Short Circuits and Garden Shears

I spent a lot of my high school days inside the cramped garage of Joe's family. Joe was allowed 1/4 of the garage to play host to a veritable mini-man-cave for him and his friends. There we had an extremely small TV, an old couch, a beat up recliner, and dreams. We'd gather together many days to play video games and forget what time it was. One day, though, all that would come to an end after a misplaced snip by yours truly.

There were five of us there that day. I believe it was Joe, Kevin, Kevin's sister Lauryn, and occasional d'Artagnan Steven. We were playing the shooting game Perfect Dark which only allowed four people to play at a time. While we cycled through rounds of the game, one person had to sit out. During my turn to sit out, I set out to find things to do. I was in a garage, and as such, was able to find a lot of things to do. There were many random implements to stupidly amuse myself with, and the flavor of the day was a pair of gardening shears. As my friends played, I snipped. I didn't snip anything in particular, I just snipped the air. Don't ask why I was doing this, for there exists no such rhyme or reason. During the match, though, my snipping would go awry. Without realizing it, an errant controller cord moved itself into the path of my blades, and with one movement of my arms, the cord was cut.

Instantly, all the lights in the entire garage went black. The lightbulb at the ceiling; the LED lights from the Nintendo; all lights went out. Within a few seconds things came back on, but the Nintendo did not. It was fried. We tried a lot to resurrect that poor system, but it was all for naught. Joe, in shock from what had just occurred, simply uttered to himself, "Well, at least this will give me a chance to play Chrono Trigger" (on a different gaming console.) I thought to myself, though, that the Nintendo 64 shouldn't have been fried. I didn't understand, though, why cutting a controller cord caused such a power surge as to total the gaming console. As it turns out, there was an answer for that, too. Joe's Nintendo 64 plugged into a power strip. In that power strip was also plugged a TV, a Super Nintendo, a fan, and a game boy charger. That power strip was plugged into another power strip, which housed a similarly full array of devices. That power strip was plugged into a single socket which stemmed from the garage door motor, and the collection of strips dangled from the ceiling like an eerie skeleton hung in a closet. The resulting monstrosity was so fragile in its wiring that one link anywhere in the chain (in this case, a controller plugged into the Nintendo 64) was enough to cause a veritable grenade explosion inside the tubes, with the Nintendo 64 valiantly diving on top to save its electrical brethren.

The moral of this story, kids, is don't plug too many things into a single socket outlet. Otherwise, idiot kids will come over with garden shears and break everything, and you'll only have yourselves to blame.