#386 Hotwire

Yesterday I changed my first circuit breaker. This guy who had been renting my house had put in a gas dryer and for no apparent reason had taken out the circuit breaker that serviced the electric dryer outlet. When the workers came over to install a new electric dryer, no power. So I looked at the hole and I looked at the other circuit breakers and asked myself that perfect Darwin List question, how hard can it be? If you haven’t heard of the Darwin list just Google it from any available computer. It’s a compendium of stories of misguided folks who’ve done all sorts of weird, stupid and deadly things. Many of them are probably urban myths but it’s a fun read anyhow. So being fully aware of how stupid the comment “how hard can it be” was and being just as aware that trained electricians die everyday, I resolved to give it a try. The first thing I did was go down to the hardware store and look at circuit breakers. The store I went to seemed to have a number of different brands but only a couple of types. I got one that looked like it might do the trick. It had a couple of snapping switch things like I remembered from dryer circuit breakers from other houses, and a place to stick in the wires and so on. I took it back to my house and realized that not all circuit breaker are alike. The breaker I was trying to put it had a different back end than the other ones that were in the stack. The old ones had kind of an angular notch on the backside that helped position it to snap into what I assumed to be the grounding tree in the middle of the box. Anyhow it was the wrong size. I was left with a dilemma. Take one of the other circuit breakers out and down to the store or figure out some way to draw a picture of an old one so I could compare its shape to a new one. And then I had an inspiration and a chagrin moment at the same time. I’ve railed for years now about cellphones and more recently cellphone cameras. Camera? It’s supposed to be a phone, dangit. What a needless piece of electronic gingerbread. What possible, real, honest to goodness, practical use could there be in having a camera in your phone? Well, guess what, if you take a picture of a circuit breaker in place you can then be spared the task of taking out the breaker or the embarrassment of not being able to draw one. So I whipped out my cellphone and snapped a picture. When you do it, my phone has this cool little shutter sound effect too. Nifty. I then took my phone down to an electrical supply store, un-flipped it, showed the counter guy the picture and voila—he didn’t have anything like it. The next day I took an old circuit breaker out, took it to a different place, they had what I needed, and as you can see and hear, my house and computer still have power. Not only that, I appear to have regained complete control of my nervous system. Did I mention that main power cutoff switch?
America, ya gotta love it.