Short Circuit

There has been an electrical outlet on the fritz in my kitchen. So today, being the expert electrician I am, I decided I would pull it out of the wall to see if anything terribly obvious presented itself -- you know, loose connections, burnt wires, rodent teeth marks, etc. With the cost just to get an electrician in the door, I figured it was worth risking electrocution to save $60.

Before pulling the socket out of the wall, I remembered I needed to head to the circuit box. The circuit breakers in our house were painstaking labeled by an alcoholic dyslexic over 20 years ago. The penciled lettering has faded substantially over the years, making the illegible handwriting even more cryptic. I had started to remap the switches a few years ago so that when I flipped the switch marked "master bdrm" I would know the lights in the kitchen would go off. Of course, I subsequently lost my magic decoder leaving me to throw random switches any time I needed to turn the power off somewhere in the house.

Trying to turn the power off to a specific area is not a one-person job. You really need two people -- one to throw the switches and another to stand watch in another room and yell "wrong one!" Alas, I was on my own today, flipping switches, wandering through the house, trying to figure out what had just gone off.

After ten minutes of this futility, I finally got the right switch thrown. But not before I had managed to turn off every other circuit in the house. Every clock in the house now flashed 12:00 am. With a bit of forethought, I should have done this exercise at exactly midnight. That would have saved me so much effort. Better yet, maybe I'll wait until daylight savings starts next time . I figure I'll have to change the time on all the clocks anyway.

In case you were wondering, when I finally did pull the outlet from the wall, I found what appeared to be a perfectly normal looking outlet. But what do I know about it? At least it's easier to turn all the power back on, than it is to turn it off.