The latest excuse-slash-label-slash-diagnosis for why we are so tired and can hardly bear to see anyone is the concept of the Social Battery. Its level of charge is being posited as reason why we are sometimes extroverts and sometimes we feel as though we need to lie in a darkened room for a week.
Within this, we need to recognise the big drainers. Sometimes we plan to plug enthusiastically into a party but the effort of getting dressed left us at 0.1% and so we spent the whole evening in low battery mode. Then we woke up worried about having been BORING. Or we find that we can’t remember anything about the evening. Not because of tequila – well not often – but because we zoned out and just thought about colours.
Imagine if you could walk around with a social battery power pack. Like a portable charger. Which got us thinking about all the batteries we have known. And we have known a few. Maybe it would be like a…
Car Battery
It being the dawning of this idea, we start with a brick battery just as someone started with the massive brick mobile car phone. Maybe this social battery is attached to a car I order to keep it and us running. Maybe it’s like a battery colostomy bag. Maybe it’s huge and unwieldy and only to be brought out in incredibly challenging situations, like any meeting with HR or when someone says ‘we need to talk.’ Or dinner with your most competitive Whatsapp group that you were too scared to cancel.
Tiny, sinister silver disc ones
We have to be honest. They scare us. You know, the tiny ones, like the ones you used to put in your Donkey Kong, that are so fiddly and flippy, rolling off across the floor, sending everyone INTO A BLIND PANIC because, if ingested, they are the deadliest things known to man. So deadly. Dissolve internal organs. Explode intestines. Almost certainly nuclear active in some way. It’s always a disappointment when you open up the plastic flap on a thing and realise that these are demands rather than a nice, friendly AAA. But maybe the tie silver discs would be just the thing for social battery leakage. Obviously we worry about social battery leakage. And all leakage. So we could tuck these into our bras – like those Apple Tag things. But that would be MAD. Because death.
Pound Shop Batteries
We’ve all gone to the pound shop, got over-excited and bought loads of batteries called Diracell, thinking we’ve saved ourselves a fortune: they last for about a minute. And we’ve all played battery roulette with these batteries, where it is imperative that you keep the new ones and the old ones separate. You become borderline hysterical screaming to ‘keep them separate’ and then you look away for one small second and can no longer remember which batteries were full and which were empty. The drawer of death is full of such batteries: no one no one knows if they are working or not working. And no-one has the logical skills to test them in appropriate rotation and work it out.
The Random Cable
Forget a battery pack – what about a random cable that we just boldly plug into any socket if we need it. Or another person. Imagine being so ballsy that you just turn up and plug yourself in to another person to suck out some of their battery. Share you bastards. You just said you sleep like a baby. Well, this is the price you pay. BIG CABLE ENERGY. This suddenly feels like a dystopian drama. But so does the world at the moment.
