My compulsion to think of the social needs of patients probably stems from watching too many episodes of Marcus Welby, MD as a youngster. Would you like to meet the patient who cured me of this compulsion?

First, a preface to make this story understandable. Years ago, I noticed that the brass-colored prongs on electrical outlet plugs eventually become tarnished. I wondered if this tarnish would increase the contact resistance of the plug and thus waste energy (whenever electrical current passes through a resistor, energy is wasted). I performed some measurements and determined that this waste does indeed occur; the worst plug I tested was wasting 25% of the energy being supplied to that device. Aren’t you appalled? Well, I was. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I made a device to quickly remove the tarnish from plugs, giving it the rather unimaginative name of EPC (for electrical plug cleaner).

It worked, but I wasn’t done yet. I wanted to sell them. Taking a cue from the mavens of marketing, I decided to copy their brilliant strategies of persuasion and incorporate a surefire means of drawing the attention of men to my advertisements:  include a beautiful woman in the ad. (It may seem sexist of me to say this, but I thought that men were more likely than women to spend countless sleepless nights worrying about electrical contact resistance.)

Besides being an inventor, I’m also something of a cheapskate. Consequently, I wasn’t going to pay a lot of money for a professional model to pose with my EPC. The apparent solution to this dilemma popped into my mind while speaking with a beautiful patient on welfare who was in obvious need of money. I offered her $100 if she would smile and hold the EPC while I took her picture. I wasn’t sure if Marcus Welby would approve, but I thought I’d be able to help her out and save some money in the process. She seemed befuddled by the request and didn’t give me a straight answer, so I assumed she wasn’t interested and let the matter drop.

A few weeks later my boss called, saying that someone in administration had fielded a call from her highly irate mother who lived 1000 miles away. The two women had somehow concluded that I wanted her to pose nude while holding the EPC. This was such a non sequitur that I wondered if they were hopelessly stupid, or just trying to extort some money from a well-intentioned but naive inventor. Posing nude with an EPC? Oh, wouldn’t newspapers just love an ad like that? I may be as horny as the next man but I don’t have a sick mind. Until those two fruitcakes mentioned it, the thought of posing nude with an EPC never occurred to me. Thanks for the education, ladies.

You know what they say: "No good deed goes unpunished."

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