REAL GENIUS

REAL GENIUS

Now here’s a real genius and I think I know him or at least some of his family.

“SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Savannah police say a homeless man was electrocuted after apparently trying to steal copper from wires on a utility pole.”

There’s a lot of information in this short statement. First of all you have got to wonder why this guy was homeless in the first place. Here in North Alabama companies are fighting for creative and intelligent workers to man our many high tech industries. A man smart enough to recognize copper wire on a utility pole from the ground and strong enough to climb the pole to get to it could get a job if he really wanted one. I would not know copper wire from a good grade of fishing line if it was lying on the ground and I sure couldn’t get up a pole to steal it. Here you have a man that could do both yet he failed to figure out that if it was copper and strung between two poles on the side of a road that it probably had electricity running through it and might be carrying a pretty good bite.

You’ve got to think this joker had a better plan than to just climb the pole with some wire cutters and a spool to wrap his bounty around when he got it cut. I think it is important to find out just what he was thinking as he climbed that pole. Was he watching all the houses along the road that were serviced by the line to see when everyone turned off their lights for the night? Did he think that if the line were not buzzing that it meant there was no power running through it? He had to have some kind of plan. There is a saying made famous by some motivational speaker and writer that man does not fail “because he plans to fail, he fails because he fails to plan.” This poor guy left a page out of his final plan.

The reason I first said I thought I might know this guy or some of his family is because I’ve known some folks that had almost the same results in some of their efforts. I remember an ole boy I went to school with that was in a class by himself when it came to siphoning gasoline from cars to use in his old ’52 Roadmaster Buick. Billy Ray Newby never bought one gallon of gasoline during the three years he was in the 10th grade (Billy Ray turned 16 and got his license in the 9th grade). Billy Ray carried a garden hose and a five gallon bucket in the back seat of that old Buick just for the purpose of stealing gasoline from cars parked overnight in the local hospital parking lot. Billy Ray would wait until everything had quieted down after around 9:00 and would simply take his pick of the cars in the lot to replenish his tank in the old Buick whenever it would run low. Now this was at a time when gas was .30 a gallon so Billy Ray was only getting about a $1.50 a draw. After nearly three years of this and everyone knowing about Billy Ray’s continuing penchant for larceny, the lone police officer that patrolled out little town from 6:00 in the afternoon until midnight decided to take Billy Ray down. After a couple of weeks of foiling Billy Ray’s efforts, which cost Billy Ray two garden hoses and one five gallon bucket, Billy Ray decided it was time to move his operation to another area outside the patrol of Officer Raybon Hulsey. Billy Ray decided that the rock quarry just outside of town was the perfect place since it was only used at night for late night swimming and romantic getaways. The first few nights Billy Ray found a couple of pick-up trucks left by the quarry crew to be good sources for his gasoline needs. After discovering the loss of gasoline was becoming a problem the management started allowing the workers to drive the pick-ups home instead of leaving them at the quarry. This practice led to Billy Ray’s downfall. With all the pick-ups now gone, Billy Ray decided to just take the gasoline from the Caterpillar tractors left at the site. Like the guy on the utility pole, Billy Ray failed to plan or at least think about what he was about to do. Billy Ray got a longer garden hose and stuffed it into the huge tank on the giant piece of equipment. He began sucking the fuel through the hose using all the sucking power he could summons. It took a little longer to get the fuel to his mouth so I guess he did not know what to expect. With one final and huge suck Billy Ray sucked a flood of diesel fuel into his mouth. The fuel filled his mouth, flushed down the front of his shirt, his pants and all over the front part of his body. Before he could pull the hose away from his mouth blisters where covering inside his mouth, his chin and any part of his body the diesel fuel touched.

Billy Ray could not eat or talk for the next three weeks. He will tell you today that he thought the big machines ran on regular gas and had no idea what he was getting into that night so long ago. I guess it takes more than a ‘plan’; it doesn’t hurt to have a little common sense when you embark on a life of crime.