OnePoland

It happened when I was around 7 years old. As a typical child, I desperately wanted to be noticed and praised by my school teacher. At that time, our teacher complained about our class not being able to keep quiet for even one minute. This gave me an idea and my little head started to plot a scheme to help me achieve my long lasting desire to excel.

My brother, being 7 years older then me, just came back from a summer camp in Hungary, from where he brought a much envied Rubik's cube. It was a craziness all around the world to solve this mastermind puzzle, and he was a proud owner of this hard-to-get cube. However, for some strange reason he decided to trade it off for a Russian old fashion stopwatch. He kept it in a box hidden amongst his other "teenage treasures" and no one was allowed to touch it without his prior permission (especially not me!).

Still, my desire for "promotion" was much stronger then a fear of big brother. One fine day I decided to sneak to my brother's' room and "borrow" his precious stopwatch to impress my teacher and help her time "the endurance" of our class for keeping quite. I could hardly wait for her to conduct this experiment and, of course, to acknowledge my input in front of the whole class. She decided however, that we should wait till afternoon session, as first we were given little tests to check our writing abilities.

Usually we had an hour break for lunch during which we played in groups at the school playground. I had decided to take the stopwatch with me, as I was afraid to leave it alone in the classroom. Therefore I put it in my uniform's pocket, where I thought  it would be safe. As an hour is a long time, and a child's concentration span is much shorter, I quickly forgot about keeping an eye on the stopwatch. Running around with other classmates, and with typical child-like carefreeness enjoying my time, I thought of nothing else. Then the break came to an end and reaching to my pocket to my shock and horror I realised that the stopwatch was gone. I still don't know whether I lost it or it was stolen (personally I prefer to think that I lost it!). One can only imagine my shame when I had to go back to the class to hear the teacher announcing the we cannot conduct our little research because I lost the stopwatch!

However, this was nothing compared to the anger and disappointment of my brother when he found out what I had done. I was so sorry that I could not forget for years the loss I brought onto my brother. Years later I saw a similar stopwatch at a Russian fee market. Although I knew my brother's anger had evaporated a long time ago, and he did not care much for that stopwatch anymore, I bought it and gave it to him as a birthday present. In that way I partly assuaged my conscience. This whole experience thought my one lesson though - never to try to impress somebody with something that is not really yours.