Dumb and Dumber

As much as I hate to admit it, there are times when I do something dumb and then have to slap my forehead and say "duh."

Holding my keys in my hand while looking for them constitutes as dumb. Going to the grocery store to get eggs, coming home with $65 worth of groceries and no eggs is another one, as is pouring a cup of coffee and realizing I forgot to put grounds in the basket.

But when the electricity goes off in our garage and I can't find the reset button that's right in front of my face, well that ratchets stupidity up to a whole new level for me.

Not being able to accomplish relatively simple tasks goes back to my childhood. I remember the first time the chain came off my bicycle. An hour later, covered with black grease, I still couldn't fix my bike.

My brother came along and slipped the chain back on in less than two minutes.

As a teenager, I had an Impressionist wall in my bedroom because I stood on a folding chair to paint the moulding around the top of the room. Instead of having a blue border, I had a white wall decorated with a huge splat of cornflower blue paint.

I also backed our car into the house one afternoon. Oh, I can say I was distracted by my baby brother or I was a young driver and couldn't judge distances, but the hard, cold truth is that I backed our Ford sedan into our house – that wasn't moving – and cracked the sheetrock from the ceiling to the floor.

Then there was the evening I put Dawn liquid detergent in the dishwasher after running out of powdered cleaner. I never bothered to read the dishwasher directions, but when mountains of suds came spewing out the sides of the Kenmore, I learned my lesson.

So when I came home from work this week and the garage door didn't open, I thought the power was off in the house. I went inside and realized only the garage was without power.

Growing up in an older house, I knew to check the breakers, but none seemed to be tripped. At this point in time, I did what any intuitive person would do – I called an expert. That expert just happens to be my husband who was taking a needed break out in the country.

He asked me to look around the garage for an outlet similar to the one in our bathroom that trips from time to time. I didn't see one but I told him one of the breakers had to be tripped.

I described the electrical panels to him and checked all of the switches to see if any had tripped. Knowing I must be missing something, I took pictures of the panels and emailed them to him so he could see what I was seeing.

Nothing looked tripped, but my husband decided to come home in case something deeper was wrong.

Frustrated at not being able to figure out the problem, I stomped around the house for a bit and then decided to go back to the garage one more time and look around.

That's when I saw the electrical outlet with the ground fault interrupter.

It was right below the electrical panel.

With one press of the trip button, the power was back on. That move took less than three seconds, the same amount of time it took me to slap my forehead.

Am I feeling like the dumbest person on the planet?

Oh yeah.
 
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.