Relative Something

I am seriously struggling to figure out the best way to explain this. It seems significant to me that it all started after too long a day at work. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the situation that followed, as I walked in the door at home to find a note that read, “Shocking news.”

It didn’t take long for my mind to stumble over a wide variety of reasons for such a note, but since Cyndie was sitting right there at the counter when I walked in, I cut straight to the point and asked. I certainly didn’t expect that it wasn’t the news that was shocking. It was news of a shocking!

It’s not every day you hear of a garden giving someone a shock. As a matter of fact, I have never heard of such a thing in my life, …until now. Cyndie explained that she was trying to lift a cucumber vine back up on its support frame. When she planted her other hand in the dirt for support, she received an intense electrical shock that caused an involuntary scream. Her heart raced and she thought she was being electrocuted. There would be no more gardening for her on this day. She went back indoors and scrolled the note for me to find.

Our garden is on the side of our house where the newly installed air conditioner fan unit is located. There is nothing else electrical in the area. It didn’t make any sense to me. I told her she should have called the power company immediately. Better late, than never. She made the call and we had a service technician at our door in about an hour.

The expression on his face, as he tried to discretely mask his smirking disbelief over our description of her experience, was priceless. He explained that there are no power lines in the area. He actually was very understanding, and he agreed to go to his truck and bring back a device that can detect live voltage. I got the impression he was just patronizing us, with no expectation of verifying her story. That made it all the more dramatic when, to his obvious surprise, he discovered hot electricity in the dirt.

A little additional probing revealed it wasn’t the dirt, after all. It was the downspout of the gutter. No less intriguing. The entire gutter and downspout on the back side of our house is energized with 120 Volts of electricity! Maybe that is why there haven’t been as many chipmunks trying to set up residence in the bottom section of the drain spout this summer.

Phase II of this adventure will involve trying to figure out how in the heck this happened. Best guess is the recent gutter repairs and the probability that they ran a screw through the siding and struck some house wiring. The technician was kind enough to assist me in finding which circuit breaker would cut the power to the gutter.

Tonight, I actually have a valid excuse for walking through the darkened hallway to the bedroom. Tomorrow, we contact an electrician.