| Author | Message | ||
     Captpete |
My younger days. I don’t know what was wrong with me at the time. I was living in Bridgeport, Ct. and I decided to rent an apartment in the ghetto. It was a three-room shotgun affair, living room, bedroom, and kitchen, running front to back, with a gas stove in the kitchen. Middle floor out of three. It was nasty, right in the middle of the projects. The building was an old wooden structure with little porches at the back, which were mostly just part of the fire escape, a maze of 2 x 4’s. As I think back, the biggest risk of living there was probably getting burnt up in the middle of the night in that tinderbox. But at the time, I was more concerned about crime. I was working as a programmer/systems analyst for Remington Electric Shaver at the time, and one of my co-workers was an electrical engineer, part of the design team I think, and I asked him to design a burglar deterrent for the apartment. What he came up with was some transformers that took household current up to 40,000 volts and fired 60 times a second, the cycle time for AC. A great big kick-ass spark plug, if you will. I then got a spool of small ni-chrome wire, and built a maze where a wire went around the apartment up where the walls met the ceiling. I hung it with some insulated fasteners that I designed. Next, at both the front and rear doors and the one window that was accessible from the fire escape, I had a bunch of wires dangling down almost to the floor. The plan was that anyone who entered while the system was turned on would be lit up pretty good, and their hollers and screams would certainly alert somebody. They would not actually be electrocuted, because the transformers isolated them from the actual line current, but I suppose coronaries could have been a real possibility. I had a little brass number fastened to the front door, so I took one of its screws out, swung the number crooked, and drilled a hole in the door that would be hidden when the number was in place. I then located the on/off switch behind that hole. When I came home I could swing the number out of the way and poke a pen into the hole and turn the system off. And lastly, I hung signs on the front and rear doors, which in both English and Spanish said, “Caution! 40,000 volts just inside this door.” The system was real, and it worked. But I didn’t want to start stacking coronary victims up at my front door, so I had to get the word out to the “community” that yes, it was real, and it did in fact work. I had a hippie couple living across the hall and I decided to finesse them into becoming my advertising team. There was a stray cat the hippies had named Owlsly and he pretty much lived on the fire escape. He was quite tame and would roam up and down the stairs looking for handouts or an open door, which if found, he considered an invitation to come on in and visit. Owlsly spent a lot of time in the various kitchens, and appeared to be eating quite well. I had the system on, but unplugged, and invited the hippies to come over and inspect my new electric burglar fryer. They came in, I ushered them to the kitchen where I opened the back door, and then I plugged the system in. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before old Owlsly came strolling into the kitchen. But he never made it. He got about halfway across the threshold and ran into one of those wires dangling down from the ceiling… and he got going on some serious multi-tasking. He let out this ear-piercing howl as he went straight up into the air about four feet, and by the time he reached the apex of his leap he was already turned around, facing back out the door. He must have had some pretty sharp claws, for he never spun his wheels when he came back down on that linoleum. He just shot back out the door and was out of sight. I wasn’t sure if he went up or down, but it was a good month or so before he came back to visit me. I unplugged the system and said, “Not bad, huh?” “Far out, man,” one of them said through a cannabis haze. “An electric cat.” I never turned the system on again and was the only apartment in the building that wasn’t broken into at least once during the year or so I lived there. I guess my advertising scheme worked pretty well, thanks to good old Owlsly. | ||
| Blake |
So you never self-tested the system? Come on, fess up.  Funny stuff. Much better sanity than the shotgun rigged to fire some folks have used. | ||
| Henrik |
Ohhh, poor Owlsly .... thanks for the laugh  Henrik | ||
| Davegess |
Good tale! | ||
| Bomber |
good name fer a feline! thanks for the tip, Cap . . . . . | ||
| Road_thing |
Probly woulda made a helluva good fish-stunner! rt | ||
| Captpete |
So you never self-tested the system? Come on, fess up. What? You've never had a close encounter with an electric fence, city boy? I knew how it worked just fine. I just needed Owlsly to test the isolation part for me. | ||
| Jackbequick |
Two hippies who name a cat Owlsley were probably not thinking of owls, they would more likely be thinking of the well known underground chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Jack (Message edited by jackbequick on August 20, 2006) | ||
| Captpete |
Keen sense of the obvious there, Jackbequick. That episode above was circa 1970, when I was a hippie hiding behind a necktie. The following year I quit my job, threw the ties and suits in a dumpster, and came out of the closet. (The haze that was mentioned was in the kitchen.)  | ||
| Road_thing |
"hippie hiding behind a necktie" Been there! Done that! rt | ||
| Bomber |
Been there, Doing that! (sorta kinda) still gotta lil aluminum pill container with a Sandoz logo on it round here sumwhere's . . . . . . . | ||
| Captpete |
Bomber, Psst... it's hidden in your sock drawer. | ||
| Bomber |
LOFL! very likely -- ain't worn socks for a long far -- no WONDER I can't find it! |
