The Sonic Reducer

Two things aggravate me when I go to a concert – whoo girls and cell  phones.

One of them you can’t do anything about. I mean, what would a concert be without women? So, I embarked upon figuring out a solution to the second.

Now, you can’t just open your own bar and disallow cell phones. Can you? Is it a right to have a cell phone nowadays? Probably, knowing the way folks love to change what the founders of this country had in mind. Which, by the way, didn’t include cell phones. Or the internet. Or fucking women voting even.

So, changes to the almighty document should be made.

That’s when I started by banning of cell phones legislation. It didn’t get very far. Seems people really love their cell phones and won’t part with them. I actually miss pay phones. Not so much the paying part, but the fact that you could be in the middle of nowhere and call someone. Of course, if you transported the world back to that time, no one would know anyone’s number anymore.

We are getting dumber.

And dumber.

I set my sights on something better. If you can’t ban them or get rid of them, how about just destroying them?

In my best Stewie Griffin mindset I started to plot. There must be a way to broadcast a simple little signal to a cell phone that will simply destroy it. It had to be possible.

At first, I set about just finding a way to transmit a signal to a phone that I didn’t know a number for. This proved to be pretty easy, way too easy it seemed. I could have been just trying to tap into phones and done it. I guess the cell phone companies just don’t want anyone to know just how easy it is.

After that, I found I could get a phone to beep with my new technology.

Being I had a degree in journalism and one in economics, engineering was not my strong suit. So, many hours were spent in the library. First in downtown, then at the local college. Soon, I was hanging out at a local pub where the engineering professors and students hung out. It was an odd place. A bar just full of engineers and engineering students. Not a lot of focus on fucking there. Or is that just a stereotype and I wasn’t trying to get laid either, so it had no bearing on what I was doing.

After visiting this pub, called “Dogs-n-Suds” for some reason, a few times, I befriended John Stamos. No, not the actor, but that would have been pretty cool but not really on point for my mission, but instead a professor of engineering at the university. He was once employed by Verizon, and knew quite a bit about cell phones. Soon, we were drunk and talking about a device that could destroy cell phones at the push of a button. We dubbed it the “Sonic Reducer” for the Dead Boys’ song. We would play that song over and over on the internet jukebox while plotting our invention.

I decided early on to get his trust by talking small talk.

“Where are you from, John?” I asked after a couple of brews.

“Kennett, Mo., the hometown of Sheryl Crow,” he boldly boasted.

“Really now?” I said, acting like I was interested.

“Yes. I knew her in high school.  She wasn’t very pretty then. Or very popular. So, we got along.”

“Did you ever go on a date with her?”

“Ha. Never. I was too scared of any woman at that time in my life. But I did watch her eat at the Grecian once,” he said.

“Sounds fascinating.”

“Anyone from your hometown?”

“Seka. The porn star,” I said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, my god! I loved Seka when I was a kid.”

“Who didn’t that is our age?”

“You got that right.”

“Now, back on point, John. Do you think there is  a way to do this little scheme of mine?”

“What? The cell phone thing?”

“Yeah man, the Sonic Reducer!” I felt my own excitement. It was a bit much.

“Of course. But we’d need some serious cash to figure it all out.”

“You get research grants, right?”

“Um, yeah. But I don’t see that being something they’d approve me for.”

“No. You’d call it something else. Like the annoyance reducer or a cell phone reduction project to keep folks from using it when they drive.”

“Now…That might just work.”

“You see, John? We make a great team. Let’s get this thing started…”

Three years later. We had a prototype. Three years of concerts with everyone filming the band. Filming themselves hugging or kissing or duckfacing. But now we were ready to try it out in the wild.