I recently posted a story about where I ended up doing the right thing in the end. I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about me, so now I’ll post one where I didn’t listen to the little angel on my shoulder. As a matter of fact, I don’t even remember the angel even showing up for this one.

It was December 25th 1980-something and I got a Walkman for Christmas. Remember those? I went everywhere with that thing strapped to my side, listening to ZZ top, The Cars, and Bon Jovi cassettes among others. There was an added feature on this particular model of Walkman that you didn’t see on a lot of the other ones. It had a little switch on it where you could enable a microphone that piped the ambient audio around you to the headphones instead of the music on the tape. This was convenient, because if anyone was talking to you while you were listening to music, you could just switch it to the microphone to hear what they were saying. This particular microphone was really sensitive and it would pick up even the faintest of sounds around you.

Skip ahead a couple of years. I don’t remember what I was doing, probably screwing around on my Commodore 64, but an idea about that Walkman suddenly came to me. I’m not going to tell you what that idea was. I’ll let you figure it out as I tell the story of how I made this idea a reality.

In order to start working on this idea I needed to initiate a little covert operation where I could work without any prying eyes around. How did I accomplish this? Why, I faked being sick so I could miss school one day. In my house, just saying you weren’t feeling well was not a good enough excuse to miss school. You had to have corroborating evidence to the fact that you were actually ill. So when I told my Mom that I wasn’t feeling well she promptly stuck one of those old mercury thermometers in my mouth. When she left the room to attend to other morning duties I quickly touched the mouth end of the thermometer to the light bulb of my desktop lamp. I know what you are thinking. You’ve seen this on movies and I am just using that in my story. I swear, I’m not. I’ve used this technique more than once. You have to do it right though. The heat of the light bulb will quickly raise the mercury in the thermometer to a level that indicates that you would no longer be conscious or even breathing. Of course that was no good, but you see, you can shake the mercury back down on the thermometer. It could take some trial and error, as you would sometimes shake it back down so low that you would be room temperature. I had enough experience using this technique by now that it only took me one sharp shake to land that mercury indicator to 101 degrees, plus or minus half a degree.

So when my Mom came back she determined I had a fever and would be allowed to stay at home. My Dad and Mom both worked and my sister would be at school, so this left me alone all day. Phase one of my covert operation was complete. When everyone was gone, I had a miraculous recovery and got out of bed. After downing a few Pop Tarts for breakfast (OMG, have you heard of those new pretzel Pop Tarts? I gotta try those…) I got to work on the technical portion of my operation.

My Dad is an electronics technician (which I eventually also became) and had a small workshop out in the garage of this particular house we were living in at the time. I took my Walkman out there and disassembled it. I located the little round rubber microphone and was able to easily extract it. It was connected to a circuit board by a small length of wire. It was time for phase two of the operation. The Test. I’d never used a soldering iron before but I had watched my Dad use one many times. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a soldering iron is used to connect electronic parts together with the use of electrical conducting solder that flows when it is heated but solidifies when it’s cool. Here, a picture is worth 35 words, which is how many was in that previous sentence. You went back and counted them didn’t you?

With a little trial and error I unsoldered the short wire from the contacts on the circuit board. Then I took a couple feet of wire from my Dad’s supply and soldered that to the circuit board. I ran that wire through the little mesh opening where the microphone had been located that allowed sound into the interior of the Walkman. Then I soldered the end of that wire to the short wire that was still connected to the microphone and put the Walkman back together. I now had a Walkman with a microphone dangling from a two foot wire. I put my headphones on and clicked the switch enabling the microphone. I could hear everything perfectly. The Test was complete! Anybody see where I am going with this yet?

Phase three, Implementation, was about to take place. I unsoldered the short microphone wire from the extended wire. I then took a big long loop of wire from my Dad’s supply. Along with that, I took his drill and a small bit. I went back to my room and into the closet. In one of the back corners of the closet I used the drill to make a small hole in the ceiling, just big enough for the wire to fit through but not big enough to be obvious if one were to casually look that way. I repeated this process somewhere else in the house but I’m not going to tell you quite yet where that was.

With that done, I went back to the garage and lowered the trap door that leads the the attic. Once in the attic I made my way over to above my room closet. This part proved to be the most difficult of the whole operation. I had to move a lot of insulation around but I finally found the hole I had drilled. I was already itching from all that fiberglass on me and it would persist all day even after I showered but it was a small price to pay in order to enact my vision. I unwound the long loop of wire that I had brought back with me and snaked one end of it down through the hole until there was plenty of it hanging in my closet below. I then carefully crossed the rafters of the attic, trailing out a length of wire to another portion of the house and located the second hole. I unwound more wire until I thought I would have more than enough and cut it from the spool. Then I snaked this end of the wire down in the space below.

