Dave Barry: The Taming Of The Screw

Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who’s willing to pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop for lumber, hardware, and toasters all in one location. Notice I say “shop for,” as opposed to “obtain.” This is the major drawback of home centers: They are always out of everything except artificial Christmas trees. The home center employees have no time to reorder merchandise, because they are too busy applying little price stickers to every object—every board, washer, nail, and screw—in the entire store. Once they’ve applied a round of stickers, they immediately set out to apply a new set, with slightly higher prices, to the same merchandise. This leaves them no time to learn about the products they sell, so it is utterly futile to ask them for help.

Let’s say a piece of your toilet breaks, so you remove the broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if they carry replacements. The employee, who has never in his life even seen the inside of a toilet, will peer at the broken part in very much the same way that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at an electronic calculator, then say, “We’re expecting a shipment of these sometime around the middle of next week.”

So the bottom line is that home centers are even worse than lumberyards as a source for lumber. The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put into boxes.

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American homes is 110 volts per hour. This is very fast. In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows why it would want to.

The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current, lightning, static, and European. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while, then goes the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires.

Your home electrical system is basically a bunch of wires that bring electricity into your home and take it back out before it has a chance to kill you. This is called a “circuit.” The most common home electrical problem is when the circuit is broken by a “circuit breaker”; this causes the electricity to back up in one of the wires until it bursts out of an outlet in the form of sparks, which can damage your carpet. The best way to avoid broken circuits is to change your fuses regularly.

Another common problem is that the lights flicker. This sometimes means that your electrical system is inadequate, but more often it means that your home is possessed by demons, in which case you’ll need to get a caulking gun and some caulking (see Chapter 6, “Heating and Cooling,” for more on getting rid of demons with caulking.) If you’re not sure whether your house is possessed, see The Amityville Horror, a fine documentary film based on an actual book. Or call in a licensed electrician, who is trained to spot the signs of demonic possession, such as blood coming down the stairs, enormous cats on the dinette table, etc.

You should change your fuses every six months or 200,000 amperes, whichever comes first. Here’s how:

1. Go down to the basement, which should be located beneath the first floor, and find the gray box with all kinds of wires leading to it and little stickers on it saying things like “CAUTION: 80 SKILLION WATTS.”

2. Standing about 15 feet away, toss a small domestic animal toward the box and note whether it (a) falls to the floor unscathed or (b) is reduced to

a lump of carbon by a gigantic bolt of electricity.

3. In the event of (b), call an experienced electrician without dependents and have him replace your fuses. In the event of (a), open the box and remove the old fuses by unscrewing them or whacking at them with a

1/8-inch steel chisel, and replace them with new fuses, which can be obtained wherever new fuses are sold. Then simply close the box and continue to lead a normal life.

How to repair a broken electrical appliance

1. The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing the warranty expiration date with a 3’/16-inch felt-tipped marker.

2. If this fails, take the appliance to the basement and leave it there for several months, on the theory that (a) it will get lonely and want to work again so it can be up in the kitchen with all the other appliances, or (b) we’ll have a nuclear war, and you won’t have any uses for appliances any more because you’ll be too busy defending your beef jerky and water from your neighbors, or (c) you’ll develop a horrible, lingering disease, and people will feel sorry for you and give you new appliances.

3. If, after several months, the appliance still doesn’t work, locate the motor or some other electronic part and whap it briskly with a 58-ounce tire iron. This technique is particularly effective with your modern personal home electronic computers, which are smart enough to not want to be struck by blunt instruments. Toasters are much, much stupider—some of them cannot perform even simple addition—and often must be whapped for hours before coming around.

Harness the power of nature to generate electricity for only pennies a day, not counting parts and labor

If you’re tired of paying high electricity bills, and you live in an area that has a great deal of nature, you should definitely consider generating your own electricity via one of the extremely ecological methods described below. Then you should go back to whatever you were doing.

WIND POWER

Wind, which is imported into the United States from Canada in the form of cold air masses, can be used to turn the blades of a windmill, which in turn can generate electric power. At least that’s what Popular Mechanics is always claiming. The big problem is that, because of labor problems, Canada is an unreliable source of wind. So what you need is a wind collection device, such as the Goodyear blimp, to store the wind for use during times of Canadian labor unrest.

SEA POWER

The sea is potentially a source of vast amounts of electrical energy, as well as haddock. Scientists predict that some day, possibly as early as next week, whole cities will be powered by the sea. The key will be gigantic undersea electric turbines, whose blades will be turned by the relentless, powerful motion of lobsters walking along the sea bed. If you live near the sea and own a gigantic electric turbine, you can harness this power today. The trick is to make sure your turbine is parallel with the prevailing lobster motion.

ATOMIC POWER

At one time atomic power was considered difficult to handle, but these days just about every dirtball little country has it, and I see no reason why you shouldn’t, too. You’ll need an atomic reactor. This is a good time to buy one: Most of your electric companies are trying to unload their reactors because they might have this defect wherein they heat up and go all the way through the earth and destroy Communist China, so you can probably pick one up for a song. Don’t worry about the Communist Chinese. They’re not losing any sleep over you, believe me.