Today, I fucked up... by using electricity improperly in the 90's
It was just post-columbine and all of the weird kids were being watched for when we would inevitably snap and wantonly murder every living thing that we had ever been exposed to. When my time came I was in my 8th grade ‘science’ class. This class was taught by an extremely large woman who’s mass was apparently not composed of adipose tissue but rather an all consuming gelatinized paranoia. Like, she got one of my friends a three day suspension for “making gun-shooting motions at 15-45 degree angles on his desk and directing them at the other students.” He was drumming on his desk, he was in marching band and played the snare.
It was nearing the end of the year and we were doing a unit on electricity. Wiring things in series, creating simple motors, playing with capacitors… it was actually pretty fun. And I, in my typical cut-up middle schooler fashion, had taken the liberty of defining all of the vocabulary words in my work books with colorful definitions to be erased later and replaced with proper ones when time came to turn the work in.
Now the FU! Each group of students had a small electricity kit with some wires, lightbulbs, capacitors, 3 d-cell batteries and a battery holder. I (in my infinite wisdom) decided that in the interest of being a mild inconvenience and for the opportunity to bother the teacher I would leave these batteries wired in series when I put them away for the evening thus draining them and requiring new ones tomorrow. So after the wiring was complete I put this weapon of mass destruction back into the kit and satisfied that I had done my part to bother one of the most reviled people in my middle school I went home to watch Toonami.
I arrive at school, go to class. First period morning announcements I noticed my name in the litany of names that were requested to come to the office. I decided that “I ain’t no bitch” and that I wasn’t going to come to the office when they called me and that if it were truly important they would come and get me.
Second period I was greeted at my next class by a police officer who took me by the wrist and led my happy ass down to the office. This was worrying as I wracked my brain for any reason I could have fucked up this badly. Maybe someone had died? I hadn’t done anything that my groggy 13 year old mind could recall that was bad enough to bring down this amount of heat.
The officer led me straight into the principal’s office where I found the eponymous principal, my science teacher and my father who was giving me a look which I eventually became well-familiar with that said: ‘how the hell do you even do this?” These three were already engaged in a heated debate over the explosive capacity of three D-cells wired in series when my science teacher decided to drop the bombshell: I left the batteries near a bottle of hand sanitizer. Yeah, motherfucking Purel™ bomb technology was at hand and she was first on the hit list.
I did not laugh. My father did not laugh. He did however try to impress upon them that the amount of water in the Purel™ and the amount of heat that three D-Cell batteries in a box nearby could generate did not equal a high powered explosive device for a targeted assassination. Then my Science teacher made her master stroke. She pulled out my work book and looked my principal dead in the eye saying “Well, I think he was smart enough to do this and had REASON enough to do this. Here I have Fidoburger’s workbook where they are supposed to define their vocabulary words for the electricity unit. And here, “ she opens my workbook to the page she had BOOKMARKED, “where it says ’transistor’ he’s written ‘yo mama’ and I don’t know about you but I find that offensive.”
I collapsed. It was too funny. I laughed all the way to alternative school. I laughed when I got expelled from middle school for making a bomb. I laughed when I moved halfway across the country that summer (unrelated) and got to personally throw all documentation of this event away when we transferred my records to my new school system.
