As a
wee laddy of about eight years, I had a
lofty goal: to create
bug poison. I knew this would require some sort of
liquid to pour onto
bugs. I also knew that this liquid would have to be created in some sort of
tricky manner--I was going by
Sturgeon's Law here--I knew it would take some
effort.
(Right now would be a good time to tell the
reader that as a
child I read the
label of every single
household substance I could find, out of
curiosity. This probably made me a bit more
paranoid than I would've been.)
After
deeply pondering the
subject of what to use as my main source of bug
poison (this lasted about ten
seconds), I decided a
battery would be the best
logical choice. (I didn't know what logical meant at the time, but I knew it had something to do with being right and smart.) Yes, logical, and the logical size would of course be a
D.
(Few people know this, but my findings showed that D sized batteries are really just four
AA batteries in a larger
cylindrical battery
case.)†
A
hammer and a
nail would be all I needed. I was into
cost-efficiency. Why go out and buy
high tech, unnecessary devices when I could get by perfectly with these two
wonders of
human technology? My work area was to be the back
porch.
With utmost
care did I drive the nail into the battery. Four smaller cylinders rolled out of the
shell.
Odd. Better drive the nail into one of them. Time to find the
pay dirt.
(The reader must now be aware that the following
event occurred with a marvel of
calmness and simple, well thought-out
decisions)
After seeing
dark grey goop squirt out of the cylinder and, about a
tenth of a second later, feeling it make contact with my right
eye, I thought things over for a minute (half a second), and decided there was only one right thing to do. Walk slowly over to the
sink and rinse my eye out.
Flush the eye out, I think they called it on the labels I'd read.
Madness would shortly ensue.
~
<
mom> why, what are you doing?
<
chris> oh, nothing mom, just rinsing my eye out..
<mom> hm.. why are you doing that?
<chris> i just got some
battery acid in it..
*shrug*
<mom> you _what_
!?##%^$!#
<chris> don't worry about it
* mom calls up
urgent care, and rushes her son there
~
My
entrepreneurial adventure'd come to a close. My right eye would have a
patch on it for a day, after being flooded with
green dye by the
doctor for viewing with a special
camera, in order to make sure there wasn't major
damage.
Gain: I was able to miss
school for a day.
(The reader should know that I still have 20/20 vision)
† Editor's note: After a few minutes with a hacksaw, I have determined that this is not true. A D cell battery is simply a scaled up version of a AA. It is not four AA's in one package.