Yesterday, I had a flashback to my not so glory days in Seattle. It was the middle of the day, and I was behind on some work I was supposed to be doing. Most of the time I’m behind, because I’m lazy, but this time it was someone else’s fault. When I get behind on something I get anxious, and need to use my focus powers. However, my enemy Distraction was working just as hard as I was yesterday. Other people were talking to me, the Wi-Fi was slow, but those weren’t enough to defeat me. So Distraction got desperate and brought out the big gun. He appeared in the form of Power Outage. He was definitely desperate. As soon as it happened, I knew I was finished, and I pounded my desk in frustration. I only had the energy for self-defeat and that caused me to blame Timing.

“Of course this happened right now. Classic worst Timing as usual.”

Timing caused me to sit and stare at my phone and think back to all the times we lost power in Seattle. I played out the scenario I imagine happened when Jeff Seattle, the designer of the city of Seattle talked with Mike Tacoma, creator of incredibly, Tacoma, about building their cities.

It went something like this. “I know there are a lot of trees here, so we should just let them grow and never cut them down. Also, we should make sure that power lines are always right next to the trees that we must never cut down. We shall never have power outages that last weeks at a time when the wind is blowing really fast. Lucky we live in an area where it never rains, so…”

Somehow, even with all their foresight, we had power outages…a lot. They lasted for days, sometimes weeks at a time. We knew once the power went out, it would be at least a day before we got it back. At the point, I started contemplating what the end of the world would be like. Without power and the internet, our world would go into a full blown panic and we would be done in less than a month.

I looked at my phone and was kicking myself for not charging it when I saw it was at 40%. At the point, my only thoughts weren’t, “How long until we get power back, so I can get back to work.” It was, when will the power be back up, so I can charge my phone. If it doesn’t work soon, I’m going to curl up in a ball and die in a corner.

Power affects everything we do. Computers shut down immediately. TV’s, washers and dryers, refrigerators, and all the appliances we depend on to keep clothes clean, dishes washed, and food to not turn rot and turn into poison, all depend on power. I went home for lunch and tried to open my garage, and realized it ran on power. I was like, dang, that is the way I normally get into the house, because I don’t have a key. If my wife wasn’t home, I wouldn’t have been able to get in.

Luckily, phones work, but only because they run on a battery. But even the best phones only last a day on a charge, and that’s if you aren’t doing crazy amounts of gaming, or looking at Tik Toks. Even 5G shuts down and the internet slows to a crawl. You’re then left with only a bricked phone and only until it runs out of power.

We ended up gettting the power back within a couple of hours, which would have been an all-time record in Seattle. Last night, when I went to bed, I had exactly 12% on my phone. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use it, but I felt this super charge within myself when I knew I was saving the life of the phone by plugging it in to the charger.

It was like I was a Paramedic saving the life of my poor phone that had only 20 minutes to live. I imagined my phone coughing, choking, breathing heavily and reaching its arms toward me and with its last breath saying, “Save me.” I was its last hope. I was the only one that resuscitate it. Without me, it couldn’t browse the internet, play games, check email, or text. It couldn’t even do the least important task that phones are good for, making phone calls.

Why can’t it be that easy to save the life of people? Why do we have such a complicated formula, to bring us back to life, to give us energy, to avoid being drained by other people? Why can’t we just have a USB port on our hands or sides or the back of our heads? Instead, we have to eat the correct forms of food, we have to hydrate, we have to exercise, we have to remember every 5 seconds and we have to sleep. It would be so much easier to get all the energy from fast charger that gets you to 100% in an hour and half.

We spend trillions of dollars every year devoting our time to keeping our power plants and power lines up-to-date and running just so we can watch TV and run our fridges and computers. Why aren’t all our really smart engineers working hard on such a simple thing as creating a charger for ME, so I don’t have to concentrate on eating and drinking things and sleeping, which are such a waste of my time.

I want all the EMT’s to have a simple solution for people that come to the ER. “This guy came in because his battery level is at 11%! Get him to a charger…STAT!” Then they plug me in on a fast charger, and they release me with a bill for $.02 for the electricity it took to charge me, (+$100.00 for the typical 1000% medical upcharge for everything) and I literally walk out at 100% energy.

Instead, we’re out here trying to do other big things like going to Mars, finding energy to charge our houses and such, but forgetting that people are still dying every day. All those things we are building in the world kind of useless when we are dead, you know? Just saying.

I think I’ll float this idea to my friend Elon Musk. He seems to know stuff about batteries and chargers and how they work with cars. Plus, he has some money. I think the combination of him with his money and resources and me and my tiny idea will do big things.

In the meantime, go ahead and watch these Bitter Friday Giftures, if you have the energy for it. I’m already at only 50%, so forgive me if I can’t complete the post…

Yesterday, I was actually in the middle…

When all of a sudden…

The first thing I did…

When I saw the power on the phone at only 40%…

And I imagined the conversation between Jeff Seattle…

They talked about preserving all the trees…

And they were like…

It’s not like people…

I felt like I had the unlimited power of saving the life of my phone…

And then I thought…

Neo proved that we could plug into the Matrix…

So we should at least be able to…

ARRRGGHHHHHH

Bitter Plug in Charging Ben