Neanderpundit

Is a twistlock receptacle and plug. Store this information, there will be a test. No, wait, just remember how it works. You push the plug in, and twist it to lock it in position.

When I was about nine, my cousin lived about a block from a big restaurant and banquet hall. It had been closed for ages, the original owner had put in positive acres of glass and it was probably impossible to keep warm or cool in season.

On the other hand, it had a HUGE concrete parking lot. Smooth as glass and very clean. Boringly clean, actually.

My cousin and I garbagepicked a go-kart with a bad engine. We messed with it but never could get the engine to run. Cousin had a motor, though, off a well pump. An electric motor, torquey and fast, compared to a gas engine.

So we tunneled through the trash and found some bolts and a halfway decent V belt, and we were in like flint.

Of course one person had to hold the extension cord up to keep it from getting run over, but it was a hoot. There was no accel, it was just a switch, and we had begun to tear up the yard when my aunt came out and told us to stop.

So we pushed the electric cart over to the abandoned restaurant and checked around for a plug. There was one, but it was a twistlock, and we just had a straight plug. I think the owners had put in a twistlock just to avoid the kind of shit we were trying to do.

I had about six bucks in paper and silver in my pants, so we walked to the hardware store and got the right plug, sliced the end of the extension cord (The other end was already hardwired into the switch screwed to the go-cart) and wired on the twistlock.

It was like flying string-bound model aircraft; we took turns standing in the middle and holding the cord in the air while the other person drove around in circles and did figure 8s.

Finally we got the idea that we could drag it. Neither of us had anything like a stopwatch so we dropped a shop rag, you started when the other dropped the rag from as high as he could reach and stopped when it hit the ground, and whoever went the furthest won. We must have done this twelve times when it started getting breezy; I thought, here’s my advantage, as the rag drifted sideways some distance and hadn’t approached the ground yet, and I was gaining ground.

Until the extension cord ran out. I was booking right along, and the cord, twisted into the twist lock socket, stopped me like a hammer, and the steering wheel tried to merge my kidneys, spleen and liver into one pulpy mass. A brief moment later, the twistlock plug, dislodged violently from the socket, clocked me square in the back of the head.

The fun had been permanently removed from my afternoon, and I staggered back to the Aunt’s house to rub the knot on my head and nurse my bruised kidliverleen. I spent the rest of the weekend reading back issues of GRIT and eating watermelon, and the bruise on my stomach turned purple then green, and made me look like I was a steer off the Lazy C ranch.