Shocking Genes

I inherited a lot of traits from my father: love of all things deep fried, a tendency to make jokes at the wrong time, and a weird appreciation for Barbara Streisand, just to name a few. But the most important thing I picked up from his side of the gene pool is my unerring tendency to injure myself.

Not just the normal clumsiness scale, actually my father is pretty adroit in general, but whenever there is something to be done, he will injure himself in the process. Sprain his shoulder carrying something, dislocate a finger fixing a car, slice open his hand during dinner preparations, whatever the event, he can hurt himself during it.

I've picked this same thing up, so when we combine forces to take on a project, it's like Wondertwin Powers, except instead of a water and animal form, it's horribly crippling injuries for everyone!

So this weekend I went home for my brother's (15th!) birthday. It was a pretty good time, there was relaxation and delicious food for 48 consecutive hours. And for his birthday, my family went in together and got him this sweet leaded-glass old-school Dr Pepper lamp to replace the light fixture in his room. Overall, it was completely awesome, but had to be manually installed, which meant that my dad and I went charging in there, tools at the ready.

You can already tell this is going to end badly, can't you?

So, we get the entire thing up and wired into the ceiling, with the only minor incident being a small electrical shock on my dad's end when the grounding wire was mislabeled. We turn it on and realize that what had looked like just a small line fracture in the glass before was actually a huge flaw that can be seen from space when the light is actually turned on.

Which means we're going to have to take the damnable thing back. I go ahead and start unscrewing the big outer metal faceplate that hides the actual mounting and wiring in the ceiling. I'm at this for maybe 45 seconds before there is something resembling an explosion. There is the huge bang and before you can say "disfiguring injury" there are gigantic Emperor-shocking-Luke blue electrical bolts shooting out of the ceiling and onto my hand. My hand, once so very beautiful, which is now suddenly resembling a blackened smoking husk. I break my cardinal rule of going home and let out a string of pirate-worthy obscenities before running from the room to get some sort of cooling agent on my now obviously withered and disfigured hand.

I'll shorthand the rest, because it's all downhill from here. Whoever the hell wired my parents' house was a complete wack-job, and somehow not only managed to mislabel all the wires in the bedroom, he also crossed all the wires and circuit breakers for that bedroom with the living room fixtures. So when we incorrectly wired the bedroom circuit, instead of flipping the breaker, the entire fixture exploded, literally ripping a hole through the metal plate covering the wires and arcing onto my hand.

The end result completely scorched the majority of the hair off the back of my left hand, put a huge angry, ridiculously painful burn covering my index finger, and left my middle, index finger, and thumb completely numb on the back side. Luckily all the blackened stuff managed to wash off, so it's just the hideous scarring to worry about, not the coloration.

So, y'know, score.

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And on the bright side, now I have a nice and easy excuse as to why I am alone in the world - I'm Crazy Disfigured man. I knew I'd finally get my hook eventually.

Right, good times.