Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

Electricity has always frightened and mystified me. For one recent electrical shock in my life, check out my previous entry, "Did I need one more electrocution in my life?".

While there are only three units in my condo complex, sometimes I think because I am the sole “male” among the three of us, I must do all the “man-y man” stuff around our place.

My neighbour Pat kindly waited until mid-morning before knocking on my door. She knows well what I am like early in the morning.

Her panic attack? She was having one of our famous “brown outs” in her unit. What happens is that all of the major appliances just stop working. Some of the inside lights may or may not work. If a light is on, it gets dimmer and dimmer and then goes out.

The first time this happened many years ago, we naturally called an electrician. Of course, these electrical problems never happen during regular working hours. It is usually a weekend or evening so we have the joy of paying the electrician triple time for his house call.

He HMmmm’d and hawwed and told us how shitty our wiring was and then got down to work. He turned off all the power to the entire building. In just more than one hour, I knocked on my door and said he’d fixed the problem. The cost? $200 for the call and $75 for replacement parts. Like fools, we just paid him without question.

Over the years, these electrical brown outs happened sporadically. We kept calling back the same electrician and kept paying the same for his services. A few years ago, we chanced upon “Clint” — our saviour handyman.

While he was here doing some work, we experienced one of our costly brown outs. Clint went to the electrical room and checked things out. He opened one of the breaker boxes and told me a fuse had blown. He sent me to the hardware store three blocks away to buy a new fuse.

He popped the old fuse out and replaced it with the new one, flipped the main breaker back on. No more brown out.

I was fuming at our friendly neighbourhood electrician who had been hosing us for all those years! The cost of the fuse? $10 including tax. The amount of time to replace it? Two minutes. What the electrician did for over an hour still mystifies me. Why a $10 fuse was marked up to $75 just ticks me off royally.

I keep several of the $10 fuses on hand and then just replace them when they blow. The long-winded punch line to this post is that both my neighbours stand and laugh at me when I replace the fuse.

I have to triple check to make sure the main breaker is off. I have to clear the electrical room of everything — just in case I might touch something as if that would matter. I make three or four tentative snatches at the fuse to test whether or not there is flowing electricity.

I grab on to the fuse, take a deep breath, close my eyes and yank. It usually takes at least three yanks until I manage to pull that sucker out. Popping the new fuse in is easy. Turning on the main breaker is easy.

It’s that initial hesitancy of whether the electricity is on or off that makes my electrical day. That’s my HMmmm about electricity and me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 27th, 2006 at 10:36:03 PM and is filed under JOURNAL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.