Hail to Electrical Engineers

The other day I flipped the wall switch in my office that controls the upper outlets on all the plugs and I heard a big pop from the circuit breaker and the room lost all it’s power. It was not a good sound or great feeling since my office is the wireless hub of our house and home to my walking desk.

I went to the panel in the furnace room of the 70 year old side of our house, found the offending breaker and switched it back on. All the electronics in my office that were plugged into the bottom outlets came back to life. A big sigh of relief from me, so I tried the switch on the wall again, boom. Darkness. Back to the panel. One flip of the switch and I got back the electricity except for the lights that were plugged into the top outlets.

Being married to an electrical engineer for twenty-two years has taught me a few things about basic home maintenance, as well as watching every episode of “this old house” with him. My education started the day we first looked at this house before we bought it. I was video taping Russ looking at the house so I could show it to my parents. The best scene in the video was not of the lovely living room, or pine paneled kitchen, but of Russ looking at the electrical panel in the furnace room and in a voice reminiscent of Homer Simpson looking at a plate of donuts saying, “MMM, Nice Panel.”

Using my wifely knowledge I was fairly certain that the problem was in something that was plugged into the top outlets or the switch or an outlet it’s self. I still called Russ and asked him if I needed to call the electrician. He instructed me to unplug everything from the outlets and flip the switch. BOOM. Unfortunately that meant a visit from Tony our electrician.

Tony likes coming to our house since Russ has trained to me to whittle down the possibilities for Tony in advance of his arrival. I may have done that, but was still worried that the offending outlet could be behind the largest piece of furniture in our house. It was not. A small wire, which was not correctly installed 70 years ago, had finally had the protective covering burn off and it was causing the circuit to pop.

Brilliant. Rather than the house burning down a breaker stops all current from running to a faulty wire. It took Tony about ten minutes to fix it and I was back in lighting. Russ’ loving word, “NICE Panel,” like a teenage boy looking at a dirty magazine resonated in my head.

It got me thinking about how I wish I had circuit breakers in other areas of my life. What if I could program some kind of machine to stop me from eating sweets after just one bite? One taste of cake and I shut down. When I was powered back up and foolishly took another bite I would get shut down again. Eventually I would tire of this game and stop eating cake. Or for alcoholics, smokers or drug addicts there was some kind of breaker to stop behaviors that were killing them?

Electrical Engineers have brought us so many great technological wonders; cell phones, pace makers, cable TV. It’s time to put them onto diet aids. Mouth breakers are all we need.