he had been tired of competing in the industry world. He invented a lot of things while at the company. But, only a few things were made, because of various reasons, sometimes cost reasons,
He had had an idea. He was a big fan of detective stories. He liked the scenes when customers who had complicated situations came to a detective's small office. It was always in a small old building's second floor. People would come and ask the detective for help with their problems. At first, the detective was about to refuse the request because it didn't look attractive, and seemed it would not earn much money, but he ended up accepting the request. He was the type of person who couldn't refuse peoples' requests. So, he opened a private small office and factory which could invent something for customer's needs. As was his expectation, it didn't earn much money, but as was his expectations, it was rather challenging. On this day, one middle aged guy came to his office on the second floor of the old building. The customer said, "My wife and I are always quarreling. I'm tired of this. I wouldn't divorce her because I love her, but I am disgusted with the quarreling." The inventor asked, "And you don't want to stop talking back to her, don't you?" The customer said, "No. My motto is to say what I think. This is the motto I took over from my family. My wife's motto is the same. On the other hand, we both have completely different personalities. We naturally think that the opposite's opinion is totally wrong. Can't this be helped?" The inventor replied, "I'm not a counselor, so I don't know." He promised the customer to make something useful and asked him to come back one week later. One week later the customer came again and received the gadget the inventor produced. The customer looked suspicious. The gadget looked just the same as a TV game machine with 2 sets of controllers. The inventor connected it to the TV and started to explain how to use it. As soon as the middle aged man got home, his wife cursed him for being late. He felt irritated but he went to the living room directly and connected the machine that he was given. He gave his wife one controller and held the other one himself. On the TV, two characters appeared. One looked like him, the other looked like his wife but they were animations. (He had sent their photos to the inventor.) They are called 'avatars'. His avatar started to talk, "I was working. I couldn't help it." The voice was his. (He had sent their voices of a phone recording to the inventor.) He looked at his wife speechless and urged her to return the answer. She sat down on the sofa next to him and using her controller chose from the various options. (There were a few hundred options grouped which the inventor got from the Internet as 'typical husbands & wives complaints' and carefully categorized them.) Her avatar said, "I was just worried about you. Why can't you call me then?" Surprisingly, this was fun for them. They soon got accustomed to the machine and devoted many hours operating it, like children who play TV games. After a couple days of devotion to this game, they came to look at themselves from the viewpoint of the third person and realized that these quarrels were cute. Even now they sometimes quarreled, but, now, for some reason, it somehow became warm. |
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the more ~ , the すればするほど〜になる
while間
predict予想する
whether ~ or notかどうかで
detective探偵
invent発明する
expectation期待
challengingやりがいのある
quarrel言いあいする
gadget装置
curse呪う
avatarアバター（分身）
couldn't help仕方なかった
urge促す
complaint不満
devote没頭する
the third person第三者