The Capacitors of Doom...

So our System Administrator comes in to my office the other day and plunks a large box of electrical junk onto my desk. He's like that, our SysAdmin is, always collecting miscellaneous pieces of long and forgotten computers and appliances.

"Look here, Fainswift! A box of real 1970's capacitors and resistors! Look at the size of some of these!"

"Ah my dear SysAdmin, what did you shell out for this tiny treasure trove of novelties?" asks I, with an eye to future enrichment, should I bother to clean out my cellar one day. The flat I rent was previously occupied by a fellow who had owned a radio store in the 1970's. After retiring he had kept his stock of radio parts in the cellar, as a souvenir I suppose. All of which he left behind when he moved south to warmer climes and cool margaritas...

"On eBay, this guy was selling the stuff for thirty bucks per kilo, so I just had to bid!"

"And that is...?"

"Five kilos."

"Are you planning on building a Zuse-4, by any chance?"

"What? No, no! These are just for my collection. I'll leave them here for now, got to go reinstall that server. Now where did I put that hammer...?"

And one would think that was the end of that.

Enter our PFY, as if he could smell something to break a mile away.

"What's that?" asked the PFY, pointing to the box of treasure.

"A box of capacitors."

"Ah. Yes. Right-o. So... What're they good for?"

"This my boy," said I, holding up one of the specimen, "is an ingeniously clever but simple device to store an electrical charge. It is constructed using a positively charged surface, a small metal plate, and a negatively charged surface, another small metal plate, with an insulated gap betwixt them, called the dielectric."

"Huh?"

"It's a small battery."

"Hey, that's cool. Rechargable?"

"Indefinitely. I mean: yes. And: NO TOUCHY! Belongs to SysAdmin, and he'll delete every file you ever stored if you so much as breath on them."

"Hey, don't look at me, I'm not breathing on any of that junk."

So, thinking that our PFY was chastised enough, I proceeded off to lunch, sure that nothing would happen to SysAdmin's beloved little conversation pieces.

But noooo!

A mere hour and a half later I returned, full of fine Italian pizza, a light Domodossola wine, and enough gossip about the good ol' homeland to last me the rest of the week (the owner of the little pizzeria I often visit thinks I'm Italian, just because I can spout words such as "spa-g-he-tti", "bonnaserata", "esspresso" and "preggo" with a convincing accent...). The presence of the fire engine and three police cars in front of our building should have given me a hint all was not right, but I was sauntering along the sidewalk contently humming "Bellisima, Bellisima! Cara mia ti voglio bene!" After all, there was a bank on the first floor, and we just had the floors above it. Our local fellows from the "To Serve And Protect" gang where often sighted there, due to some alarm or other.

My office was untouched, except... SysAdmin's box of goodies was missing... And there was a nice stench of burnt electrical equipment in the air from the year 1970's.

Following the stench to the PFY's room was simple. It was a war zone. His desk, luckily, was constructed of solid metal, and was also the only thing intact, if somewhat the worse for wear. The PFY's laptop in its docking station and his monitor on the desk were just two hunks of melted plastic. Among the other debris in the room I noticed a twisted metal frame, about a meter square, with the charred remains of an electrical testing board hanging from it. The elements on the board seemed vaguely familiar. Two firemen were standing in the room with spent extinguishers, looking around for more trouble. In the hallway, three of our city finest force where interrogating the PFY, and not getting very far from the looks of it. And SysAdmin was hunched in the hallway sofa, sniffing as if he had lost his only child.

Obviously I need to do something here to ease the situation, and quickly!

"Hey, my dear fellow fire-fighters! How does one get all that foam into those wee tanks, anyway?"

"Simple, Mister, you don't. These tanks hold two liquids, see, and a CO2 capsule, see. When we push the ejector, the two liquids mix and give off all this foam, see?" said the fireman closest to me, pushing the ejector on his extinguisher and letting off a bit of foam in the PFY's general direction.

"Yes, I see. Practical."

"Well, we've got all the fire out. Have a nice day Mister! We'll send you the bill later. Haha!"

"Y-es... Ha. Ha... Grmle..." And I knew where I was going to get reimbursed for that, too.

Next I turned my attention to the bereaved (as I suspected).

"So what are you moaning about, SysAdmin?"

"My... my... my 1970's capacitors... all... pffft! Pfluieee! Boom! Big badda boom!"

"Ah, well, cheer up, my dear SysAdmin! I know where I can find many, many nice 1970's capacitors, resistors, and even... yes, I believe even 1960's transistor tubes! You'll have them tomorrow and the PFY will boot the bill!"

The SysAdmin looked better already as he trundled off to optimize some deserving manager's harddrive with a rubber mallet. My mentioning the 1960's transistor tubes even made him drewl...

Lastly, I turned my attention to the PFY and his current victims, the cops.

"My dear officers! What a lovely day it is, is it not? Anything I could do to help clear up this little matter?" said I, handing each of them my card. For some reason the initials "CFO" on my card always makes people more... approachable, I think is the word I'm looking for... to my suggestions. Why they should hold so much stock in my being the "Champion Flowcharter of the Office" is still beyond me, but there you have it...

After a short and informative lecture on "Electrical Equipment, Usage and Safety Procedures in Closed Spaces", our city's finest decided their job here was done, and they returned whence they had come.

So. Now to the perpetrator of this insurance company's nightmare.

"What do you have to say, PFY?"

"Well, not my fault SysAdmin bought junk!"

"No, true, but didn't I expressly forbid you to even breath on his junk?"

"Yeah, you did. So I wore a hankie tied around my face, like John Wayne and those other cowboys..."

Sigh...

"Ok, next time I'll put a PFY trap on things I don't want you to touch. Out with it. Why were you attempting to detonate the earth?"

"My MP3 player ran out of juice. And you said those capacitors-things were batteries. So I tired one, but it was dead. So I tried recharging them. I got this neat electrical plan from the internet, on how you can put lightbulbs in parallel, so I did that with SysAdmin's stuff. Plugged it in and all was good, so I went to get a coke."

"Aha, and then?"

"Then I heard this big noise, and when I came back here everything was burning and the walls were full of small holes, and I thought they were, you know, bullet holes, 'cause that's how they look like on TV! So I called the police, saying we were under attack by terrorists, us having such vital research data and all!"

"We provide financial services, boy, not research. And self respecting terrorists could not care a wee mite what we have in our databases... It's just too horribly boring even for the most numorolophil of accountants."

"Oh... So, does the company's insurance cover my MP3 player?"

It didn't and part of the PFY's next twelve paycheques was docked to help pay for damages. And give our SysAdmin a nice weekend present of ancient electrical parts.