Know Your Place

On February 4^th I received the following email from everyone’s favorite energy company, PG&E, titled PGE Bill Adjustment.

 

Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to let you know about a billing issue affecting your PG&E account number listed above. Your account was underbilled by $-1875.00. As part of our process, we review our billing operations to ensure that our customers are billed correctly, and during those reviews, we sometimes find a billing exception that may result in a bill adjustment.

 

If you recall – as my wife surely does – this summer I neglected to realize that our solar panel system breaker had tripped, causing our giant solar array to be nothing more than the world’s ugliest home improvement project for the hottest two and a half months of the year – possibly of the decade. This wonderful learning experience caused us to get a true-up bill this year that is so large it can be seen from space.

While PG&E is not willing to do anything crazy like print in bold at the top of your August bill, “HEY! YOU DIDN’T PRODUCE A SINGLE kWh LAST MONTH!”, they are willing to “work with you” after the fact in these breaker-tripping situations. They are graciously allowing me to pay them the true-up sum equal to the gross national product of Cuba in twelve equal payments with no interest.

Now, even though they know that they agreed to let me pay it over twelve months, they still list the gargantuan remaining total as my “bill amount” each month, as if I was in charge of lighting up lower Manhattan for the last thirty days.

So, since I’m used to seeing big numbers – numbers that don’t always fit on only one line of the bill – from them, when I received the above email, I didn’t fall directly out of my chair. I actually scoffed a little under my breath, like, “Is that all you got?”

Then I read it again and had to ask – myself, of course, not customer service… I mean, who can get a hold of those people? – what do you mean you “underbilled” my account by a negative number? Is that just a cute way of saying you overbilled me because you don’t want to actually say that?

And which is worse? Admitting you underbilled me or overbilled me? On the one hand, you look like you don’t know what you’re doing, but at least you get to take more of my money while I get even more frustrated and disappointed with you. On the other hand, you still look like an idiot, but I’m happier, but you have to give me money back. Tough call, there.

Then I thought about it more and laughed at myself for even thinking that through. This is PG&E. There’s no way they would ever admit they overbilled me! Ha ha ha. So silly.

Their nice email went on to say:

 

We have corrected the issue, and a bill adjustment will be reflected on your next statement. We apologize, and we are working to improve our billing system to prevent issues like this from affecting you in the future. You do not need to take any action at this time.

 

I guess you don’t HAVE to take any action at this time, but if your heart stopped working, or simply blew right out of your chest when you read their email, you may WANT to take some action involving dialing 9-1-1.

Anyway… on February 5^th – a whole day later – I received another email from them, entitled Correction to Previous eMail- PGE Bill Adjustment

 

Please disregard the previous email you received on February 4th 2025, regarding this bill adjustment.  The amount as stated was incorrect.  This notification contains the corrected bill adjustment for your account.  We apologize for any inconvenience.

Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to let you know about a billing issue affecting your PG&E account number listed above. Your account was underbilled by $-18.75. As part of our process, we review our billing operations to ensure that our customers are billed correctly, and during those reviews, we sometimes find a billing exception that may result in a bill adjustment.

We have corrected the issue, and a bill adjustment will be reflected on your next statement. We apologize, and we are working to improve our billing system to prevent issues like this from affecting you in the future. You do not need to take any action at this time.

 

So, let me get this straight, PG&E… You are working to improve your billing system, but you just sent out an email to, I’m assuming, a crap-ton of people, with a cardiac-event-inducing decimal place error? I mean, decimal place is second-grade stuff, fellas! Sounds like things are going great with the billing system improvement project.

Also, PG&E, just so you all know, the fact that you are having large-scale decimal place errors in a large-scale bill adjustment process does NOT give us, your customers, a sense of security that you are correctly tallying up all the kilowatts we’re using and sending you.

In fact, it really makes me wonder why you’re so willing to extend me the grace of a no-interest payment plan. Is that because you’re just not 100% sure I really owe you all that money in the first place?

Maybe it’s time to get the State of California in there to check up on you guys and sort this all out? Getting the government involved should clear things right up, right?

Ha! Oh, man, I crack myself up sometimes!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2025 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge 

Solar Meltdown

We got solar panels in November of 2018. It was exciting! Our power company, the universally loved PG&E here in Northern California, finally made the decision easy for us after we had a $600+ bill that summer. More on them later.

Now, when you get solar, you are excited about making electricity instead of having to buy it. You get a cool app on your phone that shows you the real-time solar production happening on your roof. You can see that the panels in the direct sunlight are pumping out 1.56 kWh each! You have no idea how much 1.56 kWh is – or even what it is – and you have no idea how each individual kWh translates to your electric bill, but you’re pretty sure it’s a really good thing!

