It was last Saturday. Like almost any Saturday or any other day of the week, I dowed up on my sofa. The window was open, the sweet evening, I had to be wandering on the net when, from the stove where bubbling a saucepan of water full of rice, I heard like borborygm waves, a brief repetition of indefinite noise quite unusual in their composition so that my cat which, seated by my side and still dreaming of its vacation, sort of its torpor, visibly worried. There was no doubt, something was thawing.
Time to get closer, I thought I felt a burned smell and when I leaned towards the object of the offense, a kitchen plate as old as dusty, I saw the water stagnating in the pan, inert as dead. I tried to fiddle with the button so that the heat returns, the plate remained cold, insensitive to my efforts, while the rice was still drowned a little more in the vapors of its bath now completely extinct.
Obviously, I said to myself, the leads jumped. A peccadille, even for me whose level of competence in all that relates to the wonderful world of technique and physics is below sea level. I opened the closet where the circuit breaker and the Linky meter was located. But instead of coming face to face with the ancient switch of my youth with his steel disc which, behind an ice cream, turned with its serious and reassuring look at the same time, I discovered a whole theater of pimples, switches, connections, as tedious as an control table of a space shuttle.
Among this incredible clutter, I tried to see where the lead. But, despite an in -depth research, I found it nowhere. Weird. I ended up asking for help from my computer, which immediately directed me on a fairly clear tutorial in his explanations so that I feel able to put them into practice. Nevertheless, it was getting late, I still hadn’t eaten, I preferred to put my work from Hercules the next morning.
At dawn, full of enthusiasm, I started to work. I cut the current, the screws stolen, the links jumped, the compartments where I thought that the lead hid have started to dissociate themselves from each other: obviously, I was on the right track. Increasingly voluntary, on the edge of drunkenness, on the verge of humming: “He is really, he is really, he is really, phenomenal, he deserves to be in Claire Chazal’s journal!”
Always following the instructions of the tutorial, I removed the cap that hated I do not know, I removed the piece of copper whose ends were sinking I do not know where. And there, how to say, in front of the pieces scattered in front of me, a real futuristic exhibition, like a crossword lover whose words would refuse to associate, I felt the shadow of doubt: what did I do exactly, what was I playing, I had the slightest idea of what I was making?
None, I had no idea. I looked at the tutorial again, but this time, without understanding anything about it. Panic, like a thief who, hearing steps on the stairs, would seek to put the objects in their usual place, I tried to go up what I had just dismantled. Except that at the time of reconnecting the current, nothing happened, absolutely nothing, which hardly surprised me, since I still held in my hands a piece of copper from which I did not know everything, and its provenance and its usefulness.
We were on Sunday. Since the two years I lived in this accommodation, I had had time to fraternize with any neighbor; Anyway, the vast majority were still on vacation. No, I was alone in the world, without a current, without a cook, without the internet, without anything, if not a piece of copper that I contemplated like a sleepwalker murderer would have watched a revolver failed in his hand, with terror. My heart began to panic and before I completely lose the pedals, in a last flash of lucidity, I looked on my phone the contact details of a convenience store.
“Besides, the lead, the fuses, there are no longer even on the market. It was from another era. Do you arrive from March or what? “
The first, before I even started to embark on learned explanations, grumbled me that, regardless of the gravity of the breakdown, the trip was billed at 140 euros. First cardiac arrest. The second explained to me that it was complete, the third agreed to come. An hour later, he landed.
– “What is it?”he asked me, once the door is crossed.
– “The leads have jumped”I answered.
– Plugs, what crafts?!
– The plumbs of the cook.
– Impossible, your system does not work with pellets. Besides, the lead, the fuses, there are no longer even on the market. It was from another era. Do you arrive from March or what?
– Ah good? But how does it work all this bazaar, unleaded? Is it the hand of God who takes care of everything? Me, sir, in Canada, I still had plumbs, real pellets, those that are changed in a jiffy.
He did not take up, took a look at the configuration panel, tried to the stove, failed to walk on the cat, released a large notebook with invoices, thought of two minutes, prevented himself from engaging in a mental calculation of a fierce complexity, dropped in the same debonary tone as a merchant of the eighty who we would have just bought a book “It will make you about 150 euros.” Second cardiac arrest. Myocardial infarction. Stroke. We intubate direct. Committed vital prognosis. Notify the family.
Finally, he was satisfied with a less complicated repair, putting aside the cook. The bill dropped in half, but when signing the quote, I was still shaking like a sheet. At this hour, I still didn’t understand what he was going back to. A problem of under-tension, obviously. Remains the question: what is the dark moron who decided to do without pellets to refurger devices which, when they broke down, remain so before the intervention of an electrician?
Progress, what a scam all the same!
