hi guys and ladies i thought why not make a neverending story like i run a sentince or two then next person add one or two along the way and third person add along the way and so on,. it can be sense of humor or true story either way you feel.
thanks
Marc
let me start the first sentence
The comstomuter came in the building and try to hit the light switch but there is no light at all so,,,
[your turn to add this along the way .]
he called his friend the handyman, who 15 years ago in high school took shop class and learned everything there is to know about electrical work.
[This message has been edited by LoneGunman (edited 02-08-2006).]
and now half of the outlets in the house, have no power,
So he in turn called his carpenter friend and...
decided that they could fix the wiring without an electrician, so
...they took off the switch cover and saw 3 wires...
And noticed they were all 6" or more long, so they cut them to about 1" long
,not knowing that the owner's wife just turned the power back on, to make them coffee after all their hard work..
They held hands and formed a bridge to get the other receptacles powered up again.
when sparks flew from their fingertips
After coffee was ready they let go and used a small pair of vice grips to hold all the wires together. Then wraped the wires and vice grips with duct tape. One of the carpenters said, "How will we get them back in the box now?" The other more expierience carpenter said, " I learned a little trick years ago, maybe you will remember it and pass it on to your apprentices." He then took his hammer out and smashed in the box so it feel inside the wall and inserted the vice grip/duct tape connection into the wall. Immediately afterwards he opened a bucket of mud and started filling in the hole. After the coffee cooled down enough to drink they sat around talking about their vast electrical knowledge when one of the younger carpenters interupted them and said, "Hey, do you guys smell something funny?" They all stopped and looked. They saw...........
that the helper was standing in the corner cleaning something from the lawn off of his shoe.
And heard a strange sound rumbling from underneath the wall....
where smoke began pouring out of the old FPE breaker panel...
Fortunately, the same handyman had installed the smoke alarms, so there was no panic when they failed to sound off.
But the smoke got more dense, and...
Suddenly, Mrs Ownerswife appeared, wraithlike and backlit, out of the heavy smog and coughed politely.
"Toasted bagels, anyone?", she wheezed.
At that moment his neighbor, the city chief electrical inspector, walked in and said ...
my god does your wife have the biggest...
bagels, I would love to put some cream cheese on them! Suddenly they were surrounded by sparks and ....
All of the lights went out. A scream echoed through the room. The carpenter pulled out his trusty mag light only to find the electrical inspectors face covered with cream cheese and a bagle stuck in his...
...clipboard. "This bagel tastes like cardboard!" he declared, then extracted the chewed remains of a red tag from between his teeth. He covered his embarassment by pointing to the nearest kitchen outlet and saying, "
who put that receptacle upside down?
He started writing receptacles upside down on a piece of paper and stopped. As if he saw a ghost. He noticed the FPE panel with only one breaker. He saw one 50 Amp AFCI breaker and said,"What the ......
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-09-2006).]
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-09-2006).]
heck. i belive we can get 30 outlets on this one.but then someone spoke up & said,
[This message has been edited by circuit man (edited 02-09-2006).]
We better check first. So they went online and posted the following question on the Home Inspectors of America website:....
(insert stupid question)
[This message has been edited by Dnkldorf (edited 02-09-2006).]
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-09-2006).]
Q: How many electrons can dance on the head of a wirenut?
[This message has been edited by NJwirenut (edited 02-09-2006).]
Question by handymen- is a fifty amp breaker sufficient for 30 15 amp recepticles? or do I need a 450 amp breaker?
While waiting for the answer the computer went dead. There was now no power at the receptacle.
The head carpenter spoke up,"I wired that a couple of weeks ago and it was holding just fine. I guess the duct tape spice to the range circuit that I did up in the attic must have come loose."
Like a shot from a gun he hurried up the access hatch and crawled into the attic.
Crawling though the attic he got snared up on some unsupported wire and came crashing through the ceiling right onto the bed of Mrs.Ownerswife's 18 year old daughter who was just about to insert the batteries in her .....
furby. She then asked "Why the heck are the lights flickering like this?! Do you have any idea what you are doing?"
Why sure, the head carpenter said. And by the way, that sure is a furry furby you have there.
Just then the door opened.
It was Mr.Owner and he was furious,"What are you doing with my daughter in her room.?"
Mr.Owner looked down and picked up some wire that fell from the attic. With the wire clenched tightly between his hands he lunged towards the carpenter and began ....
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-09-2006).]
