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The Gonzo Ballpark Story
by Lori Shyba

This is Lesson Two demonstration supplement to the instruction design component of "Developing Personas and Scenarios." — A story pitch to a newspaper editor

(Transcribed from my journal. This took me 30 minutes to write using the Rules of Wild Mind. LS)

On the phone with the editor: Dude, you won’t believe this. I was driving down Crowchild Trail, well just getting on the onramp over by the baseball stadium, and a woman came running out, jumped onto the hood of my car started pounding on the windshield screaming, “Help, you gotta help.” I swerved over to the side of the road, jumped out, ran across the meridian, nearly getting creamed by traffic, ran across the field and there it was. Man, there’s a story here.
The ball pitching machinewas going crazy. It had three guys pinned up against the backstop fence and was hurling baseballs at them like a gattling gun. The woman I’d peeled off the hood of my car kept sobbing, “Oh my God, I’m sorry, it’s my fault, they’ll all be killed.”
Something had to be done. This maniac machine had to be stopped or three bloody corpses would haunt this woman forever, not to mention showing up in my worst nightmares. “What’s your name?” I asked her, trying to win her trust. “Mary,” she said, “Goddamn it, stop hustling me and Help!” She blubbered, “I tried to follow his instructions, Some software arrived. Faster, better, Rick said. Now it’s killing them all.”
“Arggghhh, Arggghhh, Argggghhhh,” was all I heard from them.
“Take a deep breath and let’s fix this,” I said to May, trying to pull her together, By this time, we were staring right in the face of the bastard machine and some kind of program was repeating itself on its screen like an alarm clock going off over and over again. Some kind of vicious loop. “Mary,” I said, “It’s up to you, this machine has gone mad and needs to be calmed down.”
“Arggghhh, Arggghhh, Argggghhhh,” the victims were down on the ground, their heads were bleeding, clothes were in shreds, and they couldn’t move an inch. Mary, still in tears, pulled herself together and pumped up her courage by uttering to herself as she hit the cursor keys, “Nudge, nudge, quiet now, nudge down SobaPro, work with me, calm yourself, you’re a good boy, SobaPro, Come on, just like we do every day!”
And as she did this, imagine this — the machine started to fire *golf* balls, causing even more pain and anguish. Mary let out a shrill scream “Nudge, nudge, SobaPro, you bastard,” and the damned machine started kicking out *tennis* balls this time. “Nudge, nudge,” she whispered, this time with renewed optimism and gratitude because it was tennis balls that hurled out this time. Softer. Slower.
These kinder, gentler balls freed up the guy dressed, surprisingly, in a suit and tie. He crawled and clamoured over the piles of baseballs and golfballs and tennis balls stacked up all around him. Dragged himself through the blood and the dirt. “Bang, bang, bang,” the bright green balls ricocheted off the crossbars bouncing of the umpire as he clawed his way toward safety. Balls firing at all angles but blessedly not as hard.
Dragging his broken body, the business man made it over to the machine to save the day. He knew what to do. He pulled a few knobs, hit some buttons, the mad machine gurgled, coughed, projected a final ball in a mild little arch, and was quiet. Before he passed out, the guy in the suit sobbed out “You … were going to … make us …. all rich. Mary pulled a face and rolled back her eyes.
We ran over to the bloody, sagging bodies of the other two guys and could see they were still alive. “That bastard owner,” said the guy with the bat, obviously near death. “I hate him, hate this machine, and would never ..” and then he passed out too.
Slowly but surely the other guy, much to my surprise started to get up. I realized he had a catcher’s mask and pads on and was surprisingly lucid. “Mary,” he said as he staggered over to her. “Thank God you’re okay.” She ran to his arms shouting “Rick, I love you,” and helped him maneuver over to the machine. Despite his pain, he lovingly cleared SobaPro’s still-loopy screen, gave it a pat, and said to Mary, “It’s not your fault.” He pointed accusingly to the guy in the suit, passed out on the ground. “It’s the software upgrade. It’s trying to do too much. This is a baseball field, not a golf course or a tennis court. He wanted too much and like a fool I went along with it. Mary will you forgive me? Mary joined him in his sobbing, raised his mask, brushed the blood out of his eyes and kissed him.
In the meantime some other do-gooders called 911, the paramedics peeled the broken bodies of the owner and the batter off the field, loaded them up on stretchers and whizzed them off to the Foothills. Mary and Rick smiled at each other, smiled at SobaPro and said “We’ll program this baby yet. Tomorrow’s another day in the ballpark.”
So do we have a story or what? Headlines … “Ball Machine Runs Amuck, or Romance Amid Carnage at Ball Diamond. What do you say?

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