If you think that PG&E will tell you how each kWh translates to your bill, you are wrong. They say that they are showing you on your bill, complete with numbers and charts, but what they are really showing you is Chinese algebra with no equals signs and no dollar amounts. More on them later.

Anyway, your electricity bills continue to come every month, but now they are much, much, much lower. You are happy. Eventually, you start to see a dollar figure show up in the corner of the bill labeled “Expected True-up Amount.” On your one-year anniversary of getting solar, your true-up amount is due. This is the difference between the amount of electricity you used and the amount you produced.

The true-up is the one thing on your bill expressed in dollars, and it is not negative. You owe them money. And you owe them more money than you think you should because you have a LOT of solar panels on your roof, and they were not cheap. This is when you find out that PG&E pays you about $0.0000000023 for every kWh you produce, but charges you roughly $756.00 for every kWh they send you. More on them later.

You go through another year of checking the app and getting happy about how many kWh’s you’re making when it’s sunny, cursing the clouds and rain, and watching your estimated true-up number rise and fall through the seasons, betting yourself on where it will land come solar anniversary time.

After a few years, you realize the true-up is staying fairly steady at a few hundred bucks, and you check the app less and less often. And if you got solar in 2018, by 2024 you hardly ever check the app, and basically ignore the true-up number.

You ignore it until three days ago when you were online paying your PG&E bill and you glanced over to see the Estimated True-up Amount they are showing is three times higher than your mortgage payment. Umm, what?

You initially think that something went wrong over at PG&E. Maybe your SmartMeter broke and they can’t see how much your solar panels are producing. But then you go outside and see that the SmartMeter seems to be on and working just fine.

Then you grab your phone and go to check the app that you haven’t looked at since you can’t remember when. The app is requiring you to log in and that’s when you vaguely remember looking at the app a month or so ago and seeing the same login screen and saying to yourself, “I have no idea what my login info is. I’ll check that later when I’m near my password list.”

When you finally get the app open, you see that it is not showing any production at all yesterday, or the day before. The app talks to the panels through a gateway that is located in an electrical box under the solar panel shutoff switch. You get a screwdriver and open that box to see that there is no power at all to the gateway. You check the circuit breakers, but a visual inspection shows they’re all in the ON position.

That’s when you call the solar installation company and they start walking you through the troubleshooting procedure. After a few questions, they recommend turning the whole system off and back on at the main breaker. When you go to touch the main breaker switch, it falls loosely away from the ON position to the middle “tripped” position.

Holy…

When you flip the breaker OFF and then ON, the gateway immediately comes to life, and your SmartMeter suddenly changes direction from “Receiving” to “Delivering.”

Son of a…

And on that day, September 30^th, 94 degrees at 3:00pm, you go back through the app and finally figure out that your solar panel main breaker tripped off on July 11^th and 1:26pm.

Mother…

Not only was my giant solar array just an ugly roof decoration for over two and a half months, but it was off and useless at the worst possible time – during the hottest two and a half months that California has seen in a very long time. We had multiple record-breaking heatwaves when our A/C ran all day and most of the night, without a single solar cell on my roof doing anything about it.

Now, I know that there are more than a few places I can go look whenever I want to make sure my solar panels are on and functioning, and I’m well aware of the fact that I failed to check any of them during probably the two and a half most critical solar power months in our system’s history.

But here’s my problem with you, PG&E. You know I have solar. You know I used to send you electricity every month. You know I didn’t abandon the house because I’m still paying my bills and sucking down kWh’s at a furious pace. So why in the hell is there not a note in bold at the top of my August bill saying, “HEY! YOU DIDN’T PRODUCE A SINGLE kWh LAST MONTH!!”?

Don’t bother answering – I already know how much you’re looking forward to sending me this year’s true-up bill.

Again, I know I only have myself – and possibly a crappy main breaker – to blame. So why am I complaining, you ask? I’m not complaining. I’m trying to prevent this from happening to anyone else.

If this cautionary tale saves even one of you from the same fate, then it… would be amazing if you considered sharing some of those savings with me so I can pay my horrendous true-up bill.

Thanks in advance!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

Cavepeople Unite

I live in California, and since we don’t have hurricanes or tornadoes to speak of, we got mudslides and wildfires instead. The mudslides aren’t so bad, since they’re never near my house. The wildfires, on the other hand, are scary.