...practicing Underwriters' knots. Then he said, "This is ridiculous! I need some...
vasalene. so I can put this wire in your
And then the Chief Electrical Inspector spoke up and said it would be good if they drove a few more ground rods, just in case there weren't enough of them
So outside they went, with the Mrs. Ownerswife's daughter and her furry furby to pound in more ground rods. Just as they were about to start, a huge truck pulled up.....
and out jumped Bob Vila with a film crew.
"Well!", said Mrs Ownerswife, "You can
[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 02-10-2006).]
bet the job's gonna get done now". Just then Steve Thomas and Norm Abrams come out of the smoke filled kitchen and
tell Bob to get to porta-potty cleaned out, and when he's done with that,
[This message has been edited by togol (edited 02-10-2006).]
he can patch that ceiling and take that
pair of vice grips and put them in his truck, then get on the horn and get ahold of Tim the Tool Guy pronto.
...and tell Tim that he has a very big....
[This message has been edited by togol (edited 02-10-2006).]
concern for keeping things 'PG' rated, and so..
...at that moment Mrs. Ownerswife's daughter pointed at the transformer on top of the pole outside the house and said "Is that supposed to be....
...smoking like that?" "Yes" said the Chief Electrical Inspector. "It's just the electrons oscillating. We need to get the carpenters to climb the pole and...
touch that top wire and see if ..
anybody used one of the purple wirenuts on the connections
So one of the carpenters took his ladder to the pole and.....
was stopped by Bob Vila, who said, "Wait, use my new Sears Best(R) All-Aluminum ladder!" But before he could demonstrate its motorized features,
all of a sudden from down the street a car comes racing towards the site. As the car stops it backfires and blue smoke totally engulphs the scene. Everyone stopped and stared.
After the smoke cleared in front of the car stood a man wearing a gold painted hard hat, gaffs, and is holding a #6 AWG wire in his hands.
"I am decolores9, I am now taking charge, as you may not know I am also a qualified lineman in 6 states."
He tells the carpenter to move the ladder and decolores9 immediately starts to climb the pole with his gaffs and uses the #6 as a strap.
Half way up the pole he reaches the phone/cable lines and gaffs out and immediately starts to....
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-10-2006).]
slide down again, as Norm, Bob and Steve are already up there with an 8-man film crew, on a hydraulic lift cunningly constructed on site in the Mobile Trailer Workshop, entirely of old Bay-Berry logs dredged from the bottom of a Carolina Pocosin swamp.
"Hey, Bob", says Norm, "
Look out for that piece of primary right near your head!!!"
Bob spins around on the platform, and...
and faced eyeball to eyeball of angry bird and the bird beak just about ready to bite at his nose,,,
Bob reacts by taking out his crafstman rachet from his pocket to defend himself. As soon as he gets it close to the bird the rachet starts to buzz. Norm hells "No" and then ...
the Rachet slips froms bobs grip
and bounces off Norm's hard hat into
..the primary lugs of the smoking transformer. With a loud bang and blinding blue flash...
...the ratchet went phase to phase. "Not to worry", says Bob, "That ratchet has a lifetime warranty. I'll just reach over there and pull it off the transformer". He reaches over and...
the sparks started falling down, landing the tin of gas that Bob had set at the base of the pole for his motorized ladder. At the same time, Mrs. Ownerwife's daughter started to.....
...take a picture of the arc flash...while almost instantaneously and at the same time ,
dcolores9 screams, "don't .......
[This message has been edited by togol (edited 02-10-2006).]
forget to pick up the smoking remains of the ratchet!" Adding, "It was a Craftsman, with a lifetime warranty! Bob can bring it back for a new one as soon as...
[This message has been edited by NJwirenut (edited 02-10-2006).]
[This message has been edited by NJwirenut (edited 02-10-2006).]
as soon as he cleans out his underware. But before that can happen he must ...
[This message has been edited by Bob (edited 02-10-2006).]
peel it off. As it seems to have melted because it was made of polyester.
Norm then lowers the hydraulic lift and they all get out. Norm says whats that sound and everyone looks around.
While everyone was near the pole the owner overheard the inspector say that more ground rods should be driven so trying to save money he thought that he would do it himself. He picked a nice spot next to the fire hydrant on the front lawn.
The ground suddenly started to rumble and ....
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-10-2006).]
..the mulit-state engineer ran over whining about how the shorted cables were not his problem, because the homeowner started digging without calling....
