Crap.

You’ve been walking around on carpeted flooring, gathering up electrons. You haven’t discharged your static in a very long while. Now the air is crackling with anticipation and your hair is frizzling and clinging to your arms. You know very well that the next metal thing you touch will greet you with a painful electrostatic shock.

Crap.

Is there any way out of this dreadful purgatory? Can you just avoid conductive materials for the rest of the day? For the rest of your life? You’ve got to face it somehow. Is there any way you can just discharge your excess charge slowly, throttling the amperage? You’d need something like a resistor. Who the hell carries around resistors in her pockets? Okay, what else could you use? You would do the research, but for that you’d need to touch your phone or your computer, and you don’t trust either of them.

What if you found someone you really disliked, and maybe it’s worth taking her down with you?

“Hey Janet, hold my hand for a minute, will you?”

“Why?”

“No reason,” you say as your other hand closes around the doorknob.

Crap.

No, you are a grown woman and you’re not going to worry any more about discharge. It’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid. You are just going to casually brush your arm by the railing or grip the door handle or settle down with your laptop, and if there’s an electrostatic shock, so be it. That’s life. Life is but a constant series of electrostatic shocks.

You touch the doorknob with a tentative finger.

You feel nothing at all.

That’s funny.