High Voltage Runs Through It

I believe there comes a time in every married woman’s life when she realizes that she seriously overestimated one or more of the attributes that initially drew her to her husband. In some cases, the shortcoming is trivial. In my wife’s case, however, it was difficult for her to even comprehend the concept of my inability as a handyman. She grew up with a father, a brother and a slew of uncles, cousins and other male relatives that simply fix stuff. They can weld, cut, hammer, plumb, rewire, service and otherwise handyman just about anything on the planet. She understood the ability to repair as inherent to all men.

Not only do I not possess the ability to repair, I also am inherently devoid of the capacity to diagnose the types of problems that will eventually require the ability to repair. Therefore, to avoid even the possibility of finding myself in a situation that would require either skill, I typically used one or more of the following responses to any trouble:

1. “It’s still under warranty, let’s make sure we don’t void the warranty and just get someone out to look at it.”

2. “It’s getting pretty old. Maybe it’s time to just get a new one.”

3. “We’re renting. The landlord can take care of it.”

I was feeling quite good about the above approach for the first year of our marriage. My good fortune failed in the second year of our marriage when my in-laws came to visit.

We had been having some recurring trouble with the water heater in our rented apartment, but it was always easily resolved using aforementioned excuse number three. However, on this particular occasion, my wife was concerned that her parents would be subjected to a cool-water (the water is never cold in Arizona) shower in the morning if we were unable to do anything about the water heater right away. The conversation went something like this:

ME: “It is a water heater. That’s a very complicated piece of high-voltage equipment that also stores water. Water and electricity don’t mix well. Therefore I don’t want to touch it.”

MY WIFE: “There’s probably a breaker switch on the water heater. We probably just need to check that.”

Let me interject to say that while the words “breaker switch” were recognizable to me as standard English words, I could not derive any actual meaning from them when used together in that fashion. “Breaker” to me is a word that is most commonly followed by the phrase “one – nine” which I commonly used while driving my CB-radio enabled Camaro in high school, but I was quite sure that I had never before heard the phrase “breaker switch”. I continued:

ME: “That may be, but I am quite sure that I don’t know where to find the breaker switch on a water heater. Let’s just call the landlord in the morning.”

MY WIFE: “If we wait, everyone will have to have a cold shower.”

ME: “Cool shower. They’re from Idaho; our cold water will probably strike them as rather warm.”

MY WIFE: “I’ll just go do it.”

As any man with any pride at all knows, this last suggestion was the catalyst needed to get me off my rear and force me to action. Fortunately for me (as will be later made obvious), I had already begun the process of getting ready for bed and had removed my contact lenses. I donned my coke-bottle nighttime glasses and mumbled a few words about breaker switches as I headed out to the water heater.

There may exist a general-purpose guide to manhood that others received during their formative years, but if it does exist, I had never received it therefore the only tool that I have ever been qualified to use was a screwdriver. This night I was faced with a task for which I was unsure whether a screwdriver would provide all of the necessary functionality.

I approached the water heater. From my perspective this device had always been intended to be a black box: unheated water goes in, hot water comes out. Nothing more to know. In reality a water heater is actually a fairly complex device that can be adjusted and maintained. Who knew? Near the bottom of this water heater there was a small panel indicating some sort of heat control and (amazingly) the existence of a breaker switch.

The panel itself was covered by a large yellow sticker advertising a warning about the risk of electric shock to anyone considering the possibility of removing said panel for any reason. In direct opposition to the warning was the fact that the panel was attached with nothing more than two screws, justifying the use of my screwdriver and bolstering my confidence that I could possibly be qualified to attempt this repair.

I hunched down near the panel and quickly removed the first screw. It came out easily and dropped to the floor. At this point I had not yet suffered electrocution or any other excruciating pain – I felt pretty good about my progress. In fact I began to feel that I would succeed at least in proving to my wife that the fabled breaker switch would not actually fix anything but was simply a diversion used by more technical repairmen to defer making a house call.

I thought of it in computer help-desk terms: “Have you rebooted?” The question is, as everyone knows, simply a way for the help-desk operator to get you off the phone because the following statement when you reply, “No I haven’t rebooted yet, I was hoping to be able to save the document that I’ve been writing for the past six hours,” is of course, “Well, you’ll have to reboot. If that doesn’t work, call back.” Click. I was sure that the breaker switch was the water heater equivalent of the computer reboot. I was determined to at least push the button so that when I later called for a repairman I could pre-empt the inevitable question with the much more knowledgeable-sounding statement: “I tried the breaker switch and it’s still not working, so I need you to come out.”

I began removing the second screw from the panel when I noticed that I could save myself some time by only removing the screw part way, then simply turning the panel on the screw. This would save me the time of first removing the screw and also the time of then replacing it later. I began to feel like a true handyman.

By some unfortunate crossing of a bad water-heater panel design, my own pride and laziness and some inexplicable force of nature, the next few seconds of my life seemed to last as long as the Robert Redford film, A River Runs Through It (which – if you haven’t seen it – lasts about as long as a root canal, but is less enjoyable). I crouched toward the panel and pulled it downward to move it out of the way. My wife stood behind me reassuring me that once the panel was removed we would emerge victorious from this exercise in water heater repair.

If you have never opened the panel of a water heater before, you may not know that behind the panel there actually is a breaker reset button and a temperature control knob. In some cases there is also a connection that provides the 220 volts of electricity to the heating elements in the tank. Curiously, the 220-volt-carrying wires are attached to two internal screws whose heads jut out just far enough that if you happen to be wrenching the safety panel around late at night, the panel itself will make contact with both screws simultaneously.

If you have never short-circuited 220 volts using a metal water heater panel, you may not know this: the panel explodes. Basically a large chunk of panel metal instantly bursts into white light and heat sufficient for the removal of eyebrows rushes away from the panel. My glasses absorbed the majority of the explosion, but the searing light temporarily blinded me which made my backward leap/run much more entertaining for my wife to witness.

I ran to the bathroom to nurse my wounds (which weren’t as bad as I would have liked to have sufficiently proven my point to my wife) while she picked up the mess and closed the door to the water heater.

When she finally came to check on me, I was working to maintain a level of rage that would ensure she never again compelled me to such type of action. However, being who I am, constantly considering the humor in any situation, I could hardly feign anger when I considered how funny it must have been to have seen the events from my wife’s perspective. As she entered the room I could see that she was barely able to contain her laughter, though she wanted to appear concerned. We spent the next five minutes laughing hysterically.

She has never asked me to fix anything again.