THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT IN THE BATHROOM

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My wife does not give me many rules. Mostly, she knows that I will not do things that I should not do. That said, there are occasions where I have to have some guiding law set down in my life, lest I do serious bodily harm to myself. “Hence the rule: Mike is never, ever allowed to touch anything that is even possibly electric. If he is transported back in time to well before electricity, he is still not allowed to touch things that could one day be electrical.”

The origin of this rule is actually grounded in pretty solid reasoning. A while back, I took it upon myself to fix a broken light at my house. I went ahead and flipped breakers in the house so that there was zero electricity kicking around inside. Using a flashlight, I went to the task of taking out the old light fixture. As I reached up to remove it from the wall, I found out that, while all of the electricity inside my house was dormant, this particular light was all buddy-buddy with the outdoor lights. And, as luck would have it, when I was flipping the breakers, I figured there was no point in hitting the one that read, “Outdoor Flood Lights.” This sucker was hot, and it apparently sent shockwaves into my brain that triggered me to say rather not nice things.

My wife heard my unpleasantries and quickly put together that a painful electrical shock was enough of a reason to forbid me from ever working with electricity.

So I had abided by her rule for several years. Then, about a week ago, the light in our bathroom began flickering. It is one of those units that has five really dim bulbs in it, thereby making it five times more effort to upkeep. Why in the world each room can’t have one giant sunlamp in the center is beyond me. No, we have to 87 different ornate, bent-tip lights that are and produce just slightly more light than a glow stick. But anyhow, when the light started flickering, I told my wife that I was going to go ahead and fix it. She reminded me of the rule, and told me the closest I could come to repairing it was changing out the light bulb.

Well, I never really got to that stage, because a short while later, all of the bulbs simultaneously went out. Now, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I can pretty much surmise that when five lights in a single fixture go out at the same time, there is generally a problem.

At this point, I became somewhat concerned. I had some electrical funkiness going on in my ceiling, and I was not allowed to touch it. I am fairly sure that most electrical fires start as the result of electricity, so I did the sensible thing. I put the house on the market.

HA! Just a little homeowner humor there. No, I did what any sensible man of the house would do -- I told my wife that we could no longeer use the light in the bathroom. “Shouldn’t we call an electrician?” she asked.

“I turned the light off,” I replied confidently.

“Let me rephrase that -- shouldn’t we call an electrician, moron?”

Eventually, she got me to see her point: merely turning the light off did not solve the problem. It only made the problem occur in the dark. I feebly argued that if the light was off, the problem would go away. She told me that I did not know what I was talking about. I countered that she didn’t know, either. She pointed out that if she is wrong, she will admit it. However, if I am wrong, she will have the last laugh in the burn ward.

We decided on common ground. I would admit that she was possibly right, and I would contact someone who could look into the problem. My small victory was that I was able to ask my neighbor, rather than have to pay an actual qualified person. Not that my neighbor is not qualified. He freely uses words like watts and amps and safety.

My neighbor quickly identified the problem. There was a short in the wiring of the light, and it had actually started to burn some of the insulation in the unit. It was probably nothing even close to becoming dangerous, but even the smallest of char marks on your house are cause for some alarm.

Relieved at his discovery, I said, “So, how do we fix it?”

He looked at me for a second, and then turned to my wife and gave a long, sympathetic sigh. “You need to get a new light fixture,” he said.

“Hmmm,” I said. “Well, let’s put this one back up until then.”

I am pretty sure he just ignored that line and waited for my idiocy to seep in to my own consciousness.

So we are now on a quest for new lights. My wife is adamant that the fixtures match, so we will also replace the perfectly fine and functioning light that still exists in the bathroom. I am not arguing with her decision. But that’s mainly because of the new house rule: “Mike cannot talk. It only makes things worse.”