HEMP of Another Variety

The other day, I was just thinking how wonderful it is to work at home.

"How wonderful it is", said a little voice in my head, "to be able to work at home".

Invariably, whenever I meditate upon life's goodness, whenever I hear a little voice in my head enumerating my various and sundry blessings, there's always another, different voice coming from another corner of my mind that tends to play The Devil's Advocate.

"Yeah, working at home's fantastic", said the other voice, sounding a bit like Jack Nicholson, "just as long as your power doesn't go out." This, of course, is the Voice of Anxiety, which always plays like Jack Nicholson in my head.

"Power, schmower", interjected another voice, this time with a distinctly Christopher Walken-esque quality. "One high-altitude electromagnetic pulse and that's it for your little work-at-home gig, my friend. Fried. Kaput, end of story. It's back to the nineteenth century for you, reading your books by candlelight."

This second voice I've come to recognize, over the years, as the Voice of The Worst-Case Scenario.

As you can tell, my mind likes to hold conversations discussing my irrational fears and possible dangerous future events over which I have no control. Welcome to my neuroses.

Neurotic or not, the Walken-voice's claim does have the Ring of Truth to it. My job as a workshifter (is that even the correct usage of the term?) is totally and completely dependent upon a collection of delicate, low-voltage electronics: my laptop, printer, wireless gateway, cable modem, phone and headset. And I'm not even counting the Ethernet cabling running from my gateway to the cable modem, and the coaxial cable beyond that. And beyond that, the Big Enchilada that is the vulnerable civilian infrastructure: the power grid.

Some brainiacs at the EMP Commission (http://www.empcommission.org), Dr. William Radasky and Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, recently wrote an article for The Space Review, essentially a rebuttal to an earlier article by Yousaf M. Butt, "The EMP Threat: Fact, Fiction, and Response".

I scanned through the article and tried to understand as best I could. After reading scientific or technical pieces like that, a voice in my brain that sounds like "Ted 'Theodore' Logan" in "Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure" (my all-time favorite Keanu Reeves movie) always grabs the microphone, attempting to summarize.

"So, like, the EMP dudes were like 'Whoa…EMP is totally gnarly, bro.' And then this Yousef dude's all, 'Chillax, bro…EMP's lame.' And then the EMP dudes are all, 'No way, bro…"

Suffice to say, Radasky and Pry say that EMP is bad and our power grid's vulnerable. Here, you go read it.

So, what's a wary, worried workshifter to do? A frantic Google Search of "emp shielding" yielded some results mentioning a device called a "Faraday Cage".

I'm intrigued.

A Faraday cage is an enclosure constructed of some conductive material, typically metal mesh, that blocks out external static electrical fields. Wikipedia says this: "In 1836, Michael Faraday observed that the charge on a charged conductor resided only on its exterior and had no influence on anything enclosed within it. To demonstrate this fact, he built a room coated with metal foil and allowed high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator to strike the outside of the room. He used an electroscope to show that there was no electric charge present on the inside of the room's walls."

So now, all I have to do is find – or build – a mesh enclosure big enough to hold me and my laptop.

"Great. You'll look like a gargantuan parrot in a bird cage," comes yet another voice, low and grave, sounding very much like Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborn in "Spider-Man"; this is the mocking Voice of Self-Loathing. "And as soon as you shut the enclosure door, your wireless is gonna stop working, genius".

I'll show him, I thought; if a car can withstand a 600,000 volt simulated lightning strike, EMP is no big deal. I'll just bring my laptop and headset outside and sit in my 1997 Nissan Altima! Wireless internet reception AND protection from EMP.

I'll just have to get used to saying, "How wonderful it is to work out of my car!"