Elias gripped his tweezers tighter. Focus, he told himself. He lowered the hairspring into place. Wheeze-puff. Wheeze-puff.
In the following story, the theme of "annoy" is explored through the friction between two contrasting characters in a quiet, high-stakes environment. The Audition
Elias closed his eyes, counting to ten. A magnet on a mechanical watch was like a flamethrower in a library. "Just... go to lunch, Toby. For three hours." Elias gripped his tweezers tighter
"No," Elias whispered, standing up. "It is the slow, methodical erosion of another person's sanity. It is a whistle that doesn't know its own tune. It is gum that sounds like a wet boot in a swamp. It is the destruction of a three-thousand-dollar hairspring."
Elias lived for silence. As a professional watchmaker, his world was measured in microns and the nearly imperceptible snick-snick of escapement wheels. He was currently in the final hour of restoring a 19th-century Breguet, a piece of mechanical poetry so delicate that a heavy sneeze could ruin a week's work. Then came the whistling. Wheeze-puff
"Toby," Elias called out, his voice a low vibration of restrained irritation. "The solvent. Is it applied?"
The hairspring, a coil thinner than a human eyelash, had Ping-Ponged out of the tweezers and vanished into the shag carpet. Elias sat frozen. The annoyance he had been carefully tamping down suddenly flared into a cold, white heat. The Audition Elias closed his eyes, counting to ten
As Toby scrambled out, he accidentally kicked the doorframe, making a sharp thud that echoed through the silent shop. Elias sighed, reached for his magnifying loupe, and began the long crawl across the carpet.