Armed with tools and 50 years experience, he said my door could not be fixed. Who am I to judge? But in an act of desperation, I doused it in WD40. Girl go in, girl go out; you go girl.Today I tackled electricity. Scary, but simple. Essentially there are two wires, black and white. Hot and neutral and sometimes ground.
There are exceptions to every rule. My house straddles them all.
My math was fuzzy or my eyes went cross. Black, red, white, brown, and two identical shits that looked like speaker wire.
Even if you grew up with a calculator you could still use an abacus to count. This was harder than minutes:seconds:frames.
I called for backup, you know, just to be sure. It's simple, but there's cause to pause if you've ever felt the surge. For example, say if you stuck a sharp metal object into a live wall socket...First you say it, then you do it!
I thought it was easy. Simple question, easy answer. I worded it thusly, "this nondescript speaker type wire, how do you tell them apart?" I'm thinking there's a positive and negative or a meter or something.
His response was more of a geometry proof that fell just short of a functional solution. What is this job security? His answer amounted to this:
You guess. Connect the wires, flip the switch, and....after a deliberately uncomfortable pause, I repeated it back to him....stick your finger in the socket? "If you don't get shocked, it's right."
1 comment:
...or you use a feckin' ohmmeter first! Surely you know someone with one of those.
BTW, one of the speaker wire wires is probably ribbed. It ought to be for pleasure, but you never know whether they've connected it to the hole that you screw into or to the little nub hidden in the middle. So unless you have that ohmmeter you have to poke around inside until you feel something go zing!
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