[This message has been edited by togol (edited 02-10-2006).]
digger hotline and heard the water pipe rumble and show water comming out of the ground say " oh oh ",,,
"Norm's hydraulics have started to leak!"
Luckily, it put out the fire in the engineer's underwear. Meanwhile, Mrs Ownreswife had discovered a big hole melted in the blades of her best dressmaking scissors. "OK!" she coughed, [the neighborhood was still full of acrid smoke ans even fuller of acrid experts ], "which one of you
yahoos have been messing with my scissors?"
She looked at Mr. Owner and said, "Was it you? Were you using these out in the garage again?"
Mr. Owner just stood there with a dumb look on his face.
Mrs.Ownerswife yelled,"I knew it! I should take these scissors and ...."
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-10-2006).]
have them resharpened!" With that, she wheeled around and headed back into the house, followed closely by Mr. Owner, who was wailing about how much precision scissor resharpening costs, and by his daughter, who was teaching her furby to say "One ten dot twelve!" over and over.
After posting a few dozen red tags around the premises for good measure, the chief inspector gave the lineman a lift to the hospital burn ward, Bob Vila left to exchange the ratchet, and Norm and his crew dismantled the bucket lift because it was starting to sink into the lake that was forming.
By then it was getting dark, the handyman and his friends had finished off all the beer in the rapidly-warming refrigerator (burp), and they all left to find a neighborhood convenience store that still had power.
But when Mrs. Ownerswife walked into the house and flipped the switch to turn on the lights, there was no light at all...
[This message has been edited by John Crighton (edited 02-10-2006).]
....but she did see two little glowing beady eyes looking back at her in the dark. It was....
the glow from the terminals of an AFCI protected receptacle, which meant that some of the occupants didn't wake ....
Roger
[This message has been edited by Roger (edited 02-10-2006).]
As she fumbled in the dark she ripped the batteries out of the Furby, and put them into her flashlight. The beam revealed a little man with a toolbelt, barely 18" tall. "Who are you?" she asked.
He answered "I am........
having trouble remembering why I was sent on this service call. What happened here?
Well some guy's got greedy and put in more than a single sentence and.........
wore me out reading it. Next time someone type more the 3 sentences we will use Ownerswife scissors and cut off his ...
[This message has been edited by Bob (edited 02-10-2006).]
....electrical service then stick the furby in his.....
..FPE "No-Trip" breaker panel, mounted in the master bedroom of..
his mother in laws house.
"Greedy!" cried the little man with the tool belt. "Now I remember why I'm here! If you'll just sign this estimate..."
[This message has been edited by John Crighton (edited 02-11-2006).]
Which is very basic and only covers ....
The Furby...
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which suffered serious damage from smoke and the EM pulse from the transformer explosion. Unfortunately, repair parts for furbys...
...aren't available since the Chinese Factory went over to making fake UL listed extension cords, so it's a gonner. Good, never knew what a Furby was to start with.
"Well, one good thing has come out of all this" said Mrs O, (vainly trying to trim a mass of singed hair over her right ear with her wrecked scissors), "
are not available,but alas to the rescue our local handyman/electrician/plumber/builder/furby repairman who says he
...also is a paramedic runs over to bob vila.....
..., who just returned from Sears with his new ratchet, and kicked him in the .....
knee and said "you idiot!, we need the all new Binford power rachet, not that stuid piece of cra....
All the while, the Amish farmers across the street were sitting on the fence, completely puzzled by the antics of these "town folks."
Meanwhile, dcolores9 gets his Sears voltmeter out, reads 180 volts and 60 volts to neutral, thrn declares "It's not the Utilities problem. Your electrician needs to..."
[This message has been edited by WFO (edited 02-11-2006).]
put a bigger copper pipe in the fuse holder so more power will flow through.
Preventing the lights dimming and stressing the motor of the Binford power ratchet when its plugged in the stove receptacle
Just then a hybrid car running on vegetable oil drove up and out jumped two people from "Earth First" and hollered....
"That copper pipe in the fuse holder must be properly bonded so we don't electrocute the fuse-fish!" Astonished, I replied...
The fuse fish are the least of the problems here--you oughtta see what happened to an innocent furby at the hands of these idiots!
The EF!ers then turned to Mrs. Ownerswife and said...
[This message has been edited by NJwirenut (edited 02-11-2006).]
