Tooch, Solder and I were undertaking a monumental task in our college engineering education: Trying to make an orange LED light. Not for the faint of heart. For those not inclined towards electronic circuits, LEDs are those little lights that can be found in just about anything: Dashboards, clocks, pacemakers, cat alarms, etc. In order to make one light up, you basically just need to run some current through it and a resistor. This is the most basic of circuits, and yet we could still make a flame.

After we constructed the massive two component circuit, we cautiously turned on the variable power supply and gingerly started cranking up the voltage. Completely unexpectedly, the LED started getting brighter, and we all did fist-pumps-of-manliness at our newest nerdy conquest.

Of course, being proper males, we were not content with just making a little LED light up. Tooch said something offhand like "We should turn up the voltage and see what happens", to which I responded "Yeah dude! Fucking crank it!".

As Solder let out a very melodramatic "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!", I reached out and twisted the power supply knob to 24 volts. The LED got brighter. Then brighter. Then more brighter still. Then it turned white. Then the resistor and LED simultaneously started smoking, releasing gas into the air that can only be classified as "Not Good".

After the laughter died roughly seven hours later (did I mention we're nerds?), we were able to reconstruct the circuit so that our professor could give us a thumbs up, along with a nice shaking of his head at the immaturity of twenty-something year-old undergrads. Ah, college life.

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