Slightly Cursed

The other day, I got tired of looking at the bare sockets on the walls in our new family room. The family room is a project started by my husband. He’d been promising me for a month that he’d put the wall plates on “after he finished checking a few things out.” Yeah, right.

I was tired of waiting around and decided to put the wall plates on myself. Now, most of you are probably thinking, “Big deal. A four year old could install a wall plate.” But I have to take extra precautions whenever I do anything around the house that involves electricity. This is because I’m married to an electrical engineer.

Unlike most men, my husband cannot stop himself from rewiring everything around him. It’s an obsession rivaled only by his current love for servo motors. In any case, sometimes he chooses to do non-standard things just because he can. When he’s working on electrical wiring, he never says normal things like, “Be sure and turn off the breaker before you touch anything.” No, he says vaguely disturbing things like, “You might not want to touch that,” while waving his hand indeterminately, or asks “do I have any rubber soled shoes?”

I picked up the first plate and grabbed the screws. Adjusting the plate and setting the screw into position, I made short work of the first three screws. The fourth screw gave me a bit of trouble, and I wiggled the screw to try and seat it better.

I electrocuted myself. Mild as it was, it was every bit as unpleasant as it had been when I’d stuck that hairpin in the light socket at the age of four.

The screw was all the way in. I wasn’t touching it again. I still had two wall plates to go. Being the prudent person I am, I immediately thought to myself, “Hey, maybe this is a bad idea. Leave it for the husband to do Saturday.”

I pondered my inner wisdom, figuratively nodding my agreement. Yes, I was wise. I gathered my tools. I stopped and took one final look at the sockets bulging out the front of their little blue box. I looked at the sockets. The creepy, plastic eyes of my walls stared at me in a vacantly challenging way.

Then, it happened: something activated my Stubborn Gene. You see, I’m not a quitter. I never have been. I come from a long line of non-quitting stubborn people.

So why was I giving up and passing the job off on my husband when I was perfectly capable of doing it myself?

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. “Who couldn’t put a screw through a predrilled hole?” Heck, I took electronics shop in high school. I could read color-coded resistors and work a drill press. Out came my tools; I was determined. Sitting down in front of the socket, I leaned forward to inspect the wires. Having recently zapped myself, I wasn’t keen on a repeat.

I poked around in the hole behind the sockets. There was a wad of black electrical tape wrapped around a bunch of wires. Off to the side was a thick, copper wire, and a small screw hole sat just behind the edge of the black tape. Perfect! The top screw zipped effortlessly into place. I smiled. Halfway there! I aligned the bottom screw but the mass of taped wires was in the way.

Like the genius I sometimes become when operating solely on Stubborn Gene Power, I decided to use the screw to push the taped mess of wires just a hair so the screw would go into the hole. I was afraid to touch the wires due to my earlier zappage. Bending over to get a better view, my face only a couple of inches from the action, I pushed the screw in gently, pushing the side of the tape. The whole socket moved. I pushed again and grabbed the metal screw-mount tab on the top of the socket.

There was a brief noise that sounded like a cross between the snap of thick plastic breaking and a small nuclear warhead. This was accompanied by a whoosh! of heat and searing flash of light. For about five minutes, I laid on the floor trying to assess the damage without actually opening my eyes. My eyeballs felt gritty and sore, even back in the sockets, like they did after I’d had LASIK. But they hadn’t melted away!

The scratchy feeling lasted five or six days, and I was light sensitive for almost two weeks. My husband mumbled something about temporarily using the circuit to run the dryer while he fixed the short in the wall.

I’m not allowed to play electricity anymore. But I’ve got my eye on some plumbing work that needs to be done. It’s just some water and pipes.

What could possibly go wrong?

written by vic

It’s not often that I go to a hair salon for anything other than a quick haircut. I’m cheap, I hate small talk, and I have a lot of kids. I don’t have time for that sort of thing. Plus, I could shave my head and it would take my husband two days to notice.