Not many people know this, but California is not one giant beach with Hollywood on one end. Only the left side of the state looks like that. The middle part is covered with food. You’re welcome. The right side is covered in trees and mountains, in an attempt to keep those weirdo Nevadans out. It’s the right side that catches on fire.

We live on the border of the middle and the right side. Tragically, we lost an entire town and a lot of people to a fast-moving wildfire last year. PG&E is our utility company that supplies nearly the whole state with gas and electricity. They were sued because it was found that the fire started at one of their transformers. They declared bankruptcy due to the lawsuit, but somehow, remain our utility company, proving once again that no one knows how bankruptcy works.

Suing them for the tragic fire is a double-edged sword. On the one side, they provide power. Electricity is the only thing that keeps us from being cavepeople, and we take it for granted every day and are very quick to dismiss its true importance.

On the other side, we have been paying PG&E roughly a zillion dollars per kilowatt for the last three hundred years, and the only equipment they have updated regularly are the executive jets.

So, it comes as no surprise that social media is all aflutter today with the latest developments in the PG&E saga. They are now turning off power preemptively, in an attempt to keep another fire from starting. They do this when the winds reach (or might reach) a certain velocity. As of this morning, that velocity seems to be a sliding scale, ranging from “no wind whatsoever” to “kinda breezy.”

We were alerted last night by the school district that some of the schools might be closed today, which caused every school-age child in the district to simultaneously text each other bad information. Parent braced themselves. Local stores sold out of dry ice almost instantly, and everyone went to gas up their cars, which are vital tools in keeping our cell phones alive.

The outages began early this morning. Perishable food, gasoline, and lost episodes of The Voice are not the only things being wasted by these outages. Collectively, the California Facebook users have already wasted two hundred thousand man-days of productivity arguing about why this is or is not a good idea.

Whether or not a planned power outage is a good idea is irrelevant once your power is actually turned off, so in an effort to be helpful in these strange times, I thought I would provide some power outage operational and safety tips.

1) Buy non-perishable snacks, like Twinkies and beef jerky. Keep them out and handy. Eat all these snacks before the power actually goes out, because you were bored and have no self-control.

2) Stock up on batteries. Realize when you get to the store that you actually don’t really know what size batteries the emergency flashlights take, so just buy a lot of each kind. The ones you don’t need can be used as currency in the post-apocalyptic nightmare that will soon become your life.

3) The store you are at is obviously already out of both regular ice and dry ice, so ask the clerk if they know where you can get some. They will say no. Complain to them about their stocking levels of vital power outage-related merchandise even though you know the bag boy you’re talking to has about as much store management decision making power as the Twinkies you are buying.

4) Since the bag boy was no help, ask on every social media platform about where to get any form of ice. No one will know, but everyone will share a story about not finding any either and a tirade about stocking levels of vital power outage-related merchandise. #Icemageddon

5) Return home and realize that the batteries you just purchased are worthless because all the dead batteries inside your emergency flashlights have corroded, welding themselves inside the tubes, becoming one with the now useless flashlights forever.  

6) Wait patiently for the power to go out, surfing all the social media posts about whether power is on or off in a particular neighborhood. Post that you still have power, but never give your location. Just assume everyone knows exactly where you live. In the morning, reluctantly get out of bed and start your normal routine when your stupid alarm goes off and you realize the power is still on.

7) If the power actually does go out, turn on your cell phone flashlight and locate the bag of empty, non-perishable snack wrappers. Curse your non-existent willpower.

8) Hunt for candles since all your emergency flashlights are just cylindrical paperweights.

9) Realize the only candles in your house are the scented decorative ones in the guest bath and you’ll be damned if you’re ever going to light those and waste them on this!

10) Settle in on the couch and get back on social media, asking if anyone else just lost power, but again, do not disclose your location. #SoDark #HopeMyPhoneBatteryHoldsOut

11) Realize you no longer have WiFi. Realize that that is probably your biggest problem. Get back on social media to talk about WiFi and data plans, phone carriers, etc. #PG&EBetterPayForMyData

12) Open the refrigerator and momentarily wonder why there is no light. Laugh at yourself for being dumb. Close it quickly to keep the cold in.

13) Walk to the bathroom and flip the light switch on by habit. Laugh at yourself for being dumb. Wonder if the toilet will flush with no power. It does. Be amazed that you still have water and gas with no electricity to, like, get them to your house and stuff.

14) Realize that you have no idea what you will do if this lasts more than four hours.

15) Feed the kids crackers for dinner by the light of the gas stovetop burner that you lit with the long butane barbecue lighter.

16) Go to bed and pray.

