Do Gooder Press

My knowledge of how electricity works usually stops at “plug in, flip switch.” I have dabbled some with LED circuits, and for those I consult lots of people way smarter than me via the internet before I start soldering.

Recently, my home experienced electrical and internet connection issues, and I’m still not quite sure what happened. It started Friday morning when I was outside, putting my son’s bike on the family car’s bike rack. Some roofers were working on a house behind ours, doing what I assume was a complete tear-off job. They were also being royal chuckleheads, as whatever they were tossing off of the roof was obviously hitting every hanging wire that fed into that house. Coincidentally, these wires went up a nearby pole and into my house as well.

I was thinking of going over to have a word with them, when I was informed by the rest of my household that the internet no longer worked. I also discovered that while the electricity was on for the majority of the house, the power feeding the toaster-oven where my breakfast was supposedly warming up was no longer online along with the half of the kitchen it occupied. The weird part of this is that none of the breakers had tripped. I called my ISP to make sure there wasn’t a problem on their end as well as to inform them that my Google Fiber connection might have been the victim of some roof debris half a block away when my neighbors gave me a wave. Apparently, their house was suffering from oddball electrical problems, too, as their kitchen vicinity was without electricity, and all of their breakers were in the on position as well.

We saw a truck for the power company go by, and my neighbor flagged them down. Later, we were without power for half a day while they fixed whatever was wrong, and then my internet took until the wee hours to return to functionality.

In the decade-and-a-half I’ve been in my house, I’ve wrestled with electrical oddities, one of which was when my computer’s UPS and surge suppressor kept ticking off every five minutes, and my electrician moved the wires to another circuit. He said he hated that solution, as it was like blaming the problem on “magic,” saying that the only explanation he’d heard is that sometimes individual circuits can be “out of phase” or something with a nearby transformer. This house also had the living room lights go out once, and our electrician said the circuit had two hot wires feeding into each other, which shouldn’t have worked in the first place, in spite of the fact that it had worked for over a decade before.

Since my house was built in 1917, the possibilities for malfunctions seem to include old knob-and-tube wiring, ghosts, proximity to ley lines, lead paint on the walls, and science being a cover for the wizards that really run the world. I almost included glitches in the Matrix, but since the pods needed for that run on electricity, I’m automatically suspicious of the concept in general. 🙂