The marvels of technology

As people go, I'm quite good at hoarding the most ridiculous pieces of junk ever seen by man.* One of them, however, has become rather a favourite of mine. In essence, it is an ancient static electricity generator. By pumping the handle on it as hard and fast as you can, you are supposed to be able to generate a very pleasing spark between two pieces of wire quite close to each other. For reasons unknown, it no longer works, but for reasons even less known you can still get a fair zap out of a strange and presumably meaningless piece of protruding metal that I swear wasn't there before. It will quite happily give a mild jolt to anything vaguely conductive which, to my not-entirely-pleasant surprise, includes me. With a bit of hard work I found that I could create a most satisfactory arc between the metal and my finger, albeit quite painful on my part. Although it's all very well being able to charge yourself up from time to time, I wouldn't recommend it. Not of course, that everyone has a pump-handle-spark 'n' shock-generator. * Or woman, for that matter.