So far, so good here at Casa de Smidge. I just hope they keep our power on long enoug

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Extreme Home Repair - Repost

I cheated death again last week. I managed to successfully add onto an existing 20-amp GFI circuit from my pool’s 30-amp sub panel. (I really don’t know if I used all those electrical terms correctly, but it sounded cool, didn’t it?)

I managed to install two new outlets and two ceiling fan boxes under our backyard patio cover - wired them and everything - and they actually work! And as of today, the patio cover has not exploded into a fireball, so that’s a big win. (I didn’t bother to get a permit, so don’t tell anyone. Also, if you see a big fireball in my backyard, just ignore it, please.)

I learned three things in my triumph over electricity this past week:

1) If I didn’t love being an author so much, I could probably go equally as broke being a slow and unknowledgeable electrician.

2) Using a screwdriver and pliers near a stucco wall shreds your knuckles faster than jamming your hand into a Cuisinart.

3)  Blood doesn’t come off stucco very easily, and if you try to do it wrong, you just add more blood.

My knuckles are still a little too swollen to type effectively. (I have typed this entire thing with my elbows and my nose. It has taken six hours.) So instead, I am revisiting a column from a few years ago about a slightly less successful electrical project.

Enjoy!

I think every once in a while, a man has to cheat death in order to feel truly alive. Either that, or because of our male DNA, we just keep doing really stupid things, surviving them somehow, then telling ourselves that every once in a while, a man has to cheat death in order to feel truly alive.

Since I gave up professional snowmobile motocross, I tend to mainly cheat death these days with home repair. It’s a win-win, really, because not only do I get to feel truly alive, but occasionally I accidentally fix something. This last time was not one of those times.

Our air conditioner quit working last week. That was a very unfortunate situation, since our house is currently sitting on the surface of the sun. It was 104 degrees the day it died. That is not cool. Fortunately - for her anyway - my wife was leaving with the kids the next day for a week-long excursion without me. That meant I would be left to sweat profusely by myself until the air conditioner guy could come out. “No problem,” I thought, as I dialed up the repair man, “I can make it a day or two.”

“Sorry, sir, but we’re scheduled out past a week at this point. We can be there next Wednesday.”

“Uhh… Can you repeat that? I had sweat inside my ear and I thought I just heard you say next Wednesday.”

It turns out that air conditioner problems are a pretty common occurrence here on the sun, and I had heard him correctly. I reluctantly scheduled my convenient four-hour window of time, and hung up the phone. As I wiped my face sweat from the phone’s front screen, I vowed to try and fix it myself in the meantime. I was mildly concerned that I might accidentally dehydrate until I remembered that beer is full of water. No problem there, but I really just wanted to be cool, and I could always cancel the appointment. Besides, I hadn’t cheated death in a while.

Through some very high-level troubleshooting at the circuit breaker panel on the side of my house, I had noticed that the breaker was tripping when the air conditioner tried to come on. I also noticed that the breaker would trip even when I had the A/C turned off. I obviously had a bad circuit breaker! I can fix that! I think…

I know what I’m doing with electricity in the same way that a teenager knows how to drive a car. I am familiar with the main concept, but I am severely lacking in skill and comprehension on some of the finer points.

What I do know is that electricity is amazing. Take a refrigerator for example. Electricity runs the compressor that makes the refrigerator cold, in turn, making your beer cold. Electricity also runs the little light bulb inside the refrigerator, making it possible to find the cold beer, even in the dark. Light bulbs are hot. Electricity is responsible for both cold and hot in the same machine, all resulting in the ability to find and drink a cold beer, any time of the day or night. Simply amazing!

I also know a little about the units involved in describing electrical circuits. Many people are confused by the relationship between Amps and Volts, and many others simply don’t know what they are at all. It’s really quite simple, actually.

Amps are the measurement of electricity’s ability to kill you, in units of consecutive missed heartbeats. Getting shocked by a 3-amp circuit will probably be survivable, but a 30-amp circuit will do you in. You simply cannot survive missing thirty consecutive heartbeats.

Voltage is the measure of how far the electricity will throw you while the amps are killing you. Volts are measured in inches per death. For instance, a 480-volt circuit will throw you 480 inches, or 40 feet, while the amps are turning you into a baked potato.

The circuit for my A/C unit has a 40-amp breaker. Forty consecutive heartbeats are too many to miss. I think it is also 220 volts, which means if I screwed up, my body would be found a little over eighteen feet away from the panel. That would put me squarely in the middle of my neighbor’s driveway.

