Completely mundane and pointless stories: share yours!
Here’s mine:
So, last night I thought I’d finish up some of the kids’ laundry. A load of my son’s stuff was in the dryer, with one more load to dry; my daughter’s was next in line, then mine. I open the dryer and there’s a blue flash behind the door. “Hmmm,” I think. “I should use dryer sheets. That static electricity must be really bad today. Oops - the light’s burnt out, too.” I dig out the rest of the laundry, toss it in the basket and throw in the next load to dry, then push the button. Nothing happens. “Nuts. I wonder what happened?” I check the plug. Looks ok. Then I hear the pounding of feet on the stairs.
“Overly! Are you okay? What happened?” says my husband.
“I’m fine, but the dryer won’t work. Weird.”
“Do you know that half the lights are out upstairs? The stove and microwave aren’t working, either, and the DSL is shot.”
“Seriously?”
So we go around the house checking the electrical outlets. Sure enough, half the house is out. What’s weird is that some sockets work in one half of a room while other sockets don’t work in the other half. And some of the lights will turn on, but the bulbs stay very low. I guess I managed to fry something in our fuse box. And I apparently came close to electrocuting myself and starting a fire. Not a bad start to the week. Luckily we found an electrician to come tonight after work. Still, I think this is a good reason for me never to do laundry again.
Anyone else? Random, stupid stories you’d like to share?
About a month ago, I decided to grill myself a steak.
So, I go out to the barbecue, open it up (this part is important) and turn on the gas. Head back in, grab the matches. Nothing wrong so far.
Come back out, fish a match out and light it - this takes a couple strikes. Matches are a pain in my butt. But, I get it lit, after a few tries. All in all, this is…maybe half a minute since I turned the gas on, to be generous. Move the match to the grill. BWOOMPH. Everything goes white for a moment.
‘What the hell?’ Says I, then I happen to glance at my arm. Now, I’m not exactly what one would call hirsute at the best of times. But I have some hair on my arms. (Even if it is very fine, thin, and light - very unlike the hair on my head.)
Or, at least I did up until that moment.
Oooh, that’s what that was. A fireball. All in all I singed off the hair on the arm holding the match and a bit at the front of my head. No serious burns, still had eyebrows and MOST of my hair.
Heck - It took me so long to register what had happened that I wasn’t even rattled - it was simply an amusing story pretty much immediately.
Years ago I decided to upgrade from a hibachi to a Weber grill. I got it home and decided to put it to use. I filled it with Match Light charcoal – the kind embedded with lighter fluid – and lit it. The flames were going real good. Real tall. Like reaching the roof of my porch tall. This was an old building in which the wood was excellent kindling. Since I figured my landlady wouldn’t be pleased if I burned down the entire neighborhood, I decided to squelch the flame by putting the lid on the grill.
I went inside to prepare my food for grilling. A few seconds later I heard WHOOM! CLAAAAAANNNG! The built up pressure from the lighter fluid (I guess) had blown the lid right off. And then the flames were spectacular.
Different story: There’s a woman at work who is very pretty but works pretty hard for it. She wears tons of makeup. Flashy fishnet stockings. I’m not sure what her eyebrows are made out of, but I’m sure it’s not hair. And she wears tons of jewelry. Everything about her screams “Look at me! I’m a sexpot!” One day she was wearing a gigantic gold ring with her name on it. It was so big that it covered three fingers.
A few years back I took a hike to a place called the Pinnacle… a big rock outcropping. I got there and sat down to rest at a place where there’s a sort of big crack in the rock, about six feet wide. After about 15 minutes I got up and went to the other side of the crack. I looked back at where I’d been sitting, and right where my legs had been dangling down, there was a little alcove. With a copperhead in it.
Well, my story doesn’t involve lightning or fire, it’s just mundane and pointless.
The first time I installed Baldur’s Gate, as I waited I flipped through the manual and discovered I could create my own sound theme for my character(s). So I did so, before even playing the game: Yosemite Sam. Instead of yelling “Attack!” my character would yell “Ya better say yer prayers, ya flea-bitten varmint!” Or when hit, he’d scream “OOOOH! Ya darn crazy galoot!” Or when killed, “The varmint got me… I’m a headin’… for the last… roundup.” You get the idea. I carried this on into BGII and Neverwinter Nights, and still to this day it cracks me up.
