And God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected. Spike Milligan, Irish actor, comedian, writer, musician, poet, and playwright
It was a homophonous double whammy, especially for a head-turning techie: Bridget Dickerson suffered from philophobia–the fear of love, and from filophbia–the fear of wires. She loathed Edison. Would have screwed, then left the next morning, Tesla.
Born and raised in Eldora, Iowa, Bridget was hired into the computer department of a high-end department store on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. She drove to the city straight through from Ames, farm-fresh and eager, with her ISU IT degree framed and neatly packed away in her silver Hyundai. Ready, she hoped, for the real world.
The striking redhead never shared her identically-pronounced aversions with anybody, ever–especially not with her parents who would only compel her to “suck it up, buttercup!” whenever she ran to them screaming in fright after seeing a snake in the yard—or a cord dangling from an unplugged lamp. To young Bridget Dickerson, they were one terror in the same.
Her sound-alike irrational fears stemmed from when she was just a toddler and her first vivid memory–an unfortunate one not easily erased, even with therapy: bursting into Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom early one Sunday morning, excited that she had found Daddy’s charger cord out in the grass where he had been looking for it the day before.
But rather than being happy like she thought they’d be, Mommy and Daddy, in the process of making her a little brother, fled from the bed, in shock that their daughter caught them together in full exposure, screaming in chaos at her to “get that fucking, goddamn snake out of our fucking, goddamn room!” Bridget’s psyche was shattered at three.
The repressed incident cropped up most times while shagging an Eldora High School classmate or a guy she just picked up at a State Street bar, or whenever she plugged in an extension cord, her hairdryer, or a blender. To ease the PTSD caused by her very, very naked parents getting very, very angry at her, and by confusing snakes with charger cords, and for seeing Daddy’s charger cord that was sticking straight out, and all the other sexual connotations that Freud would have had a field-day over, Bridget took her rx advice from pharmacist Keith Richards and chose her medicine: any kind of booze or pills or powders would do. She justified her dependence on such mind-numbing substances with the lyrics of another rocker, Tom Keifer: "we all need a little shelter, just a little helper, to get us by.”
Odd that Bridget made a career choice fully dependent on electricity, wires and cables–lots of them: power cables; DVI, HDMI, and VGA data cables; PS/2s; 5mm audio cables; USB (Universal Serial Bus) cables; cat5 cables with rj45 connectors; coaxial cables; unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cables; shielded twisted pair (STP) cables. Had Freud lived in today’s Information Age, his clinical evaluation might have been that she loved working with the very cables she feared because the twisted pair neurons in the deepest folds of her brain were transmitting pleasant erotic urges after seeing Daddy’s erection when she was a child. A psychoanalysis worked up by Sigmund the Cable Guy.
Yes, Bridget was electrosexually charged to Nikoli Tesla, the Serbian-born ladies' man and bon vivant, for his study of high-voltage, high-frequency electricity in free wireless power transmission. In May 1899, the theoretical genius built the largest ever Tesla Coil in Colorado Springs, telling reporters that he planned to conduct wireless telegraphy experiments, transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla used it for only one year, until 1900, and it was torn down in 1904 to pay his outstanding debts.
Alas, Bridget had to settle for Tesla’s contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity for-profit supply system. An electricity supply system that, in the end, was also fully dependent on wires and cables to carry the current, hence adding more voltage to Bridget’s cognitive dissonance, and her dependence on booze and pills and powders–non-hallucinatory ones because erasing the scary stuff conjured up by her twisted neurons when not high or drunk is why she got high and drunk in the first place!
The disturbing serpentine visions she suffered in the Hawkeye State returned vividly to her first holiday season in Chi-town. Walking to the el station after work one Friday, Bridget made the mistake of stopping to admire the official city Christmas tree installed in Daley Plaza. (As a child, the same coniferous holiday symbol did not set her three-year old neural circuits alternating that first Christmas after the charger cord incident, per se–she was just terrified that the strings of lights on it might slither down the baubled branches and attack her just as she was reaching in for a present underneath.)
Because their daughter refused to even go near a tree decked with light, the traditional Dickerson Christmas fir became perhaps the only Christmas tree in the world not winking and bright with glowing bulbs (invented by that son-of-a-grinch inventor and money-grubbing patent-holder of direct current intentionally carried by wire to paying customers, Thomas Alva Edison, she fumed to herself in protest even as a child, amped up and overcharged with more squirming holiday angst.)