Speaking of my neighbor, I was a little conflicted there. My family had left, so I was all alone. I wanted someone to know that I was about to attempt to cheat death, on the off chance that I had only missed ten or so heartbeats and was only blown five or six feet from the panel and clinging to life. On the other hand, our neighbor is old and I didn’t want to scare her. I decided someone was bound to drive by and see me smoking on the driveway, so I didn’t bother her.

I removed my wedding ring. I’m not a hundred percent sure why this is necessary, but I just know that professional electricians don’t wear them. I think it’s so when your wife is collecting your personal belongings after you die, she doesn't have to try and pull it off your charred ring finger.

I then watched a few YouTube videos on how to change a breaker, and instantly became an expert. I got my screwdriver and approached the electrical panel, mostly almost confident. I carefully unscrewed the panel cover and carefully removed it, very carefully. I was sweaty.

There, behind the circuit breakers, I could now see the “bus bar,” which is a Latin for “metal strip of death.” It is a large copper plate that all the circuit breakers clip onto, and it is brimming with kill-you-instantly electricity. I was fairly sure that I could disable the bus bar by switching the large main circuit breaker off. I could see another copper plate coming from under another protective cover that looked like it was going to the main breaker, but I wanted to be sure.

I carefully unscrewed the other cover and carefully removed it, very carefully. There behind the panel, I was face-to-face with all of the electricity for the entire neighborhood, coming in from the street on two wires as thick as Costco polish sausages. This was not on any of the videos.

I should not have removed this cover.

Crap.

Sure enough, they were attached to the plate running to the main breaker, so I was almost confident that shutting the main breaker off would kill the bus bar, but I knew for a fact there was no way to shut off the power to the two giant cables of doom that I had just uncovered.

I was now sweating and moving like the guy diffusing the bomb in the action film. If I accidentally touched the metal cover or my screwdriver to either of these humongous wires, I would receive enough Amps and Volts to miss a month’s worth of heartbeats and weld my body to the stop sign at the end of the street. Despite the gallons of sweat and nervous hand tremors, I managed to replace the cover and screw it down without incident.

Crisis averted. Death cheated, yet again.

I switched off the main, removed the old 40-amp breaker, and took it to Lowe’s to find a new one. They had an exact match, and new one in hand, I drove back to my house confident and even a little proud. Today, I know everything there is to know about electricity. Today I am an electrical super-genius. Today I am Tony Stark from Iron Man.

I slapped that new breaker in, buttoned up the panel cover, and flipped the main back on. Confidently, I flipped the new 40-amp breaker on… only to have it trip right back off.

Hmm… Electrical super-genius Tony Stark did not seem to fix anything here. In fact, all I seemed to have accomplished was spending eleven dollars on a breaker I didn’t need and getting to reset all the clocks inside an 85-degree house. Not awesome.

After spending the majority of the rest of the week in my car with the A/C running, I’m now in the middle of my convenient four-hour window, waiting for the real electrician to arrive and actually fix something. I don’t think I’ll tell him this story.

Oh, well. At least I cheated death. I feel truly alive!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy

Get the LED Out

Once again, Early January Smidge has screwed over Late November Smidge. Thanks for writing me a note or something, you idiot. I honestly don’t know what I’m thinking sometimes.

If you have read this column for any length of time, you know how I feel about Christmas lights. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief summary: I hate them. And I love them. It’s complicated. I love to see them on my house when they’re all working. It’s magical. I don’t really mind the chore of putting them up and taking them down, either. I just despise them more than anything on the planet when they don’t work. The five-foot section of uncooperative lights in the middle of the string is my mortal nemesis. “Hate” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of my feelings toward non-functional light strings.

Apparently, for me, owning and operating Christmas lights is like having a baby. Sure, lights can be expensive and uncooperative like kids, and some are brilliant and some are not so bright, just like kids, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the way that God doesn’t allow you to remember anything about what it was really like when you had the newborn, or you’d never do it again.

It’s only when you have the second kid and you’re going through all the sleepless nights of crying and wailing - some of it even from the baby - that you remember what the first one was like. It’s then that you stare at each other and say, “What were we thinking?” Then you do it a third time and start to question whether or not you are really truly sane.

Much like the first few months with a newborn, I only have a foggy memory of my struggle with the lights last year. I seem to recall a few issues with outages, but when it came time to put them up again this year, they weren’t there. All I know is when I opened up the plastic tub that was supposed to contain my icicle lights, there were no icicle lights.

Where are they? I opened up a tub marked “Extra X-mas Lights” but they weren’t there either. I picked up a random string of old mini lights and saw the black film on the inside of one of the bulbs and it all came flooding back to me. The bitter cold January day. The bitterness in my heart. The ladder. The trash can directly under the ladder receiving the light strings as they came off the eaves...

