Power

October 8, 2019

The lights are on and the garage doors work! You might be tempted to say, “Well, of course they do! That’s what happens when you flip the switch.” Except it’s not what happened a couple days ago. Toggling the light switch on and off accomplished nothing. Checking the panel in the basement, I noticed one of the breakers had tripped, so I reset it only to have it trip when I flipped the switch. Repeated efforts yielded the same results, leaving me with the distinct impression that the breaker was bad. At least, that’s what I hoped. If it weren’t the breaker, it meant there was a problem in the line, twenty feet of which was buried somewhere between the house and the garage. Locating and digging it up is definitely not on my bucket list.

A trip to the local electric supply company and I was back in business. There are two main breaker brands; I knew which ours is, so I went armed with the right information, or so I thought. After trying unsuccessfully to install the new breaker, I checked it against the pile of old ones lying on a shelf next to the panel board; the main connection was wrong. A second trip to the electric supply company revealed that Cutler-Hammer, the maker of my breakers, has two different models; of course, I was given the wrong one. This afternoon, I exchanged it, came home, and after dinner, installed the new one. Success is seeing the lights shining from the garage when I came up the cellar stairs. 

All of this is pretty minor and ordinary stuff...here. But it brings to mind memories of driving in vain all over the city of Jovellanos, Cuba, looking for a couple screws to mount a light switch. I had no such problem today. I walked into Home Depot this afternoon to see the shelves packed with box upon box of breakers in all sorts of configurations alongside rows of switches, electrical boxes, rolls of wire, boxes of wire nuts...in short, everything anyone would need to completely wire a home. At most, I deal with the annoyance of an easily fixed failed breaker, while people in many parts of the world get their electricity, if they have it at all, from cobbled and dangerous connections. I read in the glow of lights that operate reliably at the flip of a switch. I plug my iPad into the receptacle confident in the power readily available there. I take all this for granted until something fails, at which time I reflect and give thanks.