Welcome to Story Quest, a weekly podcast where we bring your stories to life!
In this episode we bring Olly’s story – Droid the Ditzy Robot – to life.
If you have a story idea, you could be like Olly and have it turned into a Story Quest. All you have to do is send us your story idea here. We know you have the best imaginations and together we can create the most brilliant stories!
That’s just what Olly did. You can watch the story they suggested come to life below, plus they tell us all about the inspiration behind the story at the end.
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Read along to Droid the Ditzy Robot!
You can read along to the story while you listen. Just follow the text below. Don’t worry if you find a word tricky – you can pause the video whenever to give yourself more time.
Droid the Ditzy Robot
Robots are everywhere these days! They help surgeons perform operations, build cars in factories and even clean our carpets at home! The planet where our story begins is called Technica and is even more robot mad – in fact no one has a job because the Robots do EVERYTHING. The non-robots (Can’t really call them human as they’re 7 foot tall and green) just laze around enjoying painting and reading and sleeping whilst the robots keep everything going. Sounds good right? In fact one of the finest painters in the Galaxy lived on Technica – Trebulous the Talented. He’d been able to hone his skills over the centuries not least because robots got on with all of the boring stuff. But we’ll hear more about Trebulous a bit later.
Droid was one of the many thousands of robots on Technica, and his job was to deliver packages. It was in his programming. He was designed to deliver packages, he was built to deliver packages, it was his raison d’etre which isn’t anything to do with raisins it’s a French phrase that just means it was his reason for being. It was his job to know exactly where he was going. Simple enough you’d think.
The trouble was that when he was newly built a frozen baguette had fallen on his head from a high shelf at the robot supermarket. This resulted in a small short circuit that no one noticed, and to be fair it only caused one tiny teeny problem. Hardly worth worrying about! It just meant that Droid … completely lost all sense of direction.
Yeah. You can see that this might be a bit of a problem for a delivery robot. If the instructions said go left he went right. If it said house number 123 he’d knock on the door of number 321 and instructions with more than three lines made his circuits ache.
So basically he was TERRIBLE at his job. But it was the only job he had. His whole reason for being.
I’d say he was sad about this, and about constantly getting things wrong but he was after all a robot and robots don’t have feelings do they – or DO they?
Droid found himself dreading each morning.
PARCEL TO BE DELIVERED TO MR LAKE ON DUCK STREET.
Droid computed this information and delivered the package …. to a rather bemused looking duck on the Lake near the High Street.
The supervisor robot told him off. It was Mr LAKE on Duck STREET – not a DUCK on the LAKE!
On one occasion he mistook a nearby postbox for the house’s letter box and the parcel ended up coming back to the depot. This happened about three or four times before the supervisor gave the job to a robot who didn’t get mixed up like that.
The next parcel came with the following instructions:
DELIVERY TO THE FROZEN CAVERNS – FIRST LEFT BY THE TRUNCULOUS, THEN RIGHT, THEN RIGHT AGAIN THEN LEFT, GO STRAIGHT ON AT THE NAVIGATION TREE THEN STRAIGHT ON AGAIN THEN LEFT, LEFT AGAIN, ANOTHER LEFT…
It was all a bit much. He got stuck on the bit where he had to go left and left and left again and found himself locked into whirring in a circle until he ran into a tree and was stuck there until his batteries died. So THAT was embarrassing. Well, if Robots can be embarrassed.
The supervisor robot eventually had to give Droid an ultimatum.
ONE LAST JOB. MESS THIS UP AND WE’LL HAVE TO DISMANTLE YOU AND TURN YOU INTO A TOASTER.
Droid didn’t want to be a toaster. He determined to try his very best. Next day the instructions came through as usual.
VIP PARCEL FOR WORLD FAMOUS ARTIST TREBULOUS THE TALENTED. NEW PAINT BRUSHES. URGENT.
The parcel was beautifully wrapped in the finest parchment and silk ribbons. Droid wondered why they couldn’t give him something less valuable and wearily set off. He got lost two times going out of the depot, ending up by the bins and toaster parts at the backdoor. That was pretty normal. Then he managed to get on the right road but to his dismay it started to rain and then the wind picked up and was so strong that the parcel was blown out of his grip.
“No!” he wailed as it went bouncing over a wall
He whizzed after it but when he found it – Oh my gosh. Let’s just say that he suddenly thought about toasters and wondered if being a toaster was THAT bad…
The beautiful parchment was sodden with rain and mud. The silk ribbons were wilting and dirty and the precious paint brushes were coming out of the packaging into the dirty mud.
Droid was so determined not to fail that a thought appeared in his circuits. What if he could fix the damage? Maybe just maybe no one would notice and he’d keep his job.
The rain and wind died down and Droid began to look around for something he could use – billowy autumn leaves fluttered on the branches in shades of yellow red and brown. He picked a few and carefully wrapped them around the brushes. He picked daisies and made a daisy chain and used it to secure the leaves, adding in other flowers in pinks and blues and so the finished parcel was very colourful indeed. The silk ribbon had mostly dried out and so he used this to add an elaborate bow and hoping that it was enough, set about to make the delivery.
He was very nervous when he FINALLY reached his destination. He felt certain that Trebulous the Talented would be angry and that he, Droid would be a toaster by teatime. He rang the bell.
After a wait that seemed to go on forever the door creaked open…. and Droid trembled to see the famous artist, impossibly green and very very tall.
“Ah! My brushes! They’ve arrived at last!” he said, looking at his watch in quite a huffy way.
Droid trembled a bit more and slowly handed over the package.
“What on earth… the packaging!” exclaimed Trebulous.
Droid winced. At this point he could almost SMELL toast.
“I’m so sorry” said Droid – “it got wet and I had to… improvise”
“YOU did this? It’s… It’s… FABULOUS!“
Trebulous broke into a wild smile – “The colours, the use of nature – the bow! This package is a work of art in itself – never mind the brushes! I shall call your supervisor at once and tell him how delighted I am. And YOU dear droid are clearly in THE WRONG JOB. YOU should be an artist!”
Wow. Droid was NOT expecting that. Trebulous was as good as his word and soon the robot depot was humming with the news that silly old Droid had actually done something right for once. And it led to something happening which had never happened before. Droid was allowed to change jobs! With immediate effect he would stop doing deliveries, and instead would be become an assistant to Trebulous himself, learning all about colours and paints and all things arty. Droid was quite nervous to start with – after all he knew his circuits weren’t quite right after the episode with the frozen baguette but Trebulous was very kind and said most artists suspected that they’d had a knock on the head at some point.
And so what if Droid did occasionally get lost when running an errand for Trebulous?. It wasn’t his job any more to know exactly where he was going. In fact it was rather nice not knowing – after all, that’s what makes things exciting – whether you’re a seven foot green alien, a human – or even a little robot! And that’s the story of Droid the Ditzy Robot.
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