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2002-12-12/4:00 a.m.
Anecdote #1 - The Electrical Box

Listening to: Screaching Weasle - I Can See Clearly Now (punk cover)

I feel like writing a little bit more, but don't really have anything to talk about. In instances such as these, I think I'll tell you about an events from my past, usually amusing, sometimes just weird or whatever. Some may be stuff people I know did. Who knows. No order, this is just the first to pop into my head.

Warning: There is a lot of exposition here, but I swear it's fairly necessarily and it pays off in the end...or at least I think it does, otherwise I would waste so much time on it.

First some geography. When I was 11 or so I lived in a house bordering the property of my school. There was a field, and my house was to the east of it, the schools were to the west of it, to the north up a hill was a highway, and to the south of it was the building and parking lot where they parked and serviced the school buses.

The field when I was eleven was in the process of being leveled into a new baseball field for the high school team, which meant there were always a lot of bulldozers and heavy machinery around. Basically what they had to do was cut out a sizable portion of a hill and keep moving the dirt back and forth from the north side of the field to the south side until it was all nice and level.

When this incident took place, there was a large mound of dirt and rock at the south side of the field. A little access road ran between the bus barn and the mound, which was effectively cut off from view of the highway because of the aformentioned mound.

Part of the rear of the building went further back the other part, so the wall kind of doglegged in one part, and on one of those walls was an electrical box. It had a metal door on it, and had once had a fiberglass window in one corner for meter readings (until some friends and I knocked it out earlier).

It was about five or six feet off the ground, which would normally be out of my eleven-year-old reach. However, parked in front of it was a small flatbed trailer, one of those types with a trailer hitch in the front, a foldable ramp in the back, and is used to carry things like riding lawn mowers and stock cars. It was also the type with only two wheels on an axle right in the middle of it, which kind of acts as a teeter-totter.

These were great fun in their own right, at least when the ramp was down in the back. See, the ramp always made the back part heavier than the front, so when it was not loaded, the front part was always about five or six feet in the air. When the ramp was down and laying on the ground (which supported the bulk of the ramp's weight), if a kid my size walked up it and put one foot on the trailer hitch, the back would rise slowly. Thus the front would drop slowly, and it was kind of like floating down on a magic carpet or something.

However, when the ramp was up, it kind of hung at an angle over the back portion of the trailer, which made the whole back portion heavier. If a kid my size walked up the ramp with the ramp up, it wouldn't budge. So it was just like climbing a hill and standing at the top. Certainly not as fun as when the ramp was down.

For some reason, these trailers were around wherever I went as a kid, so I had a lot of experience with them and the physics that made them work (at least on an unconscious level).

Anyway, on this day, the ramp was up, and when I walked up it, I was right on the exact level of the electrical box. I started thinking, "There's gotta be something I can do to this thing." May friend and I had thrown mud in there and rocks, but nothing really had any effect. I looked around and was sure I was blocked on all sides by either the wall, the mound, or the parked buses. And the building was closed for the day. I could do anything here and not be seen. But what?

Then I realized.

I had to pee.

So, of course, being a boy and having a natural fondness of pissing outdoors and destruction in general, I figured the combonation of both was a fairly rare opporotunity that might only come around once in a lifetime. And on top of that, it seemed like something that would be a real fucking hoot. So I whipped it out and began to piss right in the broken out window of the electrical box.

I started to get a little nervous when from within the box I heard a weird humming and crackling sound, and was even more nervous when a thin trail of smoke started drifting out the window. But, I was only halfway done, and, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound, and all that stuff. So I kept going.

I'm lucky I didn't get my fucking dick electrocuted off. What I did get was a VERY surprising but also very satisfying

POP!

I jumped off that goddam ramp as fast as I could, even though I wasn't quite done pissing, but managed to finish without getting any on me, at least that I noticed.

Then I got the fuck out of there.

The next day, I was over that way again an noticed a repairman standing there with the door open, trying to fix the electical box. While normally at eleven, I was pretty shy around other people, I was feeling pretty cocky that day, so I walked over, watched the guy working for a little bit like any self-respecting curious little kid would, then asked him, "What happened to it?"

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "But whatever it was, someone messed it all up."

I said, "Hm!" then left, like any self-respecting kid with a small attention span would.

That was just one of many forrays into vandalism I engaged in before I hit 16 or so, but it probably was one of the worst. Maybe not the meanest, but I can imagine that had to have cost the school a pretty penny in repair costs and lost time at work. Many tried to vandalise the buses, with little success, but I think I was the only one to effectively shut down all operations for the entire bus barn. And before I hit puberty.

Dangerous, but no regrets on that one.

Wooderson

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