Catastrophe Strikes!

Thursday February 24th in the year of our Lord 2011, Garrett Douglas Bounds, John Mark Skinner, and Ben Anderson learned a very important lesson: When purchasing electronic devices, quality is worth every penny (or centavo, as is my present case).

Allow me to recount for you the events of my Thursday evening.  I noticed earlier this week that the electronics that we have in our apartment (TV, Cable Modem, Router) were hooked up to an outlet extender and not a surge protector. Being a conservative fellow, I made a note to buy a surge protector at a hardware store right next the building where we work. That evening, upon my return home, I pulled out the new surge protector, and went over to the outlet.

I noticed as I was pulling out the outlet extender (takes one outlet and provides three more) that the plastic seemed to flex in my hand more than I would have expected.  I thought briefly about pulling each of the 3 power cables out before pulling out the extender...but laziness got the better of me and I continued in my present endeavor. And then, the two plastic pieces which *held* (note the use of past tense) the extender together completely separated, enabling contacts inside the extender to short which immediately caused a bright, pulsing blue arc of 240 V electric current through the device in my hands. If I could think of a word that meant more scared than terrifying, I would use it. I was terrified.

Exhibit 1: Outlet extender as it was when it was removed from the wall...in two pieces with many exposed electrical contacts.

Exhibit 2: Evidence of the brutal force of 240 V of alternating current.

To make matters worse, my roommate, Ben, calls out from the other room: "Garrett, what'd you do? We don't have power?" At this point, the adventure began in earnest. A very quick autopsy of the outlet extender showed liquefied contacts and soot marks. No surprise there.  As it was growing dark, I was acutely aware of the need to solve the no power situation. In the US of A, houses and apartments are all equipped with circuit breaker boxes. I was certain that the events just described caused the breakers in our apartment to flip and all that was needed was to find them, flip them the other way and, "Presto!" back in business we would be.

After 20 minutes of looking inside, behind, around, underneath, through the walls and furniture in our apartment. I concluded that a circuit breaker box as I knew it was not present in 840 Rio de Janeiro apartment A. I headed out to find out portero.  A portero is a gentlemen stationed at most apartment buildings here in Argentina. His occupation involves taking care of general maintenance for the building, and being a resource in times such as these. I found him after a 30 minute search and began to recount my debacle, asking him if he knew where the circuit breakers were for the building. He replied that they were certainly in the apartments and was so kind (he's a truly excellent fellow) as to accompany me up to the apartment and aid in the search. Within minutes he identified the circuit breaker.

Exhibit 3: An example of South American circuit breakers...which look nothing like any circuit breaker I've ever seen.

Hopefully you can see from the picture why this was not so apparently a circuit breaker in my initial search. Having identified the problem, I quickly flipped the switches to see if I could get the power back on, to no avail. After some pondering, we pulled out the strange looking tube things.

Exhibit 4: "Strange looking tube thing" which can be seen in its installed position in Exhibit 3.

Curiously, a tiny copper wire ran through each of the tubes except one. In one of the tubes, copper looked as if it had erupted and sent tiny droplets of molten hot copper to the sides of the tube (I suppose that actually is what happened). I know little about electricity, but I did recognize that these little guys were serving as circuit breakers! when the current being drawn through them grows to be too much, they melt and, thus break the circuit. 

Having a much better idea at this point about what needed to be done, I set to work making thin little "cablesitos" (term my portero used to refer to copper wire).

Exhibit 5: Cablesito to replaced the one that got torched.

Exhibit 6: Inside of tubular circuit breaker showing one of the contacts and a cablesito.

I installed the cablesito in the tube, screwed it back in to the wall, flipped the switch and: "Wallah!" Power returned. After a brief chest bump exchanged between frazzled roommates. Normal life resumed, but not before leaving three young men much wiser about the perils of cheap electronic goods.

Exhibit 7: Happy electronics all hooked up to a HIGH QUALITY surge protector.