The five-story-tall spruced-up spruce in Daley Plaza was harmonious to enjoy–until Bridget’s psyche dissolved into that three-year old again and watched in horror as snakes–strings and strings of them all winking and bright with 7,000 LEDs–came alive on all 75-stinking-feet, all slithering down to choke the sex life out of her! Her shelter that weekend was several bottles of chardonnay, an eight-ball of coke, and some guy named Jack she met on the train ride home that night.
Her second psychotic break happened one Monday morning, six months later in the server room at work. Server rooms, with all the information from every computer feeding into it to be stored, usually resemble an exploding Olive Garden, with spaghetti-tangled cables knotted and balled and twisted all over the place. Today they were all labeled and as straight and neat with a 34-Pin Split Cable.
Bridget wondered which of her nerd colleagues had spent the balmy spring weekend holed up in Nieman-Marcus’ dark and chilly server room straightening out computer cords! I mean, come on…I know we geeks all have OCD, but that was ridiculous! She asked around, but got the “what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about” reaction; only until a photo revealed the unadulterated room as it was, did she realize her mind was playing tricks on her again. At least the cables didn’t skinwalk into snakes, she thought as she went into the ladies room to sneak a shot and powder her nose.
A third incident occurred later that autumn at a rare Cubs playoff game. Bridget had shagged her way into a ticket and was enjoying the first inning—until the fan in the seat directly in front of her arrived—and was wearing radio headphones. Being so close to the skinny black serpents writhing through his ears and in and out his brain and down his neck was enough for her to leave the Friendly Confines immediately and head for the nearest Wrigleyville bar. She became even more stressed there watching the game on TV, and drank until last call after her team lost in 12 innings on a throwing error and got swept by the Phillies. Next year!
Her homophonous double whammy really hit home one winter night when she fled from a one-nighter in Tinley Park because the guy had an electric blanket on his bed–no way she was going to do it under a duvet of copper vipers!
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On September 22, in the last year that time was kept, electromagnetic energy ceased to exist–not a single spark could be generated by global electrical power plants combined. Some hysterical folks blamed Chinese hackers, some a gamma ray burst deep in space that had fried the world’s wires. Some blamed the sun’s extreme solar flares that had interfered with Earth’s electromagnetic waves. Some blamed God’s wrath because He had to wait four business days to illuminate the universe.
The President of the United States, communicating to the country now by carrier pigeons, blamed the power meltdown on a Russian cyber-terrorist organization that unleashed what the CIA called, Operatsiya Vytashchit' Vilku. The clever comrades chose the date for Operation Pull the Plug because that was Michael Faraday’s birthday.
Despite the POTUS’s assessment, some were pretty sure it was space aliens who shut civilization down in order to get our attention, like they did in that 1950s sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The President then sent out another robo-flock of carrier pigeons to assure Americans that it wasn’t space aliens who cut the AC/DC. He reassured the people that the country was back in black only temporarily, and urged them not to be thunderstruck by it all. To avoid the temptation of doing dirty deeds done dirt cheap.
All to no avail! The people panicked! No phones! No tv! No lights! No appliances! No hot water or heat! No music! No clocks! No trains, planes, or automobiles! Most heinous of all–NO SCREENS TO STARE INTO!!! Most couldn’t add 2 + 2 because AI always added 2 + 2 for them. Oh, to have half the brain of a computer chip (or a potato chip) right now!
Less than a week later, the world’s great cities and remotest villages were once again lit up at night–not with vapor-lamps and light bulbs, but by burning buildings, as looting and hoarding and anarchy became the norm. The Dark Ages? Hell no, humankind was thrust back to caveperson days!
Odd that for the very first time in her life, our strung-out heroine became blissfully happy and content and normal feeling! Bridget loved living off the grid because now there was nobody at work texting her “a quick question” during her favorite prime-time tv show; no more stacks of repair tickets and associates clamoring: can you fix my printer now, Bridge, because I have to get out a very, very important document. It will only take you a minute; no more cold sweats plugging in a toaster oven because she now did her cooking anxiety-free over an open campfire in the parking lot of her apartment complex. For the first time since she was 15, she was clean, sober, and truly feeling alive and free! For the first time in her life, she fell in love and got married (to the hunky blonde in 306). Bridget Dickerson’s homophonous double whammy was cured!
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