Meet Nate Pruitt, which is me, so I asked myself the same six questions

Fifth of seven, and this is the awkward one. The interviewer in this series is me, and this week the person in the chair is also me, so I did the only honest thing available: I wrote the six questions out on a card the way I ask them, put the card on the kitchen table, and answered them. Milo supplied one of them and it is the best one.

For anybody new: Ohmsville is a town we made up. The electronics kit in it is real — a board with rows of springs screwed to it, a drawer of parts, and a manual of projects you build by pushing wires between springs. Seven invented people narrate this site. I am the one who writes in the first person, and I am the one who is allowed to be wrong in public, which I will be before the end of this.

The question: how did you get here?

I was born here in 1974 and I left the way everybody leaves. Then I came back at fifty-two with a nine-year-old and a moving van, which makes me the only one of the seven whose arrival is a return. I write software for a living. That means I use electronics every hour I am awake and have never once been shown the inside of any of it, which I did not find embarrassing until I tried to explain a battery to my son.

The question: the manual you keep under the counter.

Timing & Control, the second booklet. I had the two-hundred-project kit with the plastic base when I was nine, and the thing I built out of it was the two-transistor blinker — two lights that hand off to each other, on, off, on, off, forever, with nobody touching anything. A transistor, if you have not met one: a part where a very small current controls a much larger one, which is how anything electronic ever decides to do something. Pair two of them up with two capacitors — parts that fill up with charge like a very small bucket and take a measurable moment to do it — and the pace of the blink is just how long each bucket takes to fill. That booklet is exactly that, laid out properly. I felt like a genius for a week at nine. Then the arcade got interesting and I put the lid down for forty years.

The question: a mission?

Mission Control. Five circuits stand between you and a launch, and they go in order, and there is a countdown at the end of them. I am the wrong person to pretend I chose it for a subtle reason. I chose it because it has an ending, and because a nine-year-old will do five things in a row for an ending and will not do five things in a row for a curriculum.

The question: the build you would hand a stranger.

The beam. A battery, a slide switch, a bulb, and nothing else in the loop — that is a flashlight, the entire thing, with the switch playing the part of the thumb tumbler. Push the switch across and nine volts crosses the filament; push it back and every one of those milliamps stops at once. I handed Milo the kit on a Saturday morning, went to make coffee, came back, and he had the lid up and had not asked me anything. He did that switch about thirty times.

The question Milo wrote: what did you get wrong?

The first thing that did not work was mine, not his. I had put a wire on the wrong spring the night before, sat there certain the bulb was dead, and was about ten minutes from throwing it out. Then somebody on the strip told me which spring. That is the actual reason we stayed in this town, and it is why I keep saying in these posts that I do not know things — being wrong out loud is cheap, and being wrong quietly costs you a bulb you did not need to replace.

The question: why do you write these?

Because there is a projector on Milo's Saturday table now. I wrote an engineering report on the Kinetoscope as a student, handed it in, and left it in a box for thirty years; I found the box when we moved back. Everything I do here is that, basically — opening a box late.

---

I am a character too. The stories are ours. My page is Nate Pruitt, and the street I grew up on is the town of Ohmsville.

Next week: June Marchetti, who is allowed to let a six-year-old hold a part.