Was I in any actual danger tonight? Probably not.
But damn if I don't feel a little bit lucky to be alive right now.
So ... it's ... way too late at night (yes, I just got home), and I finally finish up investigating a bug and get ready to head home for the night. Brandy's the only other person left at work, and decides to call it a night as well, so we head out toward the garage.
Heading toward her car, her keyless entry remote won't open the doors, and she figures it's because the battery in the remote has died. Turns out, there was a dead battery, but not in the remote.
If you're reading this, you probably already know that I know pretty much jack-diddly about anything related to cars and not a heck of a lot about electricity, so stick those together and I'm pretty much useless. Nonetheless, Brandy needs a jump, so she pulls out the jumper cables from her car and starts to try and figure out the process of getting her car started.
So far so good, until the cables come out of the bag.
First of all, I'm sure there's some bean counter somewhere or other who's happy about the ten cents that they saved by not covering the handles in plastic, but for the love of Pete, WTF is the deal with jumper cables where the handles are all metal? Sure, maybe I'm not the brightest bulb, but I know that metal does a pretty damned HORRIBLE job of keeping people and current separate.
You know what else does a horrible job of getting betweeen one's hands and electricity? Water! Living in Seattle ... right ... it was raining. And kinda cold.
So first off, Brandy calls her dad to find out whether or not it's even safe to do this kind of thing in the rain. Which he tells her, of course it is. He also reassures her that the metal handles are totally safe. So, of course, we should be fine, right?
I'm not too proud to say that I'm too freaked out by the metal and the water to want to have a damn thing to do with attaching these cables. She's a little freaked out, too, but rationalizes that there's no way that the manufacturers would put instructions in and let us do this ourselves if it was dangerous, right? So she valiantly trudges on and finally gets everything connected - positive to positive, negative to random metal. One obviously great piece of metal caused her car to light up inside when connected, but the clamp wouldn't stay, so the clamp gets attached to another random metal-seeming part of the car, and she gets into the car to turn it on.
Nothing.
Except for an odd clicking in her car. I still am not sure what this is (she thinks it's maybe the alternater), but besides this rather freaky clicking, no light, no nothing. Hmm ... am I supposed to turn on my car? Out comes the car instruction manual and lo and behold, yes I am. On it goes.
Nope.
Well, it does say that I'm supposed to run it at a fast idle. What's fast? Who knows ... but here we go, about 2500 rpms in park.
Nada.
Maybe faster? How about 15 minutes at 3500 (I have no idea if this was bad for my car. Oh well).
Not a damn thing.
Out comes the phone, and her dad says that we must not have things connected well, as if they were connected correctly, her lights should go on immediately. So off come all the clamps and they all get connected again.
You guessed it.
Right before she's ready to give up, she jumps into my passenger seat, on the phone with her Dad again, and he says that we should go ahead and connect the negative clamp directly to her negative terminal instead of to unconnected metal.
I may not know much about cars and jump-starting, but I know a heck of a lot about reading. And all three references sources that we have say that this is absolutely something we should not do. On the phone, she's saying something similar. "But all the instructions say that we shouldn't ... well ... OK."
"Uh, Brandy?"
Too late. She's out the door, walking toward the cables. I have no idea what to do. Should I turn off the car so she doesn't kill herself? Should I get out of the car but leave it on? Or should I freeze like a dummy and just hope that we don't get blown to kingdom come?
That last bit sounds pretty good. On goes the clamp, and her car lights up like a Christmas tree. Is that what happens right before my battery shorts itself out? Before I can contemplate it, she grabs her keys, turns on the car, and finally it turns over and the engine starts.
I'm still sitting in my chair, hoping I'm not going to die, and I watch her step out and try and disconnect everything. Now I'm hoping that she doesn't die, too ... but the clamps do come off safely (apparently, her Dad told her to have me disconnect one of them from my battery at the same time she disconnects it from hers, but her response was a pretty apt, "there's no way in Hell he's going to touch any of this.").
"So why in the heck," I ask, "would the instructions say not to do the thing that actually ended up working?"
