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I have a friend. I’ll call him Gerald because he does not want me to tell you his name is Bob. Gerald is quite a character. He’s very much a typical nerd. You know, thick glasses with tape in the middle, plaid shirts, goes around quoting Einstein to people who haven’t a clue. The usual bit.

So recently I was over at Gerald’s house, and he’s showing me the latest Gerald Inventation (that’s his word, not mine). The new fangled gizmo is a shrink ray, and he’s very excited about it. And when Gerald gets excited about something, things can go horribly wrong. Once, he invented a transporter and was showing me how it worked. He got so worked up about it that he ended up transporting his pet guinea pig across the room, but forgot to set the polarizing flux inhibitor spark plugs or something, and he turned the poor creature inside out. Then it exploded. It was not a fun day to be a guinea pig.

I was a bit trepidacious to say the least to see his latest contraption. It was huge, with wires and metal appendages protruding from every nook and cranny. It was freakishly huge for something that was supposed to make things tiny. It reminded me of one of those low-budget raygun designs from television shows made hundreds of years go like Lost in Space or Dynasty or something. And Gerald was really excited about it. I thought he was going to have an accident in his pants, he was so excited. He was running around, talking real fast, saying really complex technology terms like “VLF propagation” and “Flux Capacitor” and ” Corpuscular radiation”. I laughed at that last term, stating it sounded like some kind of sick porno movie. This managed to get Gerald to stop his diatribe for a moment and look at me with that look he always gives me when I throw out a concept that is foreign to him. Gerald doesn’t get out much with the girls, if you know what I mean.

But the pause is only momentary, and soon he starts going off again about vescular calculations and positronic remembrance nodes, and stuff and the next thing I know he says it’s all ready. Then, him being the epitome of strength and dexterity that he is, he trips over something and falls on the machine. This action has the direct result of pointing the business end of the contraption right at me, and then it goes off!

I see a bright flash of light, and then there’s this blast of nausea that envolopes me like a blob of warm goat snot, and then a feeling that I’m falling, and everything’s spinning, and I get this wave of dizziness, and then I hit something hard. It turns out it’s the floor. For a moment I just laid there, presuming that I had fainted of something, and then there’s this monstrously huge nerd head right smack in my face. And this voice bellows “Schadeboy! Are you okay?!” And I said that I felt like I was going to throw up. Gerald proceeds to explain, in his excited arms-flailing-in-every-direction sort of way that the machine worked, and I had the dubious honor of being the very first shrink-ray test subject - living or dead - and the fact that I was still alive was a fantastic side benefit. But the problem was that I was now only six freakin’ inches tall!

Of course, this small detail seemed to go over Gerald’s head. He was too busy whooping and hollering and giving himself high-fives and missing. After he calmed down a bit, I casually mentioned that despite the novelty of it all, I really wanted to be my normal size again. He mentioned to me that he wasn’t actually exactly sure if he could do that. When I pressed him on the issue, he mentioned that the “sizing circuits had only been calibrated to shrink” and that the “inflatory enulment processor” that he custom ordered from Radio Shack hadn’t arrived yet. I had a few choice words of encouragement for him at this point. He did mention that the silver lining was that I had definitely reached my goal of getting into a smaller size pair of pants.

Gerald assured me that he could get me back to normal size in about a week, just as soon as whatever the hell that part was gets in. In the mean time, I have regular daily duties to attend to. Being that I can’t do my regular day job, I needed to find something help put food on the table. Don’t worry, I got a temp job right away. I’m posing for sports trophies.

Here is a picture of me, taken by my adorable if not highly amused wife, getting lunch ready for BionicleBoy and Radio. Happy HNT, everyone. I expect to be back to normal next week.

For Source images, click here.

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