Anyway, one day I was playing one of the BG games, and I had the volume turned up. Now, if you let your characters just stand there without giving them any commands, after a little while they’ll play their “bored” sound. So, the phone rang, and it was one of my employees telling me about the latest minor crisis at my restaurant. After a couple of minutes, I asked her a question, and she paused a bit before answering… the conversation went something like this:
Me: <asks question>
Her: <silence>
Yosemite Sam, screaming in the background: “WELL! We haven’t got all day!!”
Me, scrambling for the volume control: “Aahhh… sorry about that.”
Her: <silence>
Had the same thing happen using a stove a few years ago where I used to live. No blue flash, but half the outlets in the house wouldn’t work anymore. Wish I could remember what I googled to figure it out at the time, but it had something to do with the 240V line that stoves and dryers hook up to.
Something similar once happened at my house, and the electrician said that it had to do with aluminum wiring, which was the style at the time the house was built. It’s why copper wiring came roaring back into style. There was also a burning odor coming from the circuit breaker box.
One cold winter night I decided to light a fire in the fireplace. And did so. And I looked at the raging fire and saw that it was good.
After dinner, and we put the kids to bed, I tossed another log on from the bag on the floor next to the hearth. I keep a few logs in there as well as some kindling. An hour later, I threw on the last log.
As my honey and I cuddled on the couch, the fire burned down to just some glowing coals. I got up in the dark, reached in the bag and grabbed a handful of kindling at the bottom and tossed that in. Wow, it really caught, look at those blue flames! Pretty.
10 seconds… 20 seconds… 30 seconds… FWOOOOOMMMMMP!!! Big fire ball! Loud scary noise!!! Holy shit, what the f&*k was that???
Seems I also had (had) one of those Scripto lighters in the bag, which I inadvertently grabbed in the dark along with the kindling.
Note to self: don’t throw a propane lighter into a lit fire. Vewy dangerous.
Many years ago, when the world was young and the audio cassette was a commonly used music format, I used to be fond of making party mixes. I was in college, and some friends of mine shared a big house off-campus. Keggers there were frequent, and I was happy to help provide the tunes.
One Saturday night, my latest tape was turning in the deck. One of the songs on it was Jerry Lee Lewis’s version of Chantilly Lace. You may be more familiar with the hit version by the Big Bopper, which starts out with “Hello, Baaaaaby!” JLL began his with “Well, hellooo, you good-lookin’ thang, you!”
So at a certain point, I – and nobody else in the house – knew that this was the next song coming up on the tape. My drunken, college-aged self decided that a really clever thing to do would be, just as the previous song was fading out, to turn to the hottest girl at the party and loudly proclaim, “Well, hellooo, you good-lookin’ thang, you!” You see, then one second later Jerry Lee would say exactly the same thing, everybody would laugh, and hot girl would think I’m cool.
What I didn’t know, because the stereo was in a different room, was that somebody at that very moment decided he wanted to listen to a different tape.
(song fades out)
Me: “Well, hellooo, you good-lookin’ thang, you!”
(several seconds of silence)
Girl: :dubious:
(completely unrelated song begins to play)
Me: :smack: “I need to go… check the porch… for…”
(I slink off in total embarrassment)
My parents opted for a gas-assisted wood-burning fireplace in their new house. They’d had one before, and enjoyed not messing with kindling and just being able to toss whole logs in their.
I said, “Hey, let’s get your first fire going.” And before you get ahead of me, yes the flue was open, and yes I have a lot of experience with gas-assist fireplaces. Everything was optimal. I toss a log in, and very slightly turn the little key that opens the gas valve. They didn’t have the long matches, but I was just going to toss in a couple of flaming kitchen matches. That always does the trick. As I’m striking the first match, I wonder what is that flute-like whistling? Then I heard the giant THOOM of a fireball belching out of the firebox. I had my arms over my face, but my wife says I was engulfed. I got the gas shut off, and only suffered burned hair.