It seems I threw out all my old icicle lights last year when I took them down, and I was either so upset at all the five-foot outages, or so traumatized by the sheer amount of little incandescent bulbs that had gone completely black on the inside, never to light up again, that I must have completely blocked out the incident.

Thanks again for the heads up, Early January Smidge. You can be a real pain.

Just like with our three boys, I decided to take the lemons life had handed me and make lemonade. (The boys love to have a lemonade stand when the neighbors bring us lemons. What did you think I meant?) Late November Smidge put a smile on his face and declared, “This is the year we will upgrade to the completely hassle-free LED icicle lights! They don’t burn out.”

Then I realized I was alone in the garage talking to myself, so I went inside and declared the same thing to my wife.

“Great weekend to buy lights,” she said. “Good call, Einstein.”

Hmm...

This was, of course, happening this past weekend on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which is National Husbands Put up the Christmas Lights Day.

The Thanksgiving week schedule is as follows:

Pre-Black Friday Sales Wednesday

Thanksgiving Thursday

Black Friday

Put up the Christmas Lights while your Wife goes to the Black-Friday-All-Weekend-Long Sales Saturday

Leftover Turkey and Football while your Wife Mops up at the Black-Friday-All-Weekend-Long Sales Sunday

Cyber Monday

Giving Tuesday (and Last Chance for Cyber Monday Deal Extensions Tuesday)

Look up the Credit Card Balance and Have a Mild Cardiac Incident Wednesday

There are only two things in the entire known universe not on sale the weekend after Thanksgiving: Christmas lights and extension cords. Thankfully, I also needed a new extension cord.

I pried the smoking credit card from my wife’s hand and headed to my local Home Improvement Warehouse. I knew right where to go, since the Christmas decorations section has been up since August. With six strings of amazing LED icicle light technology and one extension cord, I smiled at the checkout lady, inserted my credit card into the chip reader, then closed my eyes, stuck my fingers in my ears, and said la-la-la-la-la until the transaction was complete.

Back to the house I went, impending joy brimming in my heart at the thought of never having to chase down an icicle light bulb outage again. LED’s, after all, are magical computer-like technology, or something. Who knows what they really are, but they don’t burn out like regular light bulbs, so I’m happy.

Up they go onto the eaves, powered up by the brand new extension cord, just as dusk is falling on a brisk November evening. Brilliant electronic artificially bright white light illuminates the front of our house making all my Christmas wishes come tru... What in the actual hell is that?

Five stinkin’ feet of LED icicle light string, completely dead, right in the center of the house.

Get the trash can. I quit.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Extreme Home Repair

I think every once in a while a man has to cheat death in order to feel truly alive. Either that, or because of our male DNA, we just keep doing really stupid things, surviving them somehow, then telling ourselves that every once in a while a man has to cheat death in order to feel truly alive.

Since I gave up professional snowmobile motocross and extreme cage fighting, I tend to mainly cheat death these days with home repair. It’s a win-win, really, because not only do I get to feel truly alive, but occasionally I accidentally fix something. This last time was not one of those times.

Our air conditioner quit working last week. That was a very unfortunate situation, since our house is currently sitting on the surface of the sun. It was 104 degrees the day it died. That is not cool. Fortunately - for her anyway - my wife was leaving with the kids the next day for a week-long excursion without me. That meant I would be left to sweat profusely by myself until the air conditioner guy could come out. “No problem,” I thought, as I dialed up the repair man, “I can make it a day or two.”

“Sorry, sir, but we’re scheduled out past a week at this point. We can be there next Wednesday.”

“Uhh… Can you repeat that? I had sweat inside my ear and I thought I just heard you say next Wednesday.”

It turns out that air conditioner problems are a pretty common occurrence here on the sun, and I had heard him correctly. I reluctantly scheduled my convenient four-hour window of time, and hung up the phone. As I wiped my face sweat from the phone’s front screen, I vowed to try and fix it myself in the meantime. I was mildly concerned that I might accidentally dehydrate until I remembered that beer is full of water. No problem there, but I really just wanted to be cool, and I could always cancel the appointment. Besides, I hadn’t cheated death in a while.

Through some very high-level troubleshooting at the circuit breaker panel on the side of my house, I had noticed that the breaker was tripping when the air conditioner tried to come on. I also noticed that the breaker would trip even when I had the A/C turned off. I obviously had a bad circuit breaker! I can fix that! I think…

I know what I’m doing with electricity in the same way that a teenager knows how to drive a car. I am familiar with the main concept, but I am severely lacking in skill and comprehension on some of the finer points.

