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Transistors October 8, 2003
I feel compelled to comment on the Recall Election results.
When I was in grade school, there was a guy who bordered on being too smart for his own good. Let's call him Phillip. Phil loved impressing people. This is fine, really, but tends to be difficult when you're not that impressive. So he did the next best thing: He tricked people into being impressed.
Phil once brought the top half of one of those ball-point pens whose tip retracted and protracted when you clicked the little nub on the oppisite end. He told us it was actually an explosive device that was rigged to go off once it was clicked 10,000 times. He would hold it up to my face and went click-click-click-click until I finally donned a concerned look.
Phil's best trick was to convince several of us that he had created a walkie-talkie that could listen in on the teacher's lounge. The device was obviously a telephone headset with some wires poking out of the wrong places and a dangling 9-volt battery, but Phil insisted he had rigged it up right and used a mysterious transistor he had found in his dad's lab. We couldn't hear it because the signal was faint and flakey. It was fun to believe, so we did.
Things really got interesting, though, when I took it a step further and made my own eavesdropping device. I ran from the school bus that afternoon and siezed an unused phone from the remnants of our last garage sale. It was a deep green and I was sure it was pregnant with mysterious transistors. I took it to my bedroom and beat its electronic brains out with a hammer. I then rearranged the pieces, hooked up a battery, and cemented them all in place with candle wax I melted in the microwave. I had no idea what the hell a transistor was, but I was sure the device would work.
The next day, I brought my invention to shchool and made the dubious claim that I could use it to hear into the teacher's lounge, just like Phil. He just stared at me, and I could see wheels turning and grinding. Some outsider had stolen his scam, and he couldn't expose it without admitting his fraud. Worse yet, the outside seemed to actually believe it was true!
So we both walked around with telephone headsets full of wires and candle wax, pretending we could hear voices on the other end of our masterful inventions. I think I may have even convinced myself, on some level, that I could.
I think those involved with this recall election must feel the same way, except that only one person gets to use the phone at a time.
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