I'm electric!
Date: Thursday, May 30 @ 09:34:43 EDT
Topic: Quickies
So I got a keyboard for my birthday, and man, is it bad-ass! I was so excited when I got it, I couldn't wait to run upstairs and plug it in, so that's what I did.
It doesn't have its own speakers, so I had to plug it into my amp. So, I brought a cable over from the other side of the room where my amp was, and stuck it in the output jack on the keyboard. BZZT! the lights went out. Hmmm, I said to myself, this is probably a problem.
I went to the basement and reset the circuit breaker, and it immediately tripped again! Wierd, I thought. So I went upstairs and unplugged everything in my room, and reset the breaker again. I turned on the keyboard - no problem. I turned on my amp - no problem. I picked up the cable from the amp, and decided to plug it into the keyboard with the keyboard off. I reached for the keyboard's power switch and happened to brush my hand against one of the metal screws that connected to the chassis ...
ZAP!
Well, 110 Volts through the chest is not enough to kill you ... luckily ... but it sure does hurt. Fortunately, it was only for about a second. Turns out that, somewhere between the outlet my amp was plugged into and the one my keyboard was in, the uncoded ground wire was picking up a charge. Pretty neat, huh! The whole chassis of my keyboard was electrified, and when they saw me holding the cable that led to my amp which was properly grounded, all those electrons were like, "oh boy! a neutral location we can head towards! yay!" and proceeded to race through my body in their hurry to get home.
In conclusion, I'd like to thank the electricians who wired our house ... my heart will beat just the slightest bit harder from now on.
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