A Faraday Cage and Facebook

I'm sure sometimes I write things just to write them, just to have written something. This blog is the perfect example of that, but more than this blog, I do this on Facebook and YouTube comments. The ease with which I can say something to (potentially) thousands of people really is intoxicating sometimes, and often, what seems like a great thought to immortalize online at the time of thinking, does not prove to be so.

This is no more true than today, when I stood in the elevator at Little Hunter (the restaurant I clean four days a week) and watched the number tick down one floor while holding my breath so that the smell from the bins I was taking down in the lift with me wouldn't make me dry reach my stomach lining onto the lovely polished steel interior. I went from the ground floor (GF) down to the basement – front entrance (BF), and the similar double meaning of both these acronyms was – as it is on most days – glaringly apparent. 'Girl Friend', 'Boy Friend'. This was my idea for a Facebook post:

[photo of the elevator display reading 'BF']
Caption: “Wow this elevator sure is keen LOL! Sori elevator, I dnt swing dat wai LOL JK!”

Not great huh? Pretty fucking TERRIBLE ACTUALLY – even if it was meant to be satirical (for the record, yes, it was, I'm not a 14 year old boy). But now, if you go on my Facebook wall and look at the posts on today, the 30^th of August 2013, you can clearly see that no such post exists. I don't like deleting old posts, as I think it perfectly reasonable that I should have to be held accountable to my former thoughts and ideas, however deranged or idiotic. So how did I manage to dodge this bullet?

One recollection from my time in year 12 physics with Mr Turnbull that has continually puzzled and frustrated me for five years since my graduation, is the Faraday Cage. Apparently, so our wise master taught us, a Faraday Cage is a closed three-dimensional shape (cage), composed of conductive material, that forms an electromagnetic field through which electromagnetic signals cannot pass. The cage doesn't have to be completely solid, just the frame, but it does have to be closed. In our lessons he always used to refer to something like the body of a car being a Faraday Cage, and using this to justify why using a mobile phone in a car is a bad idea – because the EM waves that make up the phone's signal are 'trapped' within the car, thus subjecting you and your passengers to far greater doses of radiation than normal. This never made sense to me cos... like, if the signal can't get out of the car, then how does your phone work at all? Okay sure, I'll accept that the radiation might be greater within the car, but a pretty decent amount of those charged particles have to be able to leave or else the phone's signal would die. Yes, the radio antenna is on the outside, but not the phone... its a phone. Ummmmm... anyway, I passed year 12 physics and did really well ACTUALLY, so there! For those five years I've been content to tell Faraday and his dumb cage to SUCK IT! Ha.

Until now... so while I was in the lift today, safely (although still not happily) breathing bin-air in through my mouth and writing what I at the time was a cutting piece of social satire, my phone lost signal. The elevator, as previously mentioned, has an interior made of polished steel – not a great conductor even, but still okay considering the completeness of the cage. So while I was there, with my half-asleep brain at 6:45am trying to post my photo onto Facebook, something inside me said, “wait, dude, someone is trying to tell you something here.” I was already unsure about what I was posting – I guess just like to post when I wake up – and this little hitch thankfully pushed me over the edge. “Nooooooo Taco, no postey postey, this attempt at satire isssss DUMB!” I closed the window, and when the elevator doors opened, I grabbed the bins, and left without ever having uttered a word to the world of social media.

So thanks, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Thank you Michael Faraday and also to your lovely cage, dumb though it still may be, you have saved me from widespread embarrassment and the shame of less-than-three-likes that draws the piteous stares of wall-scrollers the world over. I felt I should do something to repay you for my five years of disdain and dismissal, so I wrote you this post, and HEY, look at that I even learnt your first name. Good on you.

Peace, Taco.