Fun With Electricity

Mondays at work are never fun. But today actually came close.



I was puttering around when Stella said something about her "ghetto-wrapped" computer monitor. (Stella can say that; she's also kind enough to ignore my Caucasianosity and say them around me.) She has a laptop, and since it's a Mac, it requires a little connector between the plug-end of the monitor cable and the teeny little plug on the Mac. Every time Stella wiggled the cord or moved the computer in any way, the monitor screen would turn a sickly, gastric green. I assumed--because this has happened on several other monitors, always with the same cause--that it had something to do with the little transformer on the monitor cord, and was something not worth fixing. (Monitors are cheap; repairs are expensive.)



So I had showed Stella, the first time this happened, how to get around it--by finding the perfect position for the cord, and making it stay that way. In her case, this meant wrapping it around her computer a couple of times, which as you might imagine looked pretty silly.



But looking at it today, I had another thought. So I went up to the attic, got a new connector, and went back to her office.



I reached for the monitor cable...unscrewed the little screws...



>>>>>KABLAMMMMMM!<<<<< and the ENTIRE BUILDING went completely...dark.



I mean, this was a BIG boom. This was like, an M-80-in-a-metal-trash-drum boom; a pipe-bomb-in-the-next-building boom. And everyone in the room--Stella, Nancy, Maude, and Charles--all looked at me, standing guiltily with half a monitor cable in each hand, and all yelled at the same time: "Gladys!!"



I have a feeling I'll never hear the end of this, even though it turned out in the end to have been nothing more than a blown transformer--apparently one of the North Shore squirrels fricaseed himself on the high-voltage lines again. This happens once or twice a year, at least; you'd think they'd squirrel-proof the power grid or something.



The lights were out for three hours. On the plus side, though, I fixed Stella's monitor--the cord on her little connector was just kinked. (We should all be so lucky.)