Journal Shadow Wrought's Journal: Delusioned Youthful Stupidity 12
During one of my freshman electronic classes, one of my bench mates got bored. He dealt with this by stripping a wire and unwinding all of its copper threads. When that failed to relieve all of his boredom he proceeded to place each end of the fine copper thread into an outlet- producing a cool little spark in the middle. That this actually cut the wire made the feat even cooler.
So what do I do with this new knowledge? Well, I said to myself, Self, if that's what happens with one strand of copper wire what would a whole wire be like? Even cooler, I answered. And if one copper wire was cool than half a dozen would be even cooler, right? Of course, I answered.
So I absconded with a long piece of copper wire and cut it into six fairly short lengths. I stripped each end before twisting them together to from one big chunk of wire at each end with the six insulated strands between. The only problem was that the wire ends, once tied, were too bulky to actually fit into a socket. An applied engineering problem if there ever was one, solved by my Dad's table vise. I squeezed the ends flat until an eyeballing told me that I was good to go.
The only thing left was to go to my room and commence my exploration of electricity related coolness. Into the plug my creation went, after which it dissapeared, along with my hand and half my forearm, in a ball of light. Then, blinking, I found that my back was against the dresser- on the other side of the room! I also did not know how much, if any, time had passed as literally my recollection was a) ball o' light halfway up my forearm and b) seeing the outlet from ten feet away.
The damage was pretty impressive. Not only was my implement pretty much disintegrated, but there was also a char mark on the wall around the outlet roughly three feet in diameter. I also noted that the power was out in my room and, based on the emergency lights, the hallway as well. A quick trip under the deck assured me that the breaker was not only tripped, but apparently irrevocably so. Obviously what I needed was to fix the outlet before I could get the breaker back- i.e., before my parents got home. I unscrewed the outlet and saw that the charring had not limited itself to the wall. Indeed the inside of the outlet box actually held charred dust that smelled mightily of rank electrical fire. A closer inspection revealed that the ground wire was simply gone. It had disintigrated enough to where there was a good couple inches from its burnt, stubby end to the outlet itself. I was doomed.
With the situation hopeless, confession was the only viable alternative. I waited an agonizing couple of hours before my Mom got home to hear it. She was upset, obviously, but the fact that I was still alive after having been thrown across the room mollified a good deal of her anger with me. Yep, the fact that I almost died made her less angry. I will never understand Mothers.
The only thing left was for an electrician to come out and clean up. I watched as he went about his task as a sort of guilty penance. There is something about the scorn of repair folk that is a good catharsis for the soul in these situations. (Indeed, if you ever have to call someone out to fix your stupidity I highly recommend that you stay in the room with them the entire time- it'll erase months of guilt right then and there.) Just before he left, as my Mom was handing him his check, she asked if he had had to do jobs like this before. He answered that, "Yes I've had to come out because of kids screwing up the outlets before." He then turned to me directly before adding, "Though they're usually not this old."
Well it wasn't a penance for it's pleasantness...
When I was 12 (Score:1)
Where's your initiative, man? (Score:2)
My youthful electricity stupidity was when I was about 17. Nowhere near as disasterous as yours, but quite entertaining. I decided to try electrolysing water of the mains electricity (in the school darkroom, at the bottom of the science block). The electricity here isn't
Re:Where's your initiative, man? (Score:2)
I made this one up myself whan I was a kid:
My "hot dog cooker" worked like a charm, so I got inventive.
Took a piece of aluminium foil, made 2 v notches in it so that the middle was very thin, put it on the two prongs and plugged it in. The aluminium acted like
Re:Where's your initiative, man? (Score:1)
Its a wonder more of us didn't get killed.
Why do you think there aren't over a million Slashdot accounts yet?
Re:Where's your initiative, man? (Score:1)
Re:Where's your initiative, man? (Score:2)
'Bout the same (Score:1)
You were right (Score:2)
Well fused them as they shot across the room sticking them both into an adapter cable at the same time
Thankfully tweezers aren't copper (Score:2)
Re:Thankfully tweezers aren't copper (Score:2)
My fun with electricity involved an old hair dryer when I was about 14. I took it apart (I always took things apart) and realized it had a nifty little electric motor. It was a simple task to attach the DC motor to the old AC cord from the hair dryer. Once it was plugged in (thankfully while sitting on a cem
More electrical fun (Score:2)
The problem came when we decided to glue the power cable to the wall, using a glue gun (or whatever it's called) - the hot glue melted the
Well, there was some electricity involved... (Score:2)
When I was in high school (!) I was with a friend and we were bouncing a golf ball on the concrete floor in one of the lower levels of the school (BIG school, 7 floors total). We decided it would be a cool thing to bounce it high enough that it hit the ceiling at least once. We forgot that the [apparently] highly sensitive smoke detection system had stations mounted on the ceiling. Accidentally hit one, and all the alarms went off.