......."SAVE THE WHALE"........,but first, could we plug into your dryer oulet....our batteries are going dead and we have to get to.....
"...the protest to smoke weed. We can't wait to sit around and play songs on our guitar about the destruction and endangerment of certain species of trees in the rainforest."
Norm spoke up and said, "Hey those guitars in your back seat look like they are made out of Brazilian Cherrywood."
Bob then told the "Earth First" that he had some rolling papers and then asked if he could go with them and .....
![[Linked Image from starbulletin.com]](http://starbulletin.com/96/10/11/features/fixvila.gif)
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-11-2006).]
....roll some fatties, which caused the local Earth First Weight Watchers group to get angry, so they....
re-energized the top lines of the overhead transmission, which cooked several turkey buzzards.
And My Lord did they smell bad, anyhow that was not the end of it.
Soon enough a Police Officer turned up asking..
"Who stabbed Bob Vila with a roll of electrical specifications?"
"And more importantly," he added quickly, "does anyone have any donuts?"
Call Billy Graham.
"we need some help from a different direction!"
But the line was busy so they.........
decided a sacrifice was necessary,....so they grabbed dcolores9 and wrapped him in in 33+.
..while the (now furby-less ) daughter was sent for donuts .....the crowd then hauled their taped-up sacrifice towards....
his truck where they grabbed his crimping tools and...
[This message has been edited by WFO (edited 02-12-2006).]
[This message has been edited by WFO (edited 02-12-2006).]
and proceded to start splicing new wires to the new transformer which the power company had hung, but then the guy from the power company said what happened to the last one
[This message has been edited by circuit man (edited 02-12-2006).]
This reminds me of a discussion I once had about whether or not smoke detectors belong on the afci circuit and....
why toasters are not required to be 220 said the chief electrical inspector as he wrote up a red tag for the miswired doorbell...
...which when pressed, activates the neighbor's food processer. Now Bob Vila, who claims to have as much if not more knowledge than the local handyman, says it's ok to put the smoke alarms on an afci circuit. As an added measure of security, he hardwires both the doorbell and the smoke alarms to the town's air-raid siren.
Then the guy from the power company said, Here, this is the phone number for my wife's sister's husband's brother. He's a handyman, and knows how to fix these things. He doesn't have a license because he knows how to do so many different things that they don't have a license that will cover it all. So the owner took the number and...
...did a Google search for it, and it came up with the address:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20500.
Why does that sound so familiar, he wondered, when all of a sudden, it hit him! That's ...
what I thought !.
....this is all Bushs fault.....
geez, that guy has his finger .......
Jammed in everyone's Fusebox...
To which he thought "We dont need a hack and slash handyman, we need a..."
[This message has been edited by Rewired (edited 02-12-2006).]
...handyman of mass destruction. Then we could...
get my house fixed.
So the owner called the number anyway and asked for some help...
![[Linked Image from images.usatoday.com]](http://images.usatoday.com/news/_photos/2005/11/24/bush-inside.jpg)
George W.
Sorry to hear about all those problems there at the house but I'm all tapped out. I can't send any electricians over because I just sent all of them overseas to fix the power so we can maximize oil production to make some big bucks. Oh I'm sorry, I mean "Private Companies" sent some over and I am not involved in that in any way. Ah..Gotta Go,Bye.
With that the Owner grabbed a pair of sidecutters and ....
[This message has been edited by RobbieD (edited 02-12-2006).]
some electric tape and the latest edition of time life's book entitled basic electricity.
With these things in hand he....
[This message has been edited by luckyshadow (edited 02-12-2006).]
..name a new group of people to monitor the actions of HMD "People Who Watch The Actions Of Handymen of Mass Destruction And All Other Morons Here And Abroad" (PWWTAOHMDAAOMHAA)their job will be to...
[This message has been edited by sierra electrician (edited 02-12-2006).]
further "dubya's" plan to eliminate the NEC and other impediments to a "free market" in the electrical industry, replacing them with a new "faith-based" electrical code which....
[This message has been edited by NJwirenut (edited 02-12-2006).]
...be called "Bob, Norm & Steve's book of Really Cool Electrical Ideas" and....
..comes bound in a beautiful corinthian leather jacket, which made PETA very...
upset. They were even more upset, however, when they saw how many endangered Naugas had been slaughtered to cover the living room furniture in Naugahyde.
Have you no shame?, said the...
Webmaster as he wondered why discussions have to turn to include Politics and so he said....
The End.