By BILLY MURPHY
Laugh Lines

Have you ever realized how many batteries per person in the United States there are?

I was at my daughter Olivia's Christmas program the other night and as I looked around at all the other videotaping parents I realized that each family represented at least five battery-operated devices in their possession. At the minimum there was probably a video camera, a still camera, a cell phone and a pager per family. Now add to that two watches, pocketbook flashlights, keyless car entries and if they are like me, a set of night vision goggles and a laser. This was just at this event. Imagine tallying the amount of batteries that are in a person's life.

About a week before this event, my wife came up with this idea for an article while we were talking on the telephone. She also had some great other thoughts but I didn't record them because our cordless phone died in the middle of the conversation. Can you imagine where you would be if every battery in your life died at the same time?

Besides living life like you were in Alabama, you would be in for some serious frustration. The car wouldn't crank, but that is good 'cause you'd have to stay close at home to get any calls anyway. Can you imagine actually having to stay within a 6- or 8-foot range of the telephone while you talked? The twisty cord knocking over dishes and glasses as you paced nervously, not knowing what to do with 300 pounds of useless plastic and wire gadgets that now lay idle. The kids are crying, dad is mad because he has to get up to change the channel, and you just bounced $2,100 in checks because you forget to carry the 9.

The shear differences in batteries are daunting, too. They are flat, round, square or tubular. They are silver, copper, platinum and lead. Sizes range from smaller than a dime to bigger than a bread basket. We are most familiar with sizes AAA through D because these are the ones we most often get wrong Christmas morning. You've had that one special toy for your son for six months, waiting on this day and you find yourself screaming. “What? Size C?! I thought it said D!”

And whatever happened to battery sizes single A and anything B? I think maybe their schematics were on somebody's laptop between Los Angeles and New York and the guy forgot to recharge. They just skipped right over those guys. And is it just me or is it suspicious that battery sizes are very similar to bra sizes? You could have Pamela Anderson pitching D Energizers and Tara Lipinski pitching the Triple A Duracells. Al Roker could be moving the C-sized Ray-O-Vacs.

Of course, the king of the batteries is the rechargeable. Just plop your electric shaver in its stand, take that baby on a trip a thousand miles away and realize an hour before the most important meeting of your life that you didn't have the charger plugged in — foolproof. I particularly have a love for the aforementioned video camera battery. You can charge this thing for a month and it will still run out at the exact moment your son hits his first homerun.

It is Murphy's Law, the chemical-electronic version. You can complain to the place you bought it, but they always say, “It just gets a ghost charge to it, you have to totally let it discharge” If you're like me, you want to say, “Yeah, you mean like 15 minutes into every time I use the thing? When the camera cuts off and light goes out, how do I discharge it more than that?” Am I supposed to go to my local mortuary and sneak it into some dead guy's pants?

And as my wife Julie pointed out to me, why is it the older you get, the smaller the battery? Kids in preschool are playing with the toys that take the big clunky cells (I guess so they can't take them out and eat them) and the elderly have the pacemakers and hearing aids with the BB-sized batteries that are oh-so easy to handle with a good set of cataract eyes and a bad case of arthritis.

Ah, batteries, pour on the juice.

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