"That's a good question! Who knows?"
We go our separate ways.
Couple minutes later, I get a call. Her Dad, now that all's finished, has told her why the instructions all say not to connect the negative terminals directly. Apparently, the sparking from the connection can ignite and cause the battery to explode.
I feel like I just won the lottery or something.
We were asked, by our 60-something prof. who was the editor of the Harvard Law Review, to watch this before Torts today:
Contracts beat my ass.
Haven't had a grade that bad since elementary school. Or maybe 6th grade. But I passed, and after spending some time with my student handbook I finally acknowledged that even D's are passing, so really, I could have done a whole three levels worse and still avoided taking it over again. That would be my own personal hell. Unfortunately I'm in a super pod, so the bar, by way of the blasted curve, is set higher for us than it would be if we were in the Orange or Purple pod. Everyone always has their shit together and this works against my GPA. I really don't like that aspect of law school. Its full of freakish over achievers who never got over the 4.0 obsession, and for some reason they all think they're really the smartest, but they know they'll still have to prove that, so they do nothing but study 120 hours a week. Are there even that many hours in a week?
Don't mind me, I'm having a bitter moment.
I'm still holding out for a B+ in Con Law. I felt like I owned that test. Unfortunately so did everyone else, so we might all just get B's.
Meh, I say.
Yet somehow I have managed to spend the last THREE hours prowling around Facebook instead of doing my contracts reading. Fooey.
There's something oddly soothing about being the last person left in your hall (or on your floor, but I can't be bothered to get up and check right now), watching the last other person trudge toward the stairs with their lunchbag in tow.
Perhaps it's the perfect quiet, broken only by the hum of the computers and the ventilation system - rare during the day in this place where hallway conversations run rampant and there's always something happening right outside your office door.
Perhaps it's the fact that you can dig into whatever you're working on, secure in the knowledge that you can dig as deep as you like and not have to worry about being pulled aside to look at something else and have to retrain your thoughts when you get back.
Perhaps it's the lights going into power saving mode and not bothering to get up turn them back on, leaving you basking in the calming glow of your monitor.
Or perhaps it's because I'm totally full of crap and it pretty much sucks.
<shrug>
You decide.
Did you know that rants have a shelf-life of one spontaneous eruption?
That has a specific meaning to it - anyone who knows me knows that I don't believe in ranting once and being done with it, so it's certainly not the case that they don't get repeated when appropriate and when prompted by the situation.
But as far as spontaneously feeling the need to rant (meaning that it happens unprovoked, whether it's appropros to the current conversation or not) and having it actually erupt in dramatic (rather than reasoned) fashion, I think it really only happens once, at least for me, and maybe for everyone.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, I think that Erin missed reason #4: I've got more people that I rant in real life to about things bothering me, and once that's happened, the one spontaneous eruption has been expended.
And weblogs are really bad at provoking action.
The moral of the story? I dunno ... maybe stop talking to me and I'll start posting again?
EDIT: Typo fix as per Erin's comment.
Met a guy at a bar last night . . . 47-years old, seemed lonely, was talking about his 19-year old daughter. We chat randomly with the kid on the other side of him (in college) untill he leaves after a couple hours and then this guy tells me that he went to sleep last night thinking he needed to find a writer to do some letters for him. *lightbulb* I do that! He buys me drinks, food, then coffee, and I write down what he wants said in handwriting this is so *barely* legible I'm amazed I can read it at all. Now I'm meeting him again today to drop off the product - or at least I think that's what I'm doing. He wants me to meet him at his house, which is close by, but that's right out. A nice public restaraunt sounds good to me. So I'll have a meal purchased for me, I'm sure, and I'll deliver the goods. I told him $20/hr for my troubles when he asked my rates. That's pretty darn cheap, but I was too intrigued to price him out. So maybe I'll make $40 or $60? I think Nick is having the kind of paranoia most people were having when my last bf flew out from OH to meet me in person (we met on Match.com) and everyone was like "Take a knife! Or mace!" as if I'd have to do more than scream to have five big guys with night sticks at my side. =P