I’m Bummed … And I’m Down on Cops at the Moment
Here’s the deal. Yesterday, my dryer blew a fuse. This is a normal occurence. My (clothes) dryer blows at least one fuse a week, sometimes five or six. I went to replace the fuse and found that the bottom part of the fuse had fused itself to the contact at the back of the electrical panel. Ungood.
I shut off the electricity to the panel and cleaned out the powdery residue and picked the fuse contact thingy off of the panel’s contact. I then wiped it out with a dry cotton swab, and screwed in a new fuse. The dryer started fine, but I noticed smoke coming from the fuse box. Plus-ungood. I turned off the dryer and unscrewed the new fuse. Then I called my dad.
He came by and found that the entire fuse block was cracked in two. Doubleplus-ungood. He had to go to the supply house (i.e., Home Depot) to get a new fuse block. While he was gone, I pulled my car out of the driveway so that I could go get fried chicken for supper later. Dad came back and started another project, and I went to get the food. When I came home, I didn’t want to pull into the drive, because Dad’s car was still there. So I pulled up to the kerb in front of my house, but my car was facing the wrong way. I figured, “no big deal; I’ll move it when the folks leave.” Well, my back had been bothering me all day, and when they left, I was hurting so bad that I figured I’d just leave the car until morning.
Went out this morning to head for work, and guess what was under my wiper blades? Yep. You got it. A citation for parking the wrong way on the street. Now, I do not dispute that I knowingly parked my car backwards and left it. I deserve the ticket.
No, what bums me is that the ex used to park that way all the time at our house (same house, same street), and he never once got a ticket. I told him it was illegal to park that way, and he scoffed at me. And kept doing it. And never once, in three years, got a ticket for it.
I did it once — the only time I have ever done it in twenty years of driving — and I get the ticket. That just so royally sucks. It’s so brutally unfair that the ex gets all the lucky breaks, and I get screwed. Repeatedly. Now, my religious upbringing tells me that this is actually a good sign. I’m not on God’s credit card system, but on the cash-only plan. This is a good thing. But it can be awfully depressing.
And it kind of makes me irritable with the police-person who issued the citation. Where was he when the ex was parking that way almost every night for three years and laughing at me for telling him not to do it because he’d get a ticket? Where was he when the frat boys down the street were rockin’ and rollin’ — very drunk — at two a.m. three Friday nights ago. Or when the folks across the street were shooting off fireworks on New Years Day (illegal inside our city limits)? For that matter, where was he when the drunken kid wrapped himself around a tree after sideswiping another vehicle last Wednesday? No, this police person found me and my backward facing car the most dangerous violation on the street last night. Sheesh! As I said, I know that I deserve the ticket; it just rankles that I got caught and the ex never did.
Fortunately for me, it’s the least expensive traffic violation going — a $10 fine. So the budget isn’t destroyed; I just won’t be able to buy Friday night pizza this week. Which I wouldn’t have been anyway, since I now have to replace the whole electric box — Home Depot doesn’t have fuse blocks for my ancient fuse box.
2 Comments
With your fuses blowing out 4 or 5 times per week, you’re very lucky that your house didn’t burn down. You should have replaced that fuse box much sooner. I can’t believe your dad didn’t recognize this and replace it for you long before now. Whoever originally installed that box was probably trying to save money and used something inadequate. Either that, or you’ve added rooms on to your house without upgrading it. Either way, your house could easily have burned down because of it.
Well, unfortunately, I’m a typical female when it comes to that sort of thing. I never actually told Daddy that I was blowing fuses at such a tremendous rate. The ex, now, he knew we were using one or two boxes of fuses a month, but he didn’t think it was a big deal. We did look into changing the box a few years back, when I wanted to put in an electric stove instead of gas, but it turns out that the house was built in the ’50s and hasn’t been upgraded since. So the service is out of code, and if an electrician started any work, he’d have to upgrade the service, rewire this, that, and the other, etc. It would have cost $2000, which we did not have at the time. And my ex was in the “don’t rack up any debt whatsoever — even a home mortgage is a sin” camp, so I was screwed. Now he’s gone, I’m hoping to swing a home improvement loan this summer, move in with my folks and put my stuff in storage for three months, and remodel the whole place.