Power vacuum
Once upon a lifetime, back when I was still married to the first Mrs Udders we built a little house together. This was in Perth, Western Australia, which, as maybe one or two of you might know, has relatively poor sandy soil for the most part. Perth is on the coast, and it's something like having a beach that extends 20 kays inland, except without the water or the topless teenagers. The eastern edge of the city is bound by a smallish range, and there the soil is solid clay.

Us being young this was the first house either of us owned. Us being young and therefore relatively poor it was also a cheap starter project home in a new subdivision that was right on the edge of the city, as far away from the prime coastal land that it was possible to be. So the place was solid clay. Since this subdivision was being sold cheaply the developers didn't want to spend any money doing expensive stuff like digging where they could get avoid it. So, they simply burnt off the scrub, laid all the sewers and various cabling pipework down, then trucked in masses of sand to bury the lot. A bit like sweeping everything under the carpet, but cheap, abrasive carpet.

Being a cheap project home meant that it didn't come with loads of extras, and the builders were happy to trade off some things if we wanted others, like more than one power point in a room. So, when we moved in we had tiles in the wet rooms, but the rest of the house had no floor coverings at all. Perth houses are inevitably built used double brick, on a concrete pad. Our floors were therefore bare concrete.

A kindly chap I worked with suggested we seal the bare concrete to lessen powdering and wear. Not long before moving in I used a bucket and broom to apply a watered down sealant throughout the house. Perth has another distinctive feature though that the cricket followers amongst you may remember - a fairly regular evening breeze that goes by the name of the Fremantle Doctor. Being so far inland it never reached us full force, but then again, sand isn't the heaviest material to move around, and being mostly skint we certainly hadn't spent much money on landscaping, and neither had most of our equally skint neighbours. The result was a constant stream of grit and dust making its way through any open door or window (no money for airconditioning either), or being tracked inside any time someone came through the front door. In the first Mrs Udder's case, rather more often than I knew about at the time, but that's another story.

Fearing that I would be up for another tin of expensive floor sealant, not to mention another broom, as the first had ended as a clagged up mess, we were both fastideous users of the vacuum cleaner. Or it might have been her mother's OCD-strength approach to house cleaning asserting itself, as we had boarded with them for a few months in between out last lease running out and the builder finishing the house.

The trouble with cheap vacuum cleaners is that they generally aren't very well built. In this case the switch mechanism was susceptible to the ingress of dirt, resulting in a cleaner than wouldn't turn on, especially when the arrival of my mother in law for "a visit" was imminent. If I couldn't afford a decent vacuum cleaner in the first place there was no way that I could spring for a proper repairperson to pop around on a regular basis. I did however own a few tools. It became as usual for me to pop open the recalcitrant machine "for a quick squiz" as it was for it to go on the blink in the first place.

Over time I grew ever impatient and slowly but surely let my standards slip. Where once I always disconnected the machine from the power point before commencing my Mr Fixit routine I began to cut corners. At first I'd skip rewinding the power cable as I worked out exactly the reconstruction contortions required to reassemble the beast with its cord unwound. Then I gave up taking the plug out the wall - my back doesn't like me bending down unnecessarily. Finally I even gave up switching off the power at the wall as it was slowing me down. And this new house had a shiny new residual current trip switch installed when it was built merely months before.

My father in law was an electrician by trade, and he'd taught me to always work with one hand behind my back. Any escaping current wouldn't have to cross my chest on its escape to earth you see, avoiding the rather unpleasant "stopping of the heart" situation.

One day the inevitable happened - I'd whipped out the number two philips head for a quick shufty at the innards of the vacuum switch mechanism and I suddenly found myself across the room with a very achy arm. Turns out that an annoyingly high percentage of RCD protectors were factory-faulty and I'd just found out the hard way that I had one of them in the meterbox outside.

My position of power apparently looks unerringly like a flag.
( Udderbelly A tale of four titties, Fri 9 Jul 2010, 14:08, 3 replies)

Great post...
...soil in Cairns, Queensland is about the bloody same!
(emadex thinks the world will end on, Fri 9 Jul 2010, 14:38, closed)

Forgive my prurience...
...but I find myself intrigued by the former Mrs Udders' extra-curricular activities. Did you part ways long enough ago for this to be a fairly pain-free memory or are the wounds still too raw to discuss?

If you want her, you know, 'taken care of' just gaz me.
(Happybara The jungle came alive and took him, Fri 9 Jul 2010, 14:39, closed)

Far too long ago for me to care about
But thanks anyway.
( Udderbelly A tale of four titties, Sat 10 Jul 2010, 1:35, closed)