The legend of Shorty......

Good Evening all, and thank you for stopping by. Pull up a chair and relax while I fix you all a mint julep. ( :-D ) After that you can read this post and hopefully have a good chuckle at Shorty's expense. Believe me when I say that He won't mind, since He passed away many years ago.
This story takes place in rural Alabama in the late nineteen thirties or early nineteen forties. It was toward the end of the depression years, or maybe immediately after the depression. TVA ( Tennessee valley authority ) had been started by FDR as one of the measures to stop the depression and put people to work and was beginning to supply electricity to the rural areas where it hadn't been available before. Ok..The history lesson over let me get on to Shorty. Shorty was, at the time that this took place, past middle age. When TVA began to put poles in the ground and run wire on them to carry the electricity they started contacting people to offer electric service When Shorty was contacted he adamantly refused. He didn't like the idea of that kind of change and didn't trust anything the government had a part in. That was a common sentiment at the time nationwide. Anyway...Back to Shorty. After a while though, after visiting some neighbors that had tied into the electrical service and listening to his wife, He decided to try it out. After finding out how much it cost he again refused. Finally though, he came up with a brilliant idea. He'd watched the men as they handled the wire and had seen how they'd tied it all together. His idea was, if they could do it so could he. That was probably the worst idea he'd ever had. Shorty didn't want outlets, didn't see a need for them, so he ran the wire for overhead lights. After completing that task He ran a wire from his house all the way to the closest power pole. Yep, you guessed it. Up the pole Shorty shimmied till he came to the closest wire to which he attached one of his two wires. No problem so far. Down the pole he shimmied, back to the ground, whereupon he commenced to hook up the ground wire to the grounding rod. That, my friends, is where the fireworks began. What Shorty didn't know was that a transformer was required. He'd just hooked up his sixty watt lights to seven thousand volts. You read right. Seven thousand volts. A bit too much when one hundred and ten volts are what is required, huh? Shorty stood and watched all of the wire he'd just put in spark and fizzle till it burned completely into. He was fortunate in two ways though. First, he'd hooked up the ground last. If he'd hooked it up first he'd have been fried at the top of the pole. Second, the wire in his house burned up before catching his house on fire. Bless Shorty's heart. Shorty lived until the early nineteen sixties, having never gotten over his anger at the power company and having never had electricity in his house. From that point on he just didn't trust electricity. After his death though, his wife did have the house wired and properly tied in. She enjoyed having the convenience of electrical power till her death in the early nineteen seventies. Nineteen seventy one I believe it was. The moral of this story is......Well, I don't know what the moral of this story is so I'll let you pick out your own. ..........And so it went..........