THE APPRENTICE

 

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-24-24)

     I guess that when the television industry has had enough of me, I'll need to find something else to do with myself. Maybe I could work in a trade, since I like to work with my hands. Is acupuncture a trade? I think I could kill at that job. Glass blower? How hard could it be? Even if you blow it, things went pretty well. Yoga instructor, as long as I can just explain what to do rather than showing you. When we discuss the cat pose, I demonstrate by sitting on a newspaper and knocking all your pens off the table. Maybe I'll get into consulting, if there's a business model where I ask the questions. How about horse groomer? "You look fine, but you could do with a little horse-scaping. That will be $40.00."

     I had to hire an electrician to come over and re-wire the ceiling fan that I hooked up using a YouTube video, and I realized that being an electrician would be the perfect job for me. Besides electrocution, what's the worst that could happen? My idea was to apprentice at the craft by having him come back several times after I try to fix things. If you watch enough YouTube videos, you feel like you can do anything.

     I was pretty much relegated to setting up the ladder. Let me pick his brain- I need to know more about the business structure. "So is there a corporate ladder or do you need to provide your own? What's the quickest way to get to the top?" "Well, I work for myself and I slept my way to the top. Could you set up the ladder vertically?" I was learning so much already.

     "Is that a jumper wire?" I asked. "Actually, yes it is." "I thought I saw it move." He says he needs to plug in his cordless drill, and this guy is supposedly the expert. "You have an outlet?" "I have an outlet, but I'm not sure we want to get into that here."

     He had his nose inside the circuit box, so I was basically his eyes and ears to the outside world. He said, "Can you find the ground?" I felt this was a test. I said, "Isn't it right down there?" But he was still looking inside the box. While I was thinking, outside the box, he said, "Yup, you're right. There it is. Good! Hand me those pliers?" He was twisting some wires. I thought this was a good time to bond. I said, "If you want to see the ground, come out drinking with me, and you'll see it at about 1:30, 2:00 on a good night, 12:15 on an even better night." "There's a pair of strippers over there." He was pointing somewhere. "Oh, so you know the place? I'm like a fixture there. That's an electrician joke."

     I think I had his attention. I said, "Listen, I've been writing some television scripts. One involves an electrician and an apprentice, and they are also private detectives. The apprentice is actually the smart one, and the electrician is always getting into trouble, and screwing things up, and the apprentice is always talking them out of a jam, but the electrician stumbles upon the answer to the crime without knowing it, and it's the apprentice who actually puts 2 and 2 together, because the police have already zeroed in on the ex-husband, but he didn't do it." "Mmm-hmmm. But if the apprentice was the smarter one why isn't he the electrician? Make 30 dollars more an hour." "I can set it in a post-apocalyptic world, if that makes you feel any better. Wait- you're paying me $40 dollars less than you?"

     I can explain the basics of electricity to you right now, if you'd like to become my apprentice's aide. It's an unpaid position, but people do a lot worse things for a lot more money. You can think of electricity as if it were water. Pretend a wire is the hose. Amperes, named for physicist André-Marie Ampère, represents the amount of water flowing. Voltage, named for Alessandro Volta, is the water pressure. Ohms, named after Georg Ohm, are like a sprinkler at the end of the hose, causing resistance to the water's flow. 

     The rickster, named after myself, is a unit that measures the amount of water you would need to stand in while working on an open circuit before becoming electrocuted. As you can see, everything is named after the guy who invented it. So to solidify my legacy in the field, I need to discover something. What I've discovered is that it seems like a lot of work to be an electrician.

     You need a license, which I already have, with only a few speeding tickets. And you have to be certified in your state. People have often said I am certifiable, so I'm just about ready to go. But I might just become a YouTube electrician instead, and make videos right here at home. I have the camera all set up and ready to go, but I can't get it to play back on the TV, so I'll probably have to call the electrician back.