But sometimes you look in the mirror and just know that your eight dollar box of color isn’t going to cut it anymore. This was one of those days: my hair was in need of professional help. Grabbing the phone and dialing before I could change my mind, I called my hair stylist. Fate smiled upon me and granted me an appointment that afternoon.

My stylist greeted me at the door and walked me over to the chair. “So what are we doing to your hair today?” she asked, gently strangling me with a towel and cape. I reached up and loosened them so I could speak.

“Highlights and lowlights. Try and match the roots for the lowlights. Hopefully this will get rid of the gray.” I squinted into the mirror, glaring at the shiny, silver wires sticking up in every direction. “You might want to wash it first; I had hairspray and mousse in my hair.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem,” she reassured me. I was unconvinced. I expressed my concern about chemical interactions. “Don’t worry about it,” she was pretty firm this time. “I do this every day. Hair styling products aren’t going to cause any problems with your color. Just relax.” She looked mildly annoyed.

Then she set about her business mixing color and bleach, then painting chunks of my hair, wrapping them in foil. The hour crawled by, silence occasionally punctured by my stylist’s attempts at small talk.

It’s my experience that the less time a stylist spends talking to you the better your hair turns out. We didn’t spend much time chatting. “Okay! Let’s get you under the dryer. It’ll set the color faster.” Cool. I was all for that. Faster is always better!

I picked up a magazine and relaxed under the warm, dry heat blowing on my plastic-bagged scalp. One of the nail technicians brought me a fresh cup of coffee and a cookie. Approximately five minutes went by.

“It smells like something’s burning,” I mentioned to the older woman in the seat across from me. She shrugged; apparently she couldn’t smell it. The heat from the dryer was relaxing; I went back to reading the article and ignored the funky smell.

Now, I’m not sure how much longer I sat under the dryer, but I don’t think it was more than another five minutes. It was around then that I heard what sounded like steam. A second or two later, I felt it: someone obviously had sneaked up behind me and pointed a blowtorch at my head.

“Hey!” I flagged down the nearest person. I did my best to stay calm. “I’m on fire over here. Can someone get this thing off me?”

That boiling sound was getting louder. Another stylist turned to look at me when, all of a sudden, steam came pouring out of the plastic cap. “Seriously, I’m ON FIRE OVER HERE.” I opened the side of the now-melting plastic cap and let the steam out, burning myself in the process. By this time I wasn’t waiting around for help. That cap was coming off my head immediately.

Two stylists flanked me within seconds, grabbing my elbows, ushering me toward cold water and instant relief. Within minutes, my head was cool and no longer bubbly. Yay, me!

“I don’t know how this could have happened!” My stylist was beside herself. “I’m so sorry.”

“Probably you should have washed out the hairspray?” My head was tingling. I was certain there was nerve damage. I had visions of my scalp peeling away, leaving chunks of burnt flesh all over my mostly-black-teeshirt wardrobe.

“No, that wouldn’t have caused a reaction like this,” she insisted. “Do you have well water?”

“Yes, but I don’t see how that’s an issue.”

“Oh, yeah! I should have asked about that. Well water has a lot of bad chemicals in it that can cause this to happen.” She seemed pretty sure of herself.

“Um, it’s never happened before, and I’ve had well water for years.” I was annoyed by this time. I mean, seriously, well water causing this? “It can’t be the water.”

“That’s what it has to be. Your well water must have been contaminated by something that set the bleach off.” I didn’t bother to correct her. Or to mention my major in college. She rambled on, “It couldn’t possibly be anything else.” She planted her feet apart and stood her ground.

She had scissors. I backed away from the argument. Who was I to insert real science into her fantasy world?

Twenty minutes later, the ordeal was over. You’d think I’d have gotten a discount or something, right? Of course not. I paid and left. I never went back.

She was right about one thing though: the color turned out great. Still, it was years before I had my hair professionally colored again.

Minus the hairspray.

written by vic