Thank you Mr. Edison, although...
I didn't realise how much I relied on electricity until the fuse blew up last night and I was powerless to do anything!
Anyway, it's winter-ish already so not having our heating on was like hell. I just stuck my head under the blanket hoping that by some sort of miracle, the fusebox fairy will come and fix whatever it was that needed fixing.
Thank gawd for my brother. While I was still in denial and decided that there's no way an electrician will come to our house at midnight, I let him do the man thing and go downstairs and find out what's wrong. Although we both knew he could stare at the wires for eternity to no avail.
Dawn came and I had to wake up at 4am-ish, the coldest, coldest time to wake up. With my doona over me so that I looked like one of those ghosts from Scooby Doo, I ventured out of my bedroom-slash-igloo straight into the hallway so I can get to the bathroom-slash-outdoor Alaska. I frightened the hell out of my grandma who decided to sleep in the lounge to acclimatise herself (Do not ask. Her logic is warped. Thank gawd I didn’t inherit it. :P).
So she thought the floating clump of blanket was a vision of her nephew in the Philippines recently deceased, an easy mistake to make in the dark and at 4am when you're only half awake. Even scarier for her was that in my need for some warmth of any sort, I decided to get closer to her, even as she was screaming, because I knew that wherever she was would be warm, like the section of a chicken's nest where the eggs are.
Cut a long story short I had to use my little cute candles to light up my room and the rest of the house. These candles were ordinarily reserved for romantic occasions which demands candlelight (Thank goodness they don't expire lest they would have been useless by now).
I brushed my teeth, still chattering from the cold as by now the blanket-slash-deceased relative has been left on top of my grandma who went back to sleep after the initial shock of seeing the apparition.
9am came and my brother called the electrician, a task he was so happy to do after staring at the fusebox once again early that day with no luck.
Electrician came with this gigantic ladder who proceeded to skip the pleasantries and asked ’Show me where it is'. My brother leads the way, electrician opens the fusebox and looks inside like a dentist would when it opens your mouth and has that look that says 'Oh yeah, we'll start with this hole. I know you. I recognise you. I've seen you before.'
Then he looked at our power lines, put the ladder up so it leaned on our roof, he then climbed up without a harness i might add! fished out some sabre-looking thing from his pocket :P which he then used to touch both lines. One sparked, one didn't. He went back down and eyed the power line as it connected to the main pole just outside our house.
Cut a long story short, my 'old' house is powered by 40Amps when it should at least be 100Amps. When our intelligent fusebox realised this many months ago, it shut down. My even more intelligent do-it-all father decided to override this intelligent switch by adding some extra lines to gawd knows where so that the electricity will loop back again when the fusebox said that over 40Amp has been used. Don't ask. I'm sure I got this explanation wrong somewhere.
Winter and of course four heaters sucking out electricity, plus three TVs plus all the other stuff resulted to one power line having the shits and saying: "f*ck it, no MORE!"
So now that the electrician has put our power back on I realised I never really thanked Thomas Edison for his wonderful gift (though was he the father of electricity? I don't know. Anywho, he's the lightbulb guy.)
But I may have said thank you one second too soon. Electrician hands me the bill for fifteen minutes of his time during which all he had to do was open the fuse box, tap a couple of things and replace a power cord of sorts and all of that costs $280. $#@!!R%&*(!!!!!!
But at least now I don’t have to worry that my grandma's dead relative will re-appear. :P
Anyway, it's winter-ish already so not having our heating on was like hell. I just stuck my head under the blanket hoping that by some sort of miracle, the fusebox fairy will come and fix whatever it was that needed fixing.
Thank gawd for my brother. While I was still in denial and decided that there's no way an electrician will come to our house at midnight, I let him do the man thing and go downstairs and find out what's wrong. Although we both knew he could stare at the wires for eternity to no avail.
Dawn came and I had to wake up at 4am-ish, the coldest, coldest time to wake up. With my doona over me so that I looked like one of those ghosts from Scooby Doo, I ventured out of my bedroom-slash-igloo straight into the hallway so I can get to the bathroom-slash-outdoor Alaska. I frightened the hell out of my grandma who decided to sleep in the lounge to acclimatise herself (Do not ask. Her logic is warped. Thank gawd I didn’t inherit it. :P).
So she thought the floating clump of blanket was a vision of her nephew in the Philippines recently deceased, an easy mistake to make in the dark and at 4am when you're only half awake. Even scarier for her was that in my need for some warmth of any sort, I decided to get closer to her, even as she was screaming, because I knew that wherever she was would be warm, like the section of a chicken's nest where the eggs are.
Cut a long story short I had to use my little cute candles to light up my room and the rest of the house. These candles were ordinarily reserved for romantic occasions which demands candlelight (Thank goodness they don't expire lest they would have been useless by now).
I brushed my teeth, still chattering from the cold as by now the blanket-slash-deceased relative has been left on top of my grandma who went back to sleep after the initial shock of seeing the apparition.
9am came and my brother called the electrician, a task he was so happy to do after staring at the fusebox once again early that day with no luck.
Electrician came with this gigantic ladder who proceeded to skip the pleasantries and asked ’Show me where it is'. My brother leads the way, electrician opens the fusebox and looks inside like a dentist would when it opens your mouth and has that look that says 'Oh yeah, we'll start with this hole. I know you. I recognise you. I've seen you before.'
Then he looked at our power lines, put the ladder up so it leaned on our roof, he then climbed up without a harness i might add! fished out some sabre-looking thing from his pocket :P which he then used to touch both lines. One sparked, one didn't. He went back down and eyed the power line as it connected to the main pole just outside our house.
Cut a long story short, my 'old' house is powered by 40Amps when it should at least be 100Amps. When our intelligent fusebox realised this many months ago, it shut down. My even more intelligent do-it-all father decided to override this intelligent switch by adding some extra lines to gawd knows where so that the electricity will loop back again when the fusebox said that over 40Amp has been used. Don't ask. I'm sure I got this explanation wrong somewhere.
Winter and of course four heaters sucking out electricity, plus three TVs plus all the other stuff resulted to one power line having the shits and saying: "f*ck it, no MORE!"
So now that the electrician has put our power back on I realised I never really thanked Thomas Edison for his wonderful gift (though was he the father of electricity? I don't know. Anywho, he's the lightbulb guy.)
But I may have said thank you one second too soon. Electrician hands me the bill for fifteen minutes of his time during which all he had to do was open the fuse box, tap a couple of things and replace a power cord of sorts and all of that costs $280. $#@!!R%&*(!!!!!!
But at least now I don’t have to worry that my grandma's dead relative will re-appear. :P