Invisible Ink

What's the difference between a psychologist and a magician?
A psychologist pulls habits out of rats!

One Christmas, or birthday, I picked up a rectangular package and ripped off the paper with a reckless abandon found rarely on this side of 8 years old. Under the paper was a home science kit. You cannot imagine how excited I was. Visions of robot armies and mutant pets marched through my mind. Seeing the look on my face, I'm sure my parents had dreams of their little boy growing into a doctor or a famous scientist. You'd think they might have known better by then.

My kit did not, much to my chagrin, contain everything I needed to grow monsters or terrify the masses. It did have what I needed to make a crystal radio. That was pretty cool. Most important, it had everything I might need to make invisible ink. My mind was blown.

I could write something that no one could read... unless of course they also had a Dixie cup full of the secret solution required to make the words legible (well, visible anyway... many would argue that no tonic exists that could ever render my handwriting legible). I had the ability to send secret messages! How cool is that?!?! Unfortunately for Kyle (age 8) no one in the house could quite manage to be interested in secret messages for more than a few minutes at a time. Also, it is difficult to run a guerrilla war against the establishment, when the only folks who are available to communicate via secret invisible ink are, themselves, a member of said establishment. Nonetheless, for a brief period of my childhood, I had the power to write what no one else could read.

Fast forward a decade or two. The scene opens with what passes for grown-up Kyle in a meeting. He has just suggested a solution to a problem. Knowing Kyle as we do, we can only assume this solution is brilliant. It is probably based in solid research, and it is most likely perfectly suited to the situation. The person who has the problem, and is the reason for Kyle's consultation, responds with something akin to, "No, that won't work. I think we should do something that requires no effort on my part, and puts my problem in the hands of other people."

At this point Kyle thinks about the 6-12 hours he has spent over the past week gathering data and developing a solution. After blinking twice he looks at his notepad and writes something that her certainly ought not to write anywhere it can be read by polite society. Fortunately, he had clicked his pen shut the moment before. Invisible ink has been rediscovered! Once again, the joy of writing something that no one else (without a Dixie cup full of magic liquid) will ever be able to read.

Since that rediscovery, I can often be found in meetings taking furious notes. My supervisors co-workers have the impression that I am a whirlwind of thought, solving problems left and right. Little do they realize that as soon as I find some other revolutionaries, the guerrilla resistance will be in full swing.

What's next? I'll talk to Mike about getting resources together for a robot army. It'd be nice if we could make them all look like Rosie from The Jetsons.