An Electric Education

In “Anecdotal Tales”, stories will be told. Some will be fun, some will not. Some will be great, some will be less so. Some stories are true, some are merely possible. This is one of them.

An Electric Education

“Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.” -Ernest Dimnet

Gregory was an intelligent and accomplished man.  He had graduated college with a degree in engineering.  He had a nice wife and two precocious children.  While others were running out and buying mp3 players for their cars, Gregory built one out of a small hard drive and a power source that hooked into the vehicle’s cigarette lighter.  Yes, Gregory was a smart sort of fellow.  Of course, he hadn’t started out that way.

Gregory also had a brother by the name of Mort.  Mort was a year and a half younger than Gregory, so perhaps he thought that his older brother wouldn’t do anything to inflict any harm.  However, Mort operated off of the faulty assumption that Gregory knew what he was doing.

The two brothers got along well enough, but there were certainly visible differences.  Gregory was around ten years old, which naturally made Mort eight.  Gregory had already developed his fascination for electric things.  He played with LED lights, knew how to work a volt meter, and was only too content to spend hours working on his electric train set.  Mort was less engaged in technological things and was happy to spend his mornings reading comic strips.  When he heard Gregory mention the word “transformer”, Mort got very excited.  Of course, when he realized that his older brother was playing with some mechanical controller and not any robotic toy, Mort turned his attention back to the book he had spread on the floor.

On one seemingly uneventful day, Gregory and Mort were both sitting on the dining room floor.  Their mother was in the kitchen, but there was a wall between her and her two boys.  How was she to know that Gregory had absconded a butter knife and was looking at it in his hands?  She couldn’t have known that Gregory was holding Mort’s hand.  However she quickly was alerted to Gregory putting the butter knife into the electrical socket and shocking both himself and his brother.

Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.  Granted, Mort saw a few spots in front of his eyes and Gregory’s hand tingled for a few moments afterwards, but they would live to cause trouble another day.  Gregory had learned the importance of using caution around electricity; a lesson he surely passed on to his daughters as they grew up.  The younger brother learned an equally important lesson which helped keep him out of trouble.  Mort found that there was a limit to how far he should trust Gregory whenever his brother had a plan.

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