Recently, I was told that I won an award for citizen service. It wasn’t because of any good reason, like saving a baby from a gang of rabid narwhals, or sacrificing myself to barely slow the rate of deforestation. No, I won that award because I was the only judge who showed up to the local elementary school’s science fair.
It turns out that a lot of the parents of the community, despite owning and operating high technology in their daily lives, do not actually understand science or engineering. If something went wrong, and it wasn’t covered in their limited schooling, they’d send it to a mechanic. Well, that also went for science fair projects. To be fair to those useless parents, there was also a question of impartiality – you can’t expect Bobby Johnson’s mom to give him the 3/5 that he deserved for such a shitty and flavourless diorama, not when she was right there beside him gluing the googly eyes onto the construction-paper bullfrogs.
So, what they needed was someone who’d been in the trenches. Ideally, someone who didn’t pay a lot of attention in school, and was forced to learn things from first principles. Only I would be able to judge what was truly impressive experimentation, versus what was just some regurgitation of a library book.
I’m not afraid to say that I was a cruel marker. Most of the assignments were crap, even for an elementary school kid. Trite conclusions, experiments that didn’t go far enough, no analysis of limited-slip differential oil additives. And then there was one. One shining project, above all else. He was a scruffy kid, sitting in the back corner of the gymnasium. The display was shit-house, a greasy trifold that had clearly been carried home on a bicycle and dropped in the mud a few times. Didn’t matter. What mattered was the science, and it was there in spades.
“Why Won’t My Grandpa’s Camaro Start?” it read, alongside some faded-inkjet pictures of a 1979 Berlinetta. I was enraptured at every step of the diagnostic process, the experiments that went nowhere, the paranoid accusations of Passlock interference on a car that had none. And at last, the answer: “it’s out of gas.” A story for the ages.
