The Grid Incident

Filed by Jimmy — second grade. PHASE 2, WEEK 2.

During second grade, the house we lived in had a shed out back, which meant I had a facility. I was out there one afternoon when I decided it was time to wire something up. I had materials. I had ambition. And, critically, I had a power supply, the adapter from my racetrack, which I reasoned was a perfectly legitimate source of electricity for projects beyond its stated mission.

I made my connections. I plugged it in. And the lights went out.

What happened next is a matter of timing. Somewhere in the house, my mother detected the grid failure and was out the door in seconds. I’m telling you, this woman’s response time should have been studied. As she covered the gap between the door and the shed, I executed the only protocol I had to save myself: the adapter was unplugged and chucked into the corner, and the investigator was greeted by the innocent face of a child who was simply playing when the universe mysteriously failed.

As Mom checked things out, the evidence sat in the corner, still warm. The case, however, soon went cold.

Lesson logged: Do not run untested experiments on production infrastructure. The whole household shares that circuit, and the blackout is the audit trail. You can hide the adapter. You cannot hide the outage.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy