At a certain point, I had to tell my brother to stop explaining his job to me. Also, to stop sending me cute cartoons and jokes from his workplace.
This is not because my brother is boring or that I dislike him. It’s because I’m not smart enough to understand what he does for a living. It involves something to do with computers that only .00001 percent of the world can grasp, and I’m not one of them.
He has a degree in electrical engineering, which I also don’t understand, except that it has something to do with plugging my toaster into the wall socket.
I would like to understand how electricity works, since maybe it would help me calm down after I open my bill from Southern California Edison. As a person who likes to keep informed (I once watched an entire documentary on the history of the electric guitar for no reason), I’ve striven over my long life to grasp how electricity works.
There was no electricity yet when I was born, although Benjamin Franklin had already performed his experiment with the key and lightning. OK, OK, I’m lying. I’m old but not that old.
Although power lines did not reach my family’s farm on the Colorado prairie until shortly before I was born.
Years ago, I had my grandfather’s old console radio restored, and the restorer told me that it had originally been wired to hook up to a car battery, because farms in the area didn’t have power in those days. Later, it had been converted to regular current, which he knew because there was a notice pasted to the back of it saying so.
I’ve tried to imagine what joy that radio must have brought into the lives of my great-grandparents on that farm, which is still in the middle of nowhere, providing a link to the outside world. They lived so far out that my grandma had to board in town to go to high school. Her father would bring the horse and buggy to pick her up on the weekends.
So that radio must have really relieved the monotony on the dark, cold nights when the snow was piling up and the wind was howling around the homestead like Jacob Marley’s ghost.
Farmers bought the new-fangled radios back then so they could get the daily farm report and, since they were eminently practical people, I’m sure that was true. But, still, that device in its walnut cabinet must have changed their lives as much — or even more — than the internet has for us today.
I don’t understand the internet either. But to have the world suddenly come flooding into your isolated homestead, when your previous entertainment had been darning socks or whittling, must have been mind-blowing.
And now, many decades later, I still don’t understand any of it. I went on my laptop and asked Mr. Google to explain electricity to me and this is what he said: “Electricity is the movement of tiny subatomic particles called electrons.”
Huh? So now I have to understand subatomic physics too? Maybe sometimes it’s just better to stay stupid. In fact, I’m pretty sure I understand how Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility works more thoroughly than what happens when I turn on my microwave.
For years, I had a vacation home in Joshua Tree, at the end of a dirt road that was at the end of another dirt road. It was so quiet out there that I’d get up in the morning to watch the sunrise, and I could hear the electric power coming from the wires into the house. (I could also hear the birds’ wings beating as they flew by, but that’s a different topic.) Why could I hear this?
And, while we’re on the subject, here are a few other questions:
- Why don’t crows get electrocuted when they sit on the electrical wires that run across my back fence?
- Why are there such a confusing number of light bulbs now and how am I supposed to figure out which ones to buy?
- Why do I have to bring an electrical adaptor when I travel to other countries and why does it always fall out of the wall socket?
- How do fax machines work and why do people keep giving you their fax numbers when no one uses them anymore?
- Why did Radio Shack go out of business?
- What is the 1-0 binary system that computers use and why do I use it to watch cat videos?I haven’t asked my brother these questions, because I’m afraid his answers will be so technical they’ll make my brain short-circuit. Oh, and add “What is a short circuit and why do they happen to me?” to the list.Until then, I’ll just keep writing away on my computer, using electricity and the internet, and hoping they’ll work without me.