There are times when what you know to be true turns out to be less than true.  But before that split second of what really is truth dawns on you, you are forced to react to what you think is true.  And how you react can sometimes set off a chain of events that are completely unpredictable.    

It all started out predictably enough.  My phone rang and I recognized the number right off.  It was a customer we had worked for before.  I knew his name and I was fairly certain I knew what the conversation would entail. 

“Hello?”

“Hello.  I have some receptacles that don’t work in my kitchen.  Can you come see what the matter is?”

“Yes, we can take a look at that for you.  Right now, our schedule is a bit full, so I’m thinking it will be 4 or 5 days before we can be there.”

“Oh.  I thought you would come to my place right away.”

“We’ll be there just as soon as we can.  Like I said, we are booked up a bit so it will be 4 or 5 days before we can be there.  If we happen to finish the work we have lined up sooner, then we will definitely get to your place sooner.  I’ll give you a call the day before we plan to be there.”

“Oh.  Well, I guess if you are going to make me wait that long I will just have to wait somehow.  I thought you would be able to get here sooner than that.  Don’t you think you could get here a little sooner?”

“No, if I get to your place sooner, then I will make someone else who I have promised already wait longer.  I’ll give you a call the day before we are ready to come to your place.  In the meantime, you are welcome to call around to any other electricians to see if they can accommodate you sooner.”

“Well, there is no one else close enough to call, so I guess if you think it’s going to take that long, then I guess I’ll just have to wait that long.”

So much was true as I had expected it to be.  This customer was known to us for his impatient manner.

***

I few days later, my phone rang with his number again.  I groaned.  I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for another go around of “when can you come to my place?”

But this was a little different than I expected.

“Hello?”

“Hello.  Say, I just got to thinking about how I sounded the other day and wanted to apologize.”

“Oh.  Sure.  Not a problem.  Actually, I’m glad you called.  We are moving along a little faster on our work than I expected and so we plan to be to your place tomorrow morning.”

***

My son and I arrived about 9 the following morning to investigate what the problem was with the receptacles that didn’t work in their kitchen. 

To say that it was a bit awkward, so soon after his apology would be speaking the truth.  But we carried on.  He seemed to feel indebted to us and was continually praising our work, or else apologizing about things that didn’t need apologizing, and trying to help along in any little way he could, which, for me, made it even more awkward and difficult to think about the problem at hand.

We had worked our way around one side of the kitchen, checking for power in the outlets and tracing the flow of it so we could work out were the problem was.  I had made it to the sink and was thinking that there was a good chance this problem could be in the recep (our slang for receptacle) under the sink that powered the garbage disposer.  I hunkered down and partially wedged myself into the tiny cabinet space under the sink. 

I had my voltmeter situated beside me and the probes out in front as I squeezed my elbows together to try to get the probes close enough together to insert on either side of the recep.  I had just inserted them and was trying to get a voltage reading on my meter when it happened.

My helpful, constantly at my side praising/apologetic companion did a number on me.  Unbeknownst to me, he had found a flashlight once I started burrowing under the sink, assuming it would be dark in there.  He was right.  I had blocked all the light off just by squeezing into and filling the opening with my small to mid-sized body.  The flashlight he had chosen to illuminate my work area with was a LED version with a rather bluish white light. 

My friend, see above description of him, had stabbed the flashlight, again unbeknownst to me, into position just beside my right ear.  When he turned it on, there was a sharp click, and a flood of bluish-white light blasted the small interior space that I occupied.

The sound was exactly the right sound, and the color of the light exactly the right color.  My mind told me, from past experience, that I had crossed the phase wire and the neutral wire somehow and had gotten shocked or if I hadn’t, then I had some molten metal that was currently suspended and was fixing to land on my person. 

I reacted to what I thought was true.

I exited backward out of that small space on my knees and elbows, sort of in stinkbug posture, in a blur of backward motion, doing the tata on the hard wooden floor I was on.  Of course, since my helpful friend was standing so close to me at the time of my exposure to his light and sound, my powerful exit strategy hurled me into his knees, almost bringing him to a sitting position beside me on the floor.  Many, many apologies followed from my helpful friend. 

After collecting myself and my wits on two separate expeditions, I retraced my route to try to find the fault in the circuit we were working on.  Somewhere in this time frame, my peripheral vision began to pick up an older woman, whom I knew by name as a local townsperson, walking through the room and into other rooms close by.  I wondered what she might be doing there, as she wasn’t any relation that I knew of, and it seemed her course of travel was rather aimless.  (I later learned that she helped clean their house on occasion.)  I soon dispatched her to the unknown, however, and completely forgot about her.

It seemed this circuit we were tracing was heading towards the basement.  “Yes,” my friend said, “there is a mechanical room right below us.”  We made our way downstairs to the mechanical room.  There was a recep up high on the wall in a rather strange place and I suspicioned I was zeroing in on my problem.  I probed that recep and it checked out okay.  I asked if there was a room adjacent and was told there was. 

I’ll just quick run over there to see if this circuit travels in that direction and be right back, I told them.  The door to the room next was about fifteen feet from the door to the mechanical room and as I approached, I could see it was slightly ajar and the light was switched on inside. 

Voltmeter in one hand, my other swung the door farther open and in a quick motion I was inside and striding towards the wall that had the suspect recep on, which was back the way I had come. 

My ears registered something amiss, but since I was so focused on that recep, I didn’t heed what they were telling me.  And since I figured this recep would be rather high up on the wall to match the placement of the other one, my eyes where elevated to that same level in this room.

I was now in a prime position to experience my second shocking experience of the morning.  My ears seemed to get through a bit to my addled brain and slowed my gait a bit.  They also caused me to lower my eyes from the recep to scan the room in particular.

It was too little and too late. 

My eyes told me that the room was a bathroom. 

They also told me there was an older lady, the local townsperson mentioned earlier, sitting on the commode. 

The next thing they told me was a blur of room and walls and finally, after what seemed a very long spin cycle, a door.  The door whence I had entered and which I was now making for in a most fastidious manner. 

My ears now registered with clarity the sound I had heard milliseconds before.  “Excuse me, excuse me,” from somewhere in the vicinity of the stool, although I didn’t try to verify this with my eyes at all. 

Why the dear lady left the door ajar remains a mystery.  But I know her quandary had to be real to her, as the commode was at least thirteen feet from the door, I was at least half that distance into the room and towards her in a most unseeing and yet seeing all manner, and she had no way whatsoever to hurriedly rise and slam the door shut like she might have been able to, had the room been smaller. 

And I’m thankful unto this day that she didn’t try to rise, in the state of dress that she was in, to try to hasten to the door and shut it, as my path and hers most assuredly would have crossed and there would have been a muffled, tangled collision.  Her only recourse, then, were the desperate excuse me’s I had heard, and those heard only faintly, and in retrospect, as it were.

I went on in faith that the recep in the bathroom checked out okay and told my son and my friend waiting for me back in the mechanical room that we would move back upstairs. 

And indeed, the bathroom recep downstairs must have been in good condition all along, having been there only to play its own little seemingly insignificant part in a string of events that left me, as my son told me later, sort of dazed and in a fog as to what the truth really was. 

But at least my apologetic friend never knew of the calamitous, tumultuous scene played out in the bathroom next door over.