Young Einstein & the Telephone

226 Young Einstein and the Telephone

Young Eintein’s cleaning behind his night table and decides all the wires from the cell phone charger and the alarm clock and the house phone and the light have to be neatened, which requires cutting a clump of them apart and rearranging them so they aren’t so messy.

Let’s see, now, where’s the little plastic tie strip that holds them all together? Ah, here. Out come the scissors and the plastic tie strip is cut. Well… no, it isn’t the plastic tie strip, it’s the wire that leads from the house phone to the power strip.

Now, let’s see. We have a phone system, a power cord and a little transformer that plugs into the power strip. And they have come apart. No problem. We’ll just hustle down to Best Buy and buy a replacement, probably ten bucks.

Best Buy doesn’t have the part. The part is useless in pieces. The phone system is useless without this accessory. Uh oh.

“Try Radio Shack” says the helpful guy behind the counter.

“You sell the phone, why don’t you sell the power supply?” asks Young Einstein.

“I dunno.”

Radio Shack doesn’t have the part, either. Cortland Street, where we used to go for spare parts, is (a) 300 miles away and (b) doesn’t have those kinds of shops anymore.

So, the answer is: buy a new phone system.

Oh, goodie. Let’s spend $100 instead of ten. Good for the economy. Plus the “old” phone system is already almost a year old.

New phone system purchased.

At home, we assemble the electronic parts of it easily. Plugging the batteries into the handsets is another story. Young Einstein takes his time trying to get the teeny-tiny plug into the teeny tiny socket. It doesn’t want to fit. It STILL doesn’t want to fit. It REALLY doesn’t want to fit. Finally, it fits.

The second handset has a completely different kind of battery arrangement. It takes equally long to put together.

They can make a fancy electronic telephone that works flawlessly once you figure out how to perform the low tech task of putting in a battery.

Genius! Young Einstein is envious. And once done (you can work up a sweat with this stuff!) he no longer is interested in making the rats nest of wires neat.

All is well until bedtime, when Einey realizes that the fancy blue light from the phone charger makes the room almost as bright as sunrise. No one can fall asleep in a room with what seems like enough light to replace the sun.

You can’t cover it up. You can’t turn it down. You can’t turn it off.

But they don’t call him Young Einstein for nothing. He plucks the phone from the cradle and the light goes out.

Now, if he can only remember to put it back together in the morning. And every morning thereafter.

And he throws away the scissor so there can be no repeat performance.

They put a man on the moon. But only after they figured out how to get him from the ground to door of the spaceship. Which project was harder? The one where they had to figure out that a ladder would do the trick.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR