The Mood Projector

The decree says that I must wear my mood projector in public, so this is what I do, because we must.

The mood projector sits on your shoulder, like a parrot would sit on a pirate’s, except it doesn’t look like a parrot. It looks like you, but parrot-sized.

The mood projector shows everyone how you are really feeling, (really feeling) and you can’t fool it.

They brought them in for airports and other security purposes initially, but now you can’t go anywhere without it being activated in public.

The good thing is that people don’t ask other people all the time;

“How are you then?”

“How are you feeling?"

"How are you really feeling?”

“Are you all right?”

But the weird thing, is that people don’t talk as much. They just look at your mood projector.

I first had a problem with my mood projector when I was at work. I would be given a task by my line manager and my mood projector would let her know how much I hated it. It would pull an appropriate face and sometimes it would give a percentage figure of my satisfaction at that very moment.

On a particular day, reacting to a specific assignment, it said that I had a quadruple blend of anger, resentment, disappointment and regret, which is rare.

I was 19% satisfied.

I had a smile on my face at the time, but the mood projector could not be fooled and nor could my line manager.

A quadruple blend like that required reporting to HR and senior management by the very same line manager. By the time HR and senior management were available to see me, I decided to leave the building for a bit of self preservation and to search for someone that could sell me a chipped mood projector.

The matter at work would be escalated and I would be visited at home by someone from the local police station, or a doctor, due to the serious nature of what had occurred in a place of work.

A chipped mood projector was and remains entirely illegal, but I knew a guy that fell short of his academic foci in life, rumoured to find a truer calling; profiteering by battling the system and setting people like me free of our mood projectors, though still in trial stage, according to the small print.

Now, the reason a chipped mood projector is entirely illegal, is that the purpose of a bonafide fit-for-purpose mood projector, is to spot someone that may intend on doing harm to others, or may not be of sane mind, or may be reacting to something around them in a potentially dangerous manner.

A mood projector is about detection, prevention and avoidance (used by Panasonic in their current advert for mood projectors).

The guy who replaced my mood projector - I won’t give you his name as that would be implicating myself in a crime - was an old drinking pal of mine who rarely left the pub and I caught him in the doorway on his way back in from a having a smoke of a real cigarette, which is quite a novelty, (in that town and in that pub especially), but he was confident of money from his soon to be expanding empire and didn’t trust the robo-fags.

We struck a deal and in the back of his camper van parked at the rear, he cut my old mood projector out whilst the kettle was on, using various scalpels, a wrench and some nano-technology to locate the optics within my body and disconnected them. It was extremely painful, despite three pills he gave me and the alcohol I’d consumed in the pub.