What I do know is that electricity is amazing. Take a refrigerator for example. Electricity runs the compressor that makes the refrigerator cold, in turn, making your beer cold. Electricity also runs the little light bulb inside the refrigerator, making it possible to find the cold beer, even in the dark. Light bulbs are hot. Electricity is responsible for both cold and hot in the same machine, all resulting in the ability to find and drink a cold beer, any time of the day or night. Simply amazing!

I also know a little about the units involved in describing electrical circuits. Many people are confused by the relationship between Amps and Volts, and many others simply don’t know what they are at all. It’s really quite simple, actually.

Amps are the measurement of electricity’s ability to kill you, in units of consecutive missed heartbeats. Getting shocked by a 3-amp circuit will probably be survivable, but a 30-amp circuit will do you in. You simply cannot survive missing thirty consecutive heartbeats.

Voltage is the measure of how far the electricity will throw you while the amps are killing you. Volts are measured in inches per death. For instance, a 480-volt circuit will throw you 480 inches, or 40 feet, while the amps are turning you into a baked potato.

The circuit for my A/C unit has a 40-amp breaker. Forty consecutive heartbeats are too many to miss. I think it is also 220 volts, which means if I screwed up, my body would be found a little over eighteen feet away from the panel. That would put me squarely in the middle of my neighbor’s driveway.

Speaking of my neighbor, I was a little conflicted there. My family had left, so I was all alone. I wanted someone to know that I was about to attempt to cheat death, on the off chance that I had only missed ten or so heartbeats and was only blown five or six feet from the panel and clinging to life. On the other hand, our neighbor is old and I didn’t want to scare her. I decided someone was bound to drive by and see me smoking on the driveway, so I didn’t bother her.

I removed my wedding ring. I’m not a hundred percent sure why this is necessary, but I just know that professional electricians don’t wear them. I think it’s so when your wife is collecting your personal belongings after you die, she doesn't have to try and pull it off your charred ring finger.

I then watched a few YouTube videos on how to change a breaker, and instantly became an expert. I got my screwdriver and approached the electrical panel, mostly almost confident. I carefully unscrewed the panel cover and carefully removed it, very carefully. I was sweaty.

There, behind the circuit breakers, I could now see the “bus bar,” which is a Latin for “metal strip of death.” It is a large copper plate that all the circuit breakers clip onto, and it is brimming with kill-you-instantly electricity. I was fairly sure that I could disable the bus bar by switching the large main circuit breaker off. I could see another copper plate coming from under another protective cover that looked like it was going to the main breaker, but I wanted to be sure.

I carefully unscrewed the other cover and carefully removed it, very carefully. There behind the panel, I was face-to-face with all of the electricity for the entire neighborhood, coming in from the street on two wires as thick as Costco polish sausages. This was not on any of the videos.

I should not have removed this cover.

Crap.

Sure enough, they were attached to the plate running to the main breaker, so I was almost confident that shutting the main breaker off would kill the bus bar, but I knew for a fact there was no way to shut off the power to the two giant cables of doom that I had just uncovered.

I was now sweating and moving like the guy diffusing the bomb in the action film. If I accidentally touched the metal cover or my screwdriver to either of these humongous wires, I would receive enough Amps and Volts to miss a month’s worth of heartbeats and weld my body to the stop sign at the end of the street. Despite the gallons of sweat and nervous hand tremors, I managed to replace the cover and screw it down without incident.

Crisis averted. Death cheated, yet again.

I switched off the main, removed the old 40-amp breaker, and took it to Lowe’s to find a new one. They had an exact match, and new one in hand, I drove back to my house confident and even a little proud. Today, I know everything there is to know about electricity. Today I am an electrical super-genius. Today I am Tony Stark from Iron Man.

I slapped that new breaker in, buttoned up the panel cover, and flipped the main back on. Confidently, I flipped the new 40-amp breaker on… only to have it trip right back off.

Hmm… Electrical super-genius Tony Stark did not seem to fix anything here. In fact, all I seemed to have accomplished was spending eleven dollars on a breaker I didn’t need and getting to reset all the clocks inside an 85-degree house. Not awesome.

After spending the majority of the rest of the week in my car with the A/C running, I’m now in the middle of my convenient four-hour window, waiting for the real electrician to arrive and actually fix something. I don’t think I’ll tell him this story.

Oh, well. At least I cheated death. I feel truly alive!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

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The Dog Collar

There is a chill in the air. The mornings are crisp, and the afternoons are staying cool. The calendar says November, and that can mean only one thing for yours truly: Pheasant season. I am a bird hunter, and have been all my life.

