Dear Alembicians,
I thought I would share with you a brief, and now in hindsight, humorous, encounter involving electricity from a few weeks back. I was reminded of this entertaining 20 minutes in my living-room by the "ElectroBOOM" channel reappearing in my Youtube feed, today. The probably unfunny story goes where I was switching amps to use a small Behringer practice amp to show the cats something (the only one connected to speakers, presently; it's cheap, not the best, but cheap and not loud enough to bother the neighbor). I bent down to plug into the instrument input jack when I brushed the adjacent gas heater's iron chassis with my upper arm while still holding the metal chassis of the plug.
Now, I understand some folks may think I regularly suffer from certain forms of paralysis, but that's generally under the influence of benzocaine, general anesthesia/whipped cream, wings and beer, or the approximately 20+ volts and very few amps that ran from the illicitly shorted heater chassis through my trunk and into my amp (my bass was not yet connected, mercifully). This bit of fun yielding a combination of an inverted shimmy and some pro-am mambo warm-ups, while I managed to slur out "gna$h-ho", as in rhymes with "lasso", thinking of our property management before breaking the connection. Mercifully, my wife was not looking, the occurrence didn't last long, I could pass it off, and calmly explain the occurrents (BAD) without either smelling like pot-roast, or twitching any more than is normal.
After the twitching and ache in my arms stopped, there have been no further problems, so no harm, no foul, no problems, and this is a cry for bupkis. I later half-jokingly said to the Mrs. that we should talk to the landlord after we can appropriately document/measure this chassis grounding problem, as I didn't enjoy pretending I was Bob Weir onstage at Wookstock (I am guessing an electrical ignitor is poorly grounded in the gas heater's exterior, but load is load regardless of origin). That quip did not, unfortunately, register, nor did suggesting that she should try the veal and that I would be back next week seem to provide banal entertainment. She seems to enjoy classical music more, so if/when I get rheumatic fever, I can make all the lame "Amadeus" jokes I want, and
then she might laugh. Might.
I guess, at least, I can say that some of you folks are rooting that the Behringer is totally or mostly dead due to the short, and "ha ha". When I get my new multimeter, I can let you know. I'm a touch wary of plugging in anything to see if the amplifier works, or risk another short and some potential burning during use. Besides, it's hard to wear the lobster claw oven/safety mitts and wield an instrument, probe, or soldering iron at the same time.
Safety first.
Oh, for all who like to watch physical comedy, here's ElectroBOOM's channel (
https://www.youtube.com/user/msadaghd), and some of his greatest hits (
I believe he is a part-time comedian, and full-time Canadian, who is a professional electrical engineer/physicist who does his demonstrations safely to entertain people like me, who leave this to the professionals.
Again, everything is fine, I am not trolling or cruising for anything from anyone here. I just thought that this is just a now funny mishap that involved me, the only person I can laugh at pointedly without being deemed worse and more offensive than Golden Corral.
Dang it. Now it's back to square one with that. That's a shocker. Regardless, please pardon the typos.
