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Okay, stop me if you have heard this one before. A vacuum cleaner salesman is making his rounds through the neighborhood and knocks on the door of a single mom who tells him to go away because she is broke and could certainly not afford his fancy vacuum cleaner.
She starts to shut the door on him but he wedges his foot in the door and pushes it wide open. Before our mom tells him how rude he is and is able to retrieve her can of pepper spray, our determined vacuum cleaner salesman has emptied a bag of dirt, cigarette ashes and something that looks a lot like cow manure all over the hallway carpeting and excitedly exclaims, "If I cannot get out every last bit of this mess with the BigSuck 2000, I'll eat whatever is left."
The mother of four just shakes her head and says, "Let me get you a fork, 'cause they just shut off my electricity this morning!"
Come on, you have to admit that is pretty funny.
Getting your electricity shut off kind of sucks but if you take these things personally you may begin to feel a bit depressed. The power company doesn't hate you or anything; they are just doing their job.
Besides, sitting in the dark gives you a new perspective on all the things we take for granted, like, well, lights… not to mention the things that keep us alive like air conditioning, blow dryers and coffee makers!
My grandparents grew up in a house without electricity or running water and had to pee into a hole in the ground for heavens sake. I'm not sure how they managed, but then again, they didn't know any differently. Not MY spoiled little rug rats!
I'm not, for the moment, going to go into how or why the electric bill did not get paid but gauging from my children's reaction to this little inconvenience, you would have thought the world was coming to an end.
Aside from the fact that our water comes from a well which relies on a pump that relies on electricity, which we are currently out of, the deafening silence of the interruption of electron flow through the various gadgets, gizmos and a multitude of other devices designed to make a lot of noise in our home was quite an unexpected and welcome relief.
Of course the immediate whining of my four deprived electronic junkies quickly shattered any sense of peace I felt after my electricity was shut off and I called my ex to come pick up his troop of ingrates and deliver them to a temporary place of normality…his house!
Of course this comes right after my two month recovery from surgery and he was not at all happy about having to spend more time with them and rushed over to see what he could do to get my power back on.
"Money, I need money," I told him. He looked at his wallet and then looked at the kids and then back at me. None of these seemed to be particularly appealing options to him so he went out back to see if the power company had put a lock on the meter or shut it off at the pole…Yes, I live in the country where the electrical lines are above ground, not so far removed from the archaic time period of my grandparents after all.
This is when my ex came in with a great big smile on his face and said the power company had actually removed the meter from the breaker box and all he had to do was pop in a couple of ¾" sections of copper pipe where the meter used to be and he would have me up and running in no time.
The kids seemed very excited by this unexpected turn of events and I began to wonder what kind of hell my ex had put them though while I was incapacitated.
Aside from the legalities of borrowing electricity from the power company, I thought this was probably not the best plan he had ever come up with. It sounded pretty dangerous and if I had not paid the power bill there was a very good chance I had not paid the premium on the life insurance policy I took out on him after our divorce either.
Perhaps another time and place I would have encouraged him to stick his hands in the inner workings of my high voltage electrical box, but I decided this was not one of those times…at least not until I talked to my insurance agent.
The ex thought I was being terribly selfish and was grumbling under his breath as he packed up the kids… I rather enjoyed seeing him this way and did a quick mental calculation of just how long I could keep the electricity off without raising a red flag down at the social services office.
Just then a power truck pulled up and a man got out and said he had taken the wrong meter. He was supposed to take our neighbors and got the house numbers mixed up…claims he'd been shocked a time or two and reads things backwards sometimes.
My ex just about hugged the guy and asked if he needed any help putting my meter back. I told the power man that I really was in no hurry and that maybe he hadn't made a mistake after all and that I knew for a fact I had not paid my bill for sometime now and he would be back in a day or two anyway to take my meter and he might as well just keep it seeing as he was already here.
He said that would be against company policy even though it made a lot of sense to him and he proceeded to reinstall my meter. He then walked over to the neighbor who had been a busy little looky Lou during this whole matter and plucked his meter right off the electrical box with no warning or concern for my neighbor or his family. Cool!
Anyway, the power is back on, at least for the next day or two and the kids have returned to their normal zombie like state parked in front of their computers, televisions and video games.
I decided to see how hard it would be to make a cup of coffee without electricity and found it to be impossible. I wrote the check to the power company and ripped up the one I was going to send to the propane company for the gas they had put in the tank last winter.
If they want their gas back, so be it, I won't need it again until at least November. I checked the bank balance and wrote a check to the life insurance company, just to be safe, and then called the ex, who is scared to death of heights, and told him the roof needed a few minor repairs and it really wasn't safe for the children to be here and to come and pick them up until I could afford to get it repaired.
He was not happy about this as you might imagine and said he'd grab his toolbox and be over right away to fix the roof. I flipped over to the weather channel and confirmed the prediction of gale force winds over the next few hours. A devious smile broke over my face as I unrolled the water hose and started wetting down the roof.
No, no, no… Not to make it slippery, so he could check for leaks, really, I'm not kidding.
For more from the mind of Myla, please go to http://www.mylamadson.com
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