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I don’t know much about electricity and wiring

Wednesday 19 January 2005

but I’m pretty sure that strange things as were happening around here last night should not be happening.

I’d literally just finished complaining about the techno hell I was scheduled to endure and had gone over to C-Span to watch some more of the Rice confirmation hearings when suddenly the light on my desk went out and the icon indicating that my laptop had switched to battery power.

Frank made the comment that it could be due to the age of the building, speculating that it could have been pre-WW2 and originally unwired, then wired and re-wired. I’m not quite sure of the age of the original building itself, but it could very well have been pre-WW2. In 1999-2001, though, it was completely rebuilt. I don’t mean renovated, I mean rebuilt — all that’s left of the original building is the foundation and the outer walls. The floor Kinga and I live on was actually non-existent then, so everything here is about four years old.

Short-term power outages happen around here (super-rural Poland) semi-regularly, so I thought nothing of it. In fact, for the first time in my life, I was happy about the apparent blackout. “Peace!” I thought.  But the thum-thum-thum-th-th-thum-thum-thum was still going on downstairs.

And Senator Bidden (bless his compromising heart) was still making me smile via Real Player and the LAN router across the hall.

Intrigued, I tried the kitchen light. Nothing. Still further intrigued, I went out into the hall and tried the light switch there. “Ba-ba-ba-PING!” and the incandescent lights were on.

Odd.

As a side note, I will very irritatedly report that most of the students were not hooting and hollering but just sitting at the edge of the room — a typical dance. Why the music has to be so loud for that, I’ll never know.

I put on my coat and descended into Techno Hell. The teachers’ room there was without electricity, but the adjacent areas had power. In fact, as I left, I noticed that there were lights on almost throughout the school. Talking to the teachers there, I learned that they were just as confused about it as I was. No one knew what was going on.

Returning home, I decided to start cooking dinner by candlelight — a minor irritation, compounded by the bit of back luck that had given Techno Hell a different electrical fate than me. “Why oh why didn’t they lose power?” I muttered.

Then the fridge switched on and I thought I was saved.

I reached over to turn on the light — nothing. Fridge running, no light. I checked the lights in the living room. They worked. I went to the bedroom — nothing going. So then I did the only logical thing: I systematically went through the apartment switching on all the lights to see which power outlets were live and which were not.

The bizarre results:

  • The bedroom and bathroom were completely without power.
  • The living room was fine, even though one of the outlets was in the same wall as one of the dead outlets in the bedroom — directly opposite it, in fact. In theory, on the same line.
  • The main light in the kitchen didn’t work, but the small light above the sink did.

Now, as I said, I don’t know much about electrical wiring, but this seems pretty damn odd to me.

And it seems to indicate some pretty weird construction practices. When the maintenance man came, I stood