With the attic crawling portion of the operation complete I went back to my room. I soldered the wire still hanging out of my Walkman to the wire that was hanging from the ceiling. Next, I went to another room in the house and into the closet in that room where the other end of the wire was hanging from the ceiling. I carefully ran this wire along the backside of the closet door frame so it would be out of sight and down to the floor. I then poked it into the seam of the carpet and the wall so that it would also remain out of sight there. Outside of the closet was a stand with a small TV sitting on it. I ran the wire from the carpet up the backside of one of the legs on the stand. I soldered the small wire from the microphone to the wire I had just ran. Then I duct tapped the microphone to the underneath side of the stand. I flipped the TV on saw a rerun of Gilligan’s Island playing. I excitedly ran back to my room, into the closet, and snatched up the headphones to the Walkman that was lying on the shelf. I put the headphones on and got ready for the moment of truth. Clicking the switch to the microphone setting, I clearly heard the voice of the Skipper berating Gilligan for some bonehead thing he had done. That would probably be called Little Buddy shaming in today’s world but I didn’t have time to spare for Gilligan’s troubles. I had just successfully installed a bug in my sister’s room! You all knew that was what I was up to, didn’t you?

I cleaned up all evidence of my espionage and waited impatiently for my sister to get home from school. Soon enough my Mom came rolling up with my sister in tow. My Mom was happy to see I was feeling better. My sister couldn’t care less. She just headed to her room like she always does. That was my cue to head to my own. I went into monitoring central, formally known as my closet, and put on the headphones. I could clearly hear every movement she was making in her room. When she made a call to one of her friends from her bedside table phone, I heard every word of her side of the conversation. The operation was a complete success!

This bug remained in my sister’s room for well over a year. When her friends would come over I would listen in on their conversations. I would invite a few of my close friends to come over and listen as well. To tell you the truth it was mostly boring girl stuff. They talked about how they wished their boobs were bigger and their butts smaller. They talked about makeup and shit like that which really wasn’t that interesting. However, every now and then we would get a bit of juicy gossip about other people at our school and we may have used that to our advantage a time or two.

One night my sister had a few of her friends staying over. I thought I would listen in to see if anything interesting was going on. When I switched on the microphone all I heard was static. Uh oh, I thought. We’ve had an equipment malfunction. That had happened once before when one of my inexperienced solder joints had come lose. I was able to locate the area of the wire and repair it with no problem. However, this time when I inspected my solder joints I did not find anything wrong. My sister was gone somewhere so I went into her room and looked under the TV stand. To my horror all I found was the end of the wire hanging loose with no microphone on the end of it! Well, the jig was up. She must have found it somehow. I waited around all day for the hammer that was surely going to be coming down on me, but when evening came and I had heard nothing from either my sister or my parents, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I walked into my sisters room where she was lying on the bed reading a book. “When did you find it?” I asked her.

“Find what?” she replied.

“You know.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

What kind of game was she playing? Could this be true? “Oh, OK,” I said. I started to leave but I had peaked her curiosity and she wasn’t letting me go that easy.

“Wait! Tell me what you are talking about,” she said.

I thought about making something up but the simple fact was that the microphone was gone so somebody knew about it and it was only a matter of time before it came back on me. I decided to just come clean. “When did you find the bug I put in your room?”

“What bug?”

“I put a bug in your room so I could listen to what was going on in here.”

“No you didn’t. What kind of trick are you trying to play?”

For my reply to this I just opened her closet door and pointed to the wire running down from the ceiling to the TV stand. She was a bit taken aback to say the least. She ran out of the room screaming for my parents. Ah, well at least we can get this over with now.

I heard a bit of heated discussion going on in another part of the house but I decided just to stay where I was. In no time at all my Dad appeared, walked in the room, and closed the door. In his hand was a small object. It was the microphone of course. My Dad went on to explain to me that he had been watching a game of some sort on my sister’s TV the other day when the rest of us had wanted to watch something else on the main TV. He had notice something hanging down under the TV stand. Evidently, the duct tape I had used to affix the microphone had come unstuck, revealing the hidden bug. Dad had ripped it off and was planning on confronting me about it soon. He asked me all about how I had done it and damn it, if I didn’t see what I thought might be a glimmer of admiration in his eyes. At least I hoped that was what I was seeing.

“You know what you did was wrong, right?” he asked me. I nodded my head in agreement. “But,” he said as a grin appeared on his face. “That is one of the coolest things I have ever seen! It’s a wrong cool, but I can’t help but be proud that you pulled it off.”

This is when I realized I was not about to be destroyed. “Your mother wants me to ream you up one side and down the other and ground you until you graduate. I’m only going to ground you for one week and we are going to pretend like I gave you the chewing out of a lifetime, OK?”

One week and just pretending like I got chewed out? Hell yeah, I could get on board with that! So that’s what we did. My sister and mother where not all that happy with my sentence but the judge had spoken. My sister still had doubts that I had even managed to pull it off, so I took the microphone and soldered it back onto the wire in her room. I let her listen to my Walkman in my room and she clearly understood now that it worked perfectly. There was no more listening to her for a while after that, not covertly or overtly, because I had to tear down my monitoring station and my sister did not talk to me for several months after.

So, see, all my stories don’t end with the after school special of me learning a valuable lesson and doing the right thing. Was it wrong? Sure it was. Do I feel guilty about it? Not in the least. It was simply too cool for school.

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