The culprit was that their gas inline in the basement has a valve that was set wide open. Just a slight turn of the valve at the fireplace caused pressurized gas to come whistling out. I saw them set it to half, and after that the fireplace wasn’t a deathtrap.
Most homes are fed from a center tapped transformer, with the center tap grounded. This may sound like technobabble to you, but what it means is that you have two “hot” lines from either end of the transformer and the “neutral” which is the center tap. The voltage from either hot line to neutral is 120 volts, and the voltage from one hot to the other is 240 volts. It’s basically 240 volts split in half.
All of your 120 volt outlets will be wired from one of the hots to neutral. 240 appliances, like your stove and dryer, connect from one hot to the other.
If the electrician who wired up your house did his job properly, the outlets should be fairly evenly balanced. Half of them should be on one circuit and half of them should be on the other. So, it’s actually not weird at all that half of the outlets in your house stopped working. It’s exactly what you’d expect if you lost one of the two main circuits. You probably lost either the hot or the neutral for that circuit inside the fuse box somewhere, but that’s just a guess and there are other possibilities. Your electrician should be able to sort it all out fairly easily.
And you should use this as an excuse never to do laundry ever again.
I once rented a warehouse in a crappy part of town. The city got some wild hair about run down looking warehouses bringing the place down and sent notices to clean crap up. They were fussing about all the vines growing up a fence by the road. These vines had been there since forever, but now it was my job to clean off the chain link fence. I was not pleased.
It was going to take decades. The entire fence was covered with entwined crap, about 75 feet long, 6 feet high. But I fixed it up.
Early one Sunday morning, I pumped up the weed sprayer thingie full of kerosene and dosed it all really well, then lit it on fire. Wow. The wall of flame was at least 50 feet high and there were electrical wires way up there getting roasted. It quieted down after a minute or so, so I pumped the sprayer up some more and napalmed everything, liquid death-fire with fingertip control. Good times. I kicked the fence and most of the vines just fell to the ground. Nice.
The fence was char black, but it was cleared. Now you could see the horrible looking warehouse quite clearly. Not really an improvement.
I had my own blue flash of death while I was trying to fix a dryer. The panel had stopped working, so I had it all in pieces, trying to test which button had died. The kids’ mom asked if I had it unplugged. Naturally I had it unplugged while I worked on it, I’m not some kind of idiot! :rolleyes:
Well I thought I found the problem, so I put it back together and plugged it in. No joy. I unplugged it again and started working on it. I had to repeat this several more times, and now I was getting pissed. I called a friend who was more electronically minded, and while I was on the phone I put the panel back on, which caused a massive cascade of sparks and potential death. Apparantly I’d forgotten to unplug it that last time, and thankfully I didn’t touch any of the live metal bits under the button panel. Unfortunately the panel bits decided to ground out and fuse the panel to the dryer.
After my friend and the kids’ mom found out I was OK and I explained what happened, they laughed themselves hoarse.
Some friends and I got rather adept at starting fires, as we’d gone on some camping trips together. A couple of months later two of the friends got married. They had a small after-wedding party in their honeymoon suite. It had a fireplace with one big log in it. It was rather amusing to see one of the guests trying to light the end of the log with a butane lighter.
I wanted to come back and thank you for the explanation. You’ve made me very impressive. At least I was able to pretend to my husband that I knew what I was talking about.
It turns out that the issue was that one of the external wires had fried. We have underground wires, so the electric company had to come out and fix it. Luckily, the entire problem had to do with the electric company’s line, not ours, so we didn’t have to pay to have it fixed. They ran a temporary above-ground wire last night and (presumably) started to dig down this afternoon for a more permanent fix. I guess I’ll find out when I get home.
And thanks, everyone else for your replies! I particularly love the firey death stories. It reminds me of that time I tried to smell a lit candle, only your stories are much worse. I wish I could’ve said I was drunk. Unfortunately, I was just stupid. I looked pretty stupid, too - I burned off my eyelashes and part of an eyebrow. Pure genius.
