the power went out on my computer last night, or early this am, at precisely 2am. the UPS kicked in, giving me time to save everything — i would have been crying if i’d lost everything that happened to be open and unsaved at that moment. i shut down and unplugged everything, and noticed that the wall around the electrical outlet was hot. like, seriously HOT. not burning scorching hot, but seriously way too hot for any normal circumstance. so i went to the fusebox and shut off the whole apartment, which was kind of unnecessary. i turned everything back on a few minutes later, thinking the power outage was one of those things fixable by just shutting off and turning on everything in the fuse box. alas, the outlet that blew out was still blown out, but not as hot as before. long story short, the super came to fix it and we discovered that the wire had burned, and that it could well have burst into flames. it did not but the wire and the innards of the electrical outlet were melted and burned to a crisp. bad news, man. i guess i overloaded the outlet with a computer, 2 monitors, a UPS, and other things, but i seriously don’t think i put *that* much stuff on there, and it had been set up for years pretty much identically as it was last night. at any rate, i went to the dollar shop and bought a couple of 25-foot extension cables, and plugged the power strips into separate outlets on the other side of the apartment. now i have wires everywhere again, but i’ll untangle that later.
i think i dodged a bullet last night. that could have been a serious fire, or a serious incident of some sort. wow.
oh, and it proves once again that it pays to get to know your local dollar shop. i happened to notice how this place that looks like it sells little more than no-name underwear and styrofoam cups had a weirdly comprehensive array of computer and electrical cables.
there used to be a dollar shop on broadway, where a duane reade is now. they had htis one hilarious sign over one of the aisles. most of the signs had stuff like “FOOD” or “HOUSEWARES” or similar headers. One aisle, though, had a sign that said “KITCHEN STENCILS”. at first i thought nothing of it, imagining that this was some genre of kitchen gadgetry that was new to me. maybe one used stencils in a way similar to cookie cutters, cutting precision-tuned foodstuffs out of amorphous blobs of bread dough or pancake batter.
alas, i found that the items under the KITCHEN STENCILS sign were nothing more than KITCHEN UTENSILS, including potato peelers, ladles, spatulae, sauce pans, and latex gloves for washing dishes and for general cleaning.
somehow, i deduced, someone had ordered a sign made for to hang over the KITCHEN UTENSILS department of this dollar shop, so that wayward customers in need of a spatula or a sauce pan might be guided by such a helpful bit of signage. somehow the words got lost in translation. maybe someone yelled the words across a crowded room, or over a faint cell-phone connection. whatever the circumstances, the request for a KITCHEN UTENSILS sign got translated into a request for a KITCHEN STENCILS sign, and evidently no one in charge of the dollar shop had a problem with it, because the KITCHEN STENCILS sign dangled over the kitchen utensils department at that dollar shop for a couple of years.
…..
ok, then. i slept little last night, maybe partly on account of anxiety over the red hot electrical outlet situation, but also on account of the pouring rain, that beast of a storm whose every soldier plunged to a smattered death on some earthly surface. i was kept awake by the suicidal rain drops hurtling onto my air conditioner. the electricity was out in one of my bedroom’s outlets, so the air purifier/white noise machine was dead on the floor. so i heard every fucking thing. the shoes clomping around on the floor upstairs at 6am. the clicking of the RAID, which i put in the bedroom a few weeks ago, ironically enough because i thought it might be overloading the electrical outlet which nearly exploded this AM.
