The Topical Autobiography of Mark Dorset

Affectation

    For a while, when I was twelve or thirteen, I carried a transistor around with me, in my pocket, my left-hand pocket, where I carried my change.
    I was at that time an avid assembler of electronics kits. I used to order them from competing suppliers, Lafayette Electronics and Allied Electronics, and I devoured their catalogs as soon as they arrived. I could have told you, then, what any of their kits cost and how long I was likely to have to save before I could buy it.
    I was something of a whiz at assembling those kits. While the passion for them possessed me, I built an electric eye, an audio amplifier, a radio transmitter, a weather station, a burglar alarm, and a transistor radio almost small enough to fit in a pocket.
    Building the kits taught me something about electronics, but not much. The instructions that came with the kits had a didactic section in addition to their step-by-step assembly procedures, and I read those sections dutifully, but my real goal was to have the thing work, not to understand why it did. The little understanding that I did acquire was superficial in the most literal sense. I understood what was happening in each of the devices only in terms of what I could see. I understood, for example, that when the thin plates of metal in a tuning capacitor were rotated so that they were more or less overlapping, the capacitance of the capacitor was altered, with the result that the radio I was building would select a particular frequency of radio signal and, therefore, a particular broadcasting station. I could have explained to you how tuning a radio “worked” on that level, but if you had asked me what capacitance was, I could only have told you that it was a measure of a capacitor’s ability to hold an electrical charge. If you had been satisfied with that, I would have been relieved, because if you had asked me for anything more, you would have discovered that I had nothing more to give. I had a supply of definitions for the arcana of electronics, but I had no understanding of what the definitions really meant.
    However, I did come to understand that I understood more about electronics than anyone else I knew. In my circle, I was the closest thing to an expert that my circle possessed. I thought that this status might bring me a little fame or entitle me to a little respect, admiration, even awe and the love of beautiful women, if only people realized that I was an adept in the electronic arts. How, I asked myself, could I, subtly, make them realize that? By carrying a transistor around in my pocket!
    It was a damaged transistor. In my haste, while assembling the radio, I had held the tip of my soldering iron on its leads too long and somehow “cooked” its mysterious interior. With the transistor in my change pocket, I reasoned, I would be able pull it out with my change, and in picking through my change to find the coins to buy my lunch at school, I might manage to attract the attention of a schoolmate, who, if luck were with me, might ask, “What the heck is that?”
    Days passed before it happened, and when it did happen I wasn’t prepared for it, because it didn’t happen while I was on the lunchroom line, but while I was at my locker, at the end of a school day, with my mind already on the way home.
    “Hey,” said the boy who had the locker next to mine, “can you lend me the price of a candy bar till tomorrow?”
    “I think so,” I said, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out what I found there.
    “What’s that?” he asked.
    “Oh, that?” I said, struggling to remember my lines. “That’s a transistor.”
    “A transistor,” he said. “Hm.”
    “Yeah,” I said, ready now to deliver what I’d rehearsed.
    “What do you do,” he asked, “carry a transistor around in your pocket so somebody will ask what it is?”
    “Huh?” I said, shaken to the core of my youthful being.
    “Are you using it as a way to kind of set yourself apart from other people? Is that what it’s for?”
    “I—ah—”
    “That is pathetic.”
    “I don’t know how it even got into my pocket—”
    “Look,” he said, with a glance to either side to see if anyone was watching, “you are making such a transparently desperate plea for recognition that it’s embarrassing. Get rid of that thing.”
    I saw the wisdom in that advice, and I took it.

 
A Transistor (I Think)
This came from the circuitry of a failed compact fluorescent bulb, 2008.