The Story About the Day the Wire Went Down
This is a story of this past Wednesday morning, when a wire went down on Spencer Street. The wire fell on the road near Ryan’s house, and Charles (who lives across from Ryan) threw some warning flags made from a torn up white T-shirt on top of the wire so that people walking down the street would be forewarned in case it was dangerous.
This is a story of people on Spencer Street feeling unsure about what kind of wire this was. Even though the wire wasn’t shooting out dangerous sparks, some of us were nonetheless concerned that it might be a power line that was just taking a nap. None of us were prepared to say, “I’ll be the one to go touch the wire to see if it’s live!”
Though this wire was of concern to all of us on Spencer Street, it didn’t belong to any of us per se. No one has been made the official Wire Warden. So we were all happy and a bit relieved when Ryan took on the job of getting in touch with the power company. The power company felt the wire most likely belonged to the cable company, which in fact, it did.1 Which meant Ryan (our hero) had to then call the cable company, which he did, and the cable company said they’d come out some time in the next two or three hours, which they did.
This story is not high drama. Netflix will not be making a miniseries out of it any time soon. But the Spencer Street group text was abuzz all day. Ryan gave us progress reports, and the rest of us replied, Thank you! We appreciate you! We were doing a lot of heart emojis. We were all just so happy that someone who wasn’t us had stepped up and said, I’ll handle this.2
I know, I know. This really isn’t much of a story at all. A wire went down, the wire got put back up. The End.
Except that it’s not the end. It’s not the end because the flags are still there.
When the cable company came and restrung the wire, the workers left Charles’ white tee shirt flags on the line (see above photo). Which means we’ll see those flags every day until the weather finally reduces them to scraps and then to nothingness. This could take years. For now, the flags will serve as a memorial to a Wednesday in mid-May that we collectively spent worrying about getting electrocuted by a wire that was pretty clearly not going to hurt anyone.
These flags also commemorate the day that Ryan was our hero and Charles was our St. Christopher, protecting all who traveled along the pilgrim road. There’s a kernel of something grand in the spirit of their actions, if not actually in the action of their actions.
Who knows how this story might grow and change over the years. Maybe the cable wire will become a power line, writhing across the asphalt, flames coming out of its mouth and nostrils like some mythic dragon-snake. In future retellings, Ryan will ride off on his powerful black steed to demand that the king send out his men, while Charles battles the dragon snake with only a white flag for a weapon. This story might become so epic over the years that Netflix will beg us for the rights.
Even if it stays an everyday story where really not much happened, there will still come a time when the neighbors are gathered together and someone will say, “I saw a squirrel chewing on those tee shirts up on the wire.”
Then someone else will say, “I can’t believe those shirts are still up there! I wonder how many people turned around when they saw them, thinking we had a live wire on the road?”
“I saw that wire from down the street,” one of us will recall. “At first I thought it was the world’s longest black snake! It wasn’t until I saw those white flags that I realized it was a wire of some sort.”
Then Charles’ wife, Janie, will say, “Charles ought to take those raggedy things down!”
But we won’t let Charles take the flags down. We won’t let anybody take those flags down. Because they’re our flags, and this our story, one that we made together just by being neighbors.
To its credit, they sent out a guy pretty quickly to check out the situation, just in case this was a power line.
Anyone who has any experience calling power companies and cable companies knows it can be onerous work trying to report a problem. You spend a lot of time suffering through canned easy listening music punctuated every two minutes by a canned computerized voice thanking you for your patience and then indulging in a little sales talk as long as they’ve got you on the line. It’s this interruption that makes it almost impossible to get any work done while you’re waiting to talk to a real live human being. Sometimes you’re giving the option of reporting your problem to a computer, but that can be a long, drawn out process, because as a human, your way of communicating is via storytelling and those dulcet-toned AI listeners just want the facts, ma’am. Of course, with ChatGPT4o, our computers will listen to us in all of our human glory and respond intelligently and with deep compassion, and it will be creepy as all get out, but then we’ll get used to it and come to prefer it, and this is why, ultimately, we are doomed.