New Wires

December 30, 2002

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this here before or not, but my wife and I live in a house with a college friend of mine and his fianceé — we’ll call them “Mark” and “Ann.” Mark owns the house and I rent. Which means I occasionally get to play the tenant — (”fix the damn lights!”) and he gets to play the landlord (”pay the damn rent!”). Well, we’ve have been having some trouble with our lights. The power in the bedroom and laundry room would occasionally just click off. If I went into the laundry room and turned on the laundry room light, that would usually bring all the power to that part of the house back on. I told Mark, who called an electrician.

Doctors, Car mechanics, plumbers, electricians — these are the people we don’t want to have to do business with. That’s because we know nothing about these things we rely on, so all we can do is nod our heads and pay our money.

But the first electrician to the premisis was a complete waste of space. Even I could tell he was feeding us a line. First of all, he told us he couldn’t get here until 1/7/03 — then he showed up unannounced on the 23rd. Then while here he didn’t bother to look at any wiring. Ann says he just insisted that we were overloading the circuits in the house “with all these lights.”

When Ann protested that the power failed frequently in the middle of the night — with nothing on — Ann says he marched into our bedroom and started going through our closet. “There!” he said. “That iron! They draw a lot of electricity. People don’t plug those into the right outlets. That’s probably what caused it.”

The iron has never been plugged in at this house.

Of course, it never occurred to Mr. Electrician that if the curcuits were being overloaded to the point of failure and the circuit breaker was not being flipped that there was some sort of electrical fault — an electrical fault he was there to find and fix. Ann kicked him out of the house for digging through our stuff without asking and being an asshole.

Mark called another electrician. Electrician #2 came in, looked at the wiring, secured a loose wire, and left.

Now our lights work and I don’t have to be afraid to plug in the iron. Score one for the Second Opinion.

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