By Taylor Smith, Staff Writer

Published in print Feb. 4, 2015

For this week’s article I will be doing something slightly different than what the five of you readers are used to seeing.  Instead of ranting in my usual manner I will be telling you all a short story.  This is a story about a little troll and his struggle in traversing the UNCG’s campus. 

The little troll’s name was Hector and nothing in this world annoyed him more than cell phones, he despises cell phones.  One day Hector was walking across campus to go to class but he noticed that the journey was taking longer than usual.  Campus was incredible crowded, as expected, however the massive horde of people seemed to be moving at an absurdly slow pace. 

Hector’s patience began to wear thin.  He looked at the person in front of him to see why they were walking so slowly.  He peered his wrinkled head over the shoulder of his new found nuisance who happened to be a young girl.   Lo and behold, this individual was staring down at her phone.  Hector squinted his bulging eyes in contempt, his lips scrunched with disgust.  He weaved his head closer and then cleared his throat.  There was no response from the girl; she continued to be immersed in her phone.  Hector sighed and then let out an “excuse me, ma’am.” 

The girl slowly pried her eyes away from her phone to acknowledge the troll.  She saw his long, pointed nose and greenish skin.  Fear quickly gripped the girl, after all, Hector is a hideous troll.  She screamed and jumped back. Then, as instinct would encourage, she ran for her life.  Unfortunately, the poor girl was not looking as to where she was going and soon found herself out in the middle of the road and in the path of a speeding oncoming truck.

It was a most gruesome sight, blood and body parts went everywhere.  The girl’s arm landed in front of Hector the troll and in that arm was an intact cell phone.  Hector, quite troubled by the horror, kneeled down and picked up the phone to bear witness to its evil aura. 

Hector felt a cloud of guilt over his head but he knew that deep down the fault did not lie with him.  “I just wanted to tell the girl to let me pass, if she was not consumed by the use of this foul technology, she would have walked at a normal pace and would still be alive.” 

This only reinforced Hector’s hatred of cell phones and he decided to rid the campus of them once and for all. 

He proceeded to search for the next phone and immediately found several students.  Hector hid in some nearby bushes and noticed a student texting on their phone, this was causing people to step off the sidewalk to pass him.  Hector found this to be unacceptable and quickly jumped out to grab the phone with his long, serpentine fingers.  “NNNAAAHHH! Give me that you little punk!  Don’t you know how much of an annoyance you’re being?”  Hector tossed the phone away but it flew through the window of a car, knocking the driver unconscious.  The car swerved off onto the sidewalk; I won’t go into details, but I can say it was a bloody day at UNCG.

The carnage only strengthened Hector’s resolve, the boy whose phone he had taken looked at the hundreds of slain students.  “Oh god!  Why is this happening?  If I wasn’t on my phone, this hideous monster would not have felt compelled to take it from me.” 

“That’s right,” Hector chimed in, “also you were forcing other students to walk on the road to pass you, and they could have been hit by a car too.” 

Tears rolled down the boy’s face, he couldn’t bear the guilt and so he ran to Hector’s troll bridge and jumped off. 

However the bridge was not that tall so he only broke his legs on the fall.  Hector stood over the poor boy who pleaded to be put out of his misery.  Hector shook his head and spat on the young man.  “People look at me and call me a monster, but who is the real monster today?  Not I,” said the troll, “Not I.”  So what is the moral of the story?  Stop walking around campus while staring down at your phone; you may cause a hideous troll to unintentionally kill hundreds of students.

But seriously, stop it.