Toasted

06Mar08

“I’m going to get the early train tomorrow. I’ve got some work I need to get through – I’m going to set the alarm early.”

That’s the kind of thing that should set alarm bells of an entirely different type ringing in the Destructo household. If there’s somewhere that I or DestructoBoy! have to be at a specifically early time, chances are something’s going to go horribly wrong.

True to form, it did. The alarm woke us up early. Bleary-eyed, I stumbled into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Then I reached under the cupboards to pull out the toaster. The next few seconds crystallised; they seemed to last forever as pain and heat shot up my arm. It felt like an eternity before I realised I was getting an electric shock and managed to pull my hand away, though it could only have been a matter of seconds. The lights went out; the boiler went off; DestructoBoy! came running out of his cold shower to see what had happened. Seems the toaster had, somehow, become live – when I touched it, it electrocuted me and blew all the fuses in the flat at the same time.

And if we’d lived there more than a week, we might have panicked less at our lack of knowledge of where the fuse box was. Ten minutes of extreme stress (“I’m going to be late for work – I’m not having a cold shower!”) later and we’d managed to restore order to the flat, but I spent most of the day trying to reassure myself that electric shocks probably don’t have delayed repercussions for health. Probably.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: electricals, injuries, moving house, things breaking down