oh, uh.. hi, you want the story :) ?
well, oke, so, back when i was in secondary school, like 13-14 years old, we were learning about radiation, and nuclear power, and the like.
for this particular lesson, my teacher had procured a geiger counter to demonstrate everyday radiation and then compare it to recordings of dangerous levels. and so she was scanning shit with it; the furniture, the walls, a bunch of bananas, herself, all of which gave off slightly different but minimal readings. all expected, all normal. and then, she moved on to us.
she walked through the aisles, wafting the geiger counter back and forth as she went, continuing to reel off shit about radiation as the thing beeped its littl beeps, all expected, all normal. until it swung past me and went completely haywire !!
the littl beeps were gone, replaced with loud, angry clicks. so loud that i, everyone sitting near me, and my teacher herself all jolted in shock. she turned it off; everything was quiet, and everyone was staring.
and just like that, the lesson was suddenly paused..
she pointed it at people around me to the sound of beeps, back to me and back to angry clicks. she told me to get up and pointed it at my desk, my bag, my pencil case, and my workbooks; all beeps, back to me; angry clicks. she asked what i'd had for lunch, i said a sandwich, she asked if i'd been inside a nuclear reactor whilst eating it bc with the readings i was giving off not only should i be dead, so should everyone else in the school. i shrugged.
this, apparently, was not a good enough answer. next, she got me to take off my blazer, my tie, my belt, my shoes and socks, and turn out all my pockets. but no matter what, her geiger counter just did not like me. i think if she could've, she'd have gotten me to strip completely naked, as it was, and after about half an hour of this, she finally let me sit back down. though she kept staring at me throughout what was left of the lesson, and jumped to scan me once more as we were all leaving, getting nothing but more angry clicks before shooing me off to my next class.
but i was not yet free bc later (i can't remember if it was later the same day or like, a few days after.. (this all happened over a decade ago lol)), i was back in the science building again, and she saw me and collared me, dragging me over to this other teacher like it was this one !! this one's the radioactive freak !!! (not what she actually said, but that's what it felt like at 14 years of age) and then the fucking geiger counter was back, throwing another littl hissy fit in my direction, and more teachers rolled up to ooh and aah and wtf at my expense, discussing if they should do something about this phenomenon (my existence) and whether it was ethical to experiment on a student.....
but eventually, the head of the science department said it definitely wasn't, and i was very clearly not as dead as the stupid clicking thing was saying i should be, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and i was finally actually set free. but after, that particular science teacher would always squint at me whenever she saw me....
i've been nowhere near a geiger counter since, so it may well have just been a really unrepresented, unresearched side effect of puberty, or maybe that particular geiger counter didn't like my vibe idk, but yeah, as a result, i tell people i'm radioactive bc i think it's funny :3
gracieabrams
germansingergirl
