I was being the dutiful son-in-law and helping my mother-in-law hang her Christmas decorations. She didn’t have a lot of lights to hang, but it was a cold, drizzling day so I believe that will award me some extra jewels in my crown when I get to heaven.
“Don’t you mean IF you get to heaven,” I can hear people like K-Dog saying, but I just don’t listen to those people.
Anyway, I’m just about finished hanging the lights on the first part of the house, when I plug them in to see how I need to adjust the strands.
I noticed some haphazard spacing between a few of the rows of lights that’s on one of those prickly holly bushes. As I grab the lights I feel this sharp prick in my finger. Thinking it was just the holly bush I just ignored the pain and kept moving the lights.
That’s when I felt the jolt.
Now, the sensation you get from a jolt of electricity is not something new for me. I do enough “handy-man” type of work around my house that I’ve touch more than my fair share of live wires. I also worked with an electrician at Peacock Chevrolet in Houston while I was in high school. I made everyone in the shop laugh uncontrollably on several occasions when I was knocked on my butt after grabbing the coil wire of a car before turning off the engine.
As it turned out, there was a broken bulb on the cord that I didn’t see. When I grabbed the cord, my finger landed on the exposed negative and positive leads. This was only a 110 connection, so I wasn’t ever in any danger. If that was all that had happened I wouldn’t have thought twice about it and wouldn’t even be writing this post.
However, probably half an hour later, as I was driving home my iphone made an odd noise. I pulled it out and the message on the screen said, “No SIM Card.”
I was very puzzled, tried to use it and nothing. All my contacts where there and the games would play, but I couldn’t make calls.
After restarting the phone everything works again. No problems at all.
The only thing I can assume is that the shock somehow went through me into the phone and caused some kind of a glitch. I may find other problems later, but for now it’s business as usual.
I am, however, quite intrigued by being a human conductor. My class is just finishing up a unit in science on electricity and magnetism. I can’t wait to tell them about their teacher’s Christmas light adventure and its shocking results…
2 comments:
Whew. My greatest fear, when I began reading this post, was that I would scroll down and see a picture of the current hairdo ('scuze the pun) as it appeared during this "electrical event". I mean, I'm having a hard enough time getting the "windblown" shot out of my head. I could only visualize THAT one combined with a wide-eyed author having smoke trails fizzing out of both ears. Actually, let me see if I can photoshop that one - I'll get back with ya.
I need that picture!
Do what you can.
Post a Comment