pilfered_words

(Responding to this post)

Oh man, this one time, my friend was like, ‘oh hey, there are some naked wires sticking out of the wall! That is probably not how things should be!” And instead of leaving the wires alone like a normal person, and asking the landlord to do something about it, he decided this was so Not Safe that he needed to do something right away. Even though he’d been living in that apartment for like a year and a half by that point, and nothing had happened.

So he took a paperclip, and very carefully, without actually touching anything, dropped it across the wires to close the circuit. The way he explained his logic at the time was, “either they aren’t live wires, and then it’s fine, or they are, and then this will just cause a short circuit and we’ll hit the circuit breakers, and then everything will be fine.”

Three months and five electrician visits later, they were pretty sure they had caught the last of the pieces burned, fused, or otherwise damaged by that short circuit. Probably.

My friend, incidentally, has a PhD in math from MIT, which goes to show you that fancy degrees don’t actually guarantee common sense.

(#to be fair#he usually has common sense#this was an uncharacteristic lapse)