State Fair State of Mind

I always love this time of year because the State Fair of Texas is in town for a few short weeks and that means good food and pig races.
I am a native Texan and have attended the state Fair every year of my life except for the year I proposed to my wife and the year we had a family emergency and couldn’t attend. Other than that, the Harris clan could be found every year eating corn dogs and turkey legs.
Through the many years of going to the fair, my family has formed several life-long memories. There is the time I bought a plane being sold at one of the many booths of merchandise and had it immediately break when we got home.
There is the time we were walking down the Midwalk and saw a girl from school and waved at her — just in time for her to get sick all over the Midwalk. Everyone just sort of stared at each other before the girl said, “Well, that was awkward” and moved along.
And then there was the time the robot read my mind.
I want to start off by saying I am not a stupid person. I do stupid things and say stupid things, but I still consider myself a sharp guy. But this day, I was about as sharp as a marshmallow.
Anyone who has been to the State Fair knows there are several buildings filled with attractions and new inventions. In one of my trips to the state fair with my mother and brother, we were walking through one such building when a robot approached me.
“Hello, Luke.”
I was impressed that the robot could read my name tag and say my name — until I realized I was not wearing a name tag. I was wearing a shirt with my old soccer team’s name on it and no signs of identification. At first, I thought it was only strange, until it started talking about my life.
“So, are you enjoying the fair with your mom and brother?”
OK, now things were getting weird. I turned around and looked at my mom and brother only to have them shrug, looking equally shocked and amazed.
“How are you enjoy Mrs. Litzenberger’s algebra class? Need to be doing a little better, huh?”
Mrs. Litzenberger was the name of my eighth grade algebra teacher — yes, I was in eighth grade — and I was doing badly in her class.
“Are you going to buy that Mindy a corn dog while you are here?”
Mindy was the name of the girl I had a crush on in the eighth grade. I was now officially freaked out. I knew there was no such thing as a robot who could read minds, but how else was this thing doing this to me? I knew the State Fair always had new and exciting attractions and I figured, “this is the year they got a mind-reading robot.”
I thought this new invention was being showed off to the public by making spectacles of eighth-graders like myself and I decided it was time for me to leave.
My mom and brother were both eager to stay and hear more about me, but I wanted to leave right then. I wanted to leave the fair, the state and the country. I wanted to go to a third-world country where there wouldn’t be mind-reading robots for years to come.
For two hours of walking around the fair, I was mortified and trying to figure out what had happened to me. I knew robots couldn’t read minds — they just couldn’t — but this one did.
And that is when my mom started laughing, and my brother joined in. That is when I discovered the truth.
It turns out that, as I suspected, there was no such thing as mind-reading robots. There were, however, remote-controlled robots with a microphone installed inside them connected to a headset.
The headset being on the man who was standing next to my mom and brother and gathering information about me from them to freak me out. Every time I would turn around to look at my mom and brother, the man would take a step away behind a column and out of my line of sight.
My family thought about not telling me for a long time, but they could see how traumatized I was by the whole situation and decided to let me in on the secret.
To this day they still give me a hard time about how gullible I was and we can all share a big laugh about it. I couldn’t really get mad about it because you have to give props for a good prank and they got me good. I mean, they got me to believe a robot was reading my mind.
It was a great prank, but it was also a great memory. I am glad my family does something together every year that I can count on for a good time. I hope I can make memories like that one day with my children — and convince them of something to terrify them for a good little while.

Luke Harris is the editor of the Burleson Star. He is afraid that when mind-reading robots really do take over the world, he will think it is a prank and be vaporized. He can be reached at burlesonstar@thestargroup.com.