Flirting with Danger-(Bees and electricity part two)

My birthday is coming up soon. I’ll be 44 years old and I’m pretty excited to be back in an even year. I always feel off in odd ages. My partner Marika asked me what I want and I referred back to my notes, where I keep a detailed list of things that would make great birthday presents for me. I start it the day after my birthday and add things that strike my fancy as the days go on. This year I looked back and was surprised to see that I’d added a Dual Voltage Multifunctional Electric Beard Straightening Brush. It was back in the fall. I’d seen an advertisement on Instagram. 

Being 44 has its ups and downs. I HAVE indeed noticed a few stray longies on the ole chin, but nowhere near enough to require a Dual Voltage Multifunctional Electric Beard Straightener. I’m sure I had hatched some plan to use it on my head, which develops new and amazing cowlicks every few weeks. I went ahead and told Marika to get me the Scent of Samadhi underarm powder I’ve been coveting for months, but the beard straightener kept calling my name. What even is dual voltage? I wondered.

I looked it up and it means that you can use it with both 120 volts (used in the US) or 220 volts (everywhere else).  Apparently lots of international travelers depend heavily on their beard straighteners for the optimum travel experience. Without that dual voltage, if they plug into the hostel in Northern France they could fry their appliance and have to walk around with an unkempt face fro or some crazy doodle longies if they are 40+ year-old women. 

All this electricity research got me remembering something I’d been trying to forget. For the last couple years we’ve had a little problem at my house. Sometimes, when a person is sitting in the tub filled with water and she touches the spigots, she gets a little shock. (I say she because the only males in the house are chihuahuas and they don’t do many long soaks.) The shock is a little worse when there’s Epsom salts in the tub, or when you have a little cut. 

It’s concerning, right? I mean, how many times have we seen people die in movies when the bad guy throws a toaster in the tub? We all know it’s bad, we all know water and electricity don’t mix well. 

It started a couple years ago really, really small, so much so that I thought I might be imagining it. But then my daughter Maya said she felt it too. It was never a BIG shock. Just a little zap, exactly like the one you get if you chew on a lamp cord while you’re hiding behind the couch at your mom’s house. Which was why I was able to keep ignoring it for so long, I guess. I mean, nobody had died yet, ranking it in the “inconvenient, potentially lethal, probably too expensive to fix” category of problems. I got a special potholder to put on the sink to use to turn the water on and off. Then the potholder fell on the floor and the dog peed on it and it got lost in the washing machine, so I started turning the water on and off outside the tub, which is really annoying when you just need a little heat up. After a while I started using the rubber drain stopper, which I thought was really smart because everyone knows rubber doesn’t conduct electricity.

Each month or so I’d sit down and try to do a little research on why it’s happening and I’d quickly get overwhelmed with information and decide to think about it more tomorrow. You’d be surprised at how many people have this problem and how many things could be causing it. So after the dual voltage discovery, I felt like I was on an electric roll, so I decided to finally really try to find some answers to the tub issue. One of the things that kept popping up was a grounding problem. I vaguely remembered a metal stake in the ground outside under the electric box, mostly because I’ve run over it a number of times with the lawnmower. I decided to check it.

I had to go out and turn off the electric main, and the old paper wasp nest was there, as expected. This time I only wore one pair of gloves and no layers and no apiary hood. After months of getting electrocuted in my bathtub, my threshold of acceptability on dangerous activities has shifted quite a lot. Also there was only one wasp this early in the season and it flew away when I opened the box. I just reached in there and turned it off, no questions asked. I looked down at the metal stake and the wire that was supposed to be attached to it, laying lifeless about six inches away. I had to go to the hardware store and buy a “grounding clamp,” which is a pretty cool little device. Not quite on par with a dual voltage beard straightener, but for $2.39, it was worth a shot. I assembled it all up, grabbed the old tiki torch and used it to turn the power back on, and went inside to test the tub with one of those things with two metal points on wires and a needle dial. Nothin! I turned on the tub, poured a good couple cups of epsom salt in there, took off my electricity fixing carhartts, sat down in six inches of water and grabbed the spigot.

No shock. I may have just saved all our lives. I think, maybe, I might just deserve that beard straightener after all.