You know the old saying; the only thing better than owning a swimming pool is having a friend who owns a swimming pool? The same is true for dogs if you are a bird hunter. I don’t own dogs, but my friend does. Actually, he’s also the one with the pool. He’s a really good friend!

I had been toying with the idea of getting a dog of my own, but there was an incident the night before opening day a few years back that changed my mind forever. I never realized how dangerous dog collars could be.

During the summer my friend had purchased two new remote collars for his pair of German Shorthair pointers. Dogs are supposed to stay close in front of the hunters during the hunt, but occasionally -- especially at the beginning of the season when they are extra excited to be back in the field -- the dogs get a little overzealous and get too far out in front. Just like my children, when dogs are excited about what they’re doing, they apparently lose the ability to hear their master’s voice. That’s where the remote collars come in. (For the dogs, not the kids.)

The collars have two modes of operation. They have an audible tone that alerts the dog that his or her attention is needed, and a small electric jolt that commands the dog’s attention if the tone is ignored.  My friend’s brand new setup had a single remote that controlled both collars, and it wasn’t until the night before opening day of pheasant season that he realized he hadn’t even taken them out of their packaging yet. He put the two new collars on the wall charger, got batteries for the remote, and, being male, threw the directions in the trash can.

It was getting late, and we were meeting the next morning at oh-dark-thirty to hunt. When he decided it had probably been long enough, he took the two collars off the charger and began packing everything up. Then he had a thought: These collars were new, and the last thing he wanted was to be out in the field thinking the collars were working when they weren’t. He also wanted to make sure he knew which collar went with each set of buttons on the dual remote, so he wasn’t accidentally calling the wrong dog. He needed to test them.

He grabbed the remote and tested the audible tones. They worked great, and he was able to verify which buttons went with which collar. So far, so good. Then he tested the electricity. He put the power setting on level 1, and put his index finger on the silver contact inside the collar.

He pressed the button with his thumb.

Nothing.

Hmmm.

He touched the silver contact in the other collar, and pressed the same button.

Nothing.

Uh oh. Maybe he didn’t charge them long enough. Or maybe setting number 1 is such a small electrical current that it’s hard to actually feel.

Go to level 2.

Press the button.

Nothing.

Other collar, same button.

Nothing.

What is wrong with these things?

Let’s try level 4.

Nothing.

Dang it! I need these things to work tomorrow. They must have been charged up OK, because the tone works just fine, and it’s nice and loud. Maybe the electricity levels are just really light?

Try level 6.

Press the button.

Nothing.

Other button.

Nothing

Other collar, same button.

Nothing.

Other collar different button.

Nothing.

Damn it! Are these things defective? What kind of crap did I buy here?

All the way to level 10.

Nothing.

These things are broken! Now what?

Hmmm…

Maybe you have to be touching both silver contacts inside the collar?

Press the button…

Level number 10 on a remote dog collar is likely made for when your dog is over 20 miles away, or possibly when he is defiantly eating one of the birds in front of you, despite your verbal threats to his life. But even if you hit your dog with level 10, he would only feel a momentary shock. It turns out, however, that if you yourself are holding the button down, and receiving the level-10 shock, it works a little differently.

Since your body runs on electricity, adding more can cause your muscles to contract without your consent. If one or more of those muscles happen to be holding down a button, you may find yourself temporarily unable to release said button. It’s sort of an electrical “Catch-22.”

When my friend’s upper body hit the ground, his thumb finally came off the button. He found himself on the floor of his living room, still clutching the now smoking dog collar, having fallen forward over the ottoman, legs in the air behind him, face in the carpet, and drooling. There was a strong taste of burnt metal coming from the fillings in his molars, and he was pretty sure his heart had stopped for at least ten to fifteen seconds.

It was 10:30pm when he inadvertently Tasered himself. By 11:00pm he had somewhat regained his sense of direction and smell, but despite needing to be up at 5:00am, he stayed awake for another three hours, afraid if he fell asleep he might slip into a coma.

When he arrived to the hunt the next morning, I had never seen a man so deprived of sleep looking so wide awake. Or so surprised.

After I heard the story -- and after I got done laughing -- I gave up any notion of ever owning my own hunting dog. I don’t need any more electro-shock therapy in my life. I get enough already from my home improvement projects.

I’ll leave the dog ownership up to my good friend. (And the pool ownership, too.) Come to think of it, it’s a good thing he wasn’t standing next to his pool that night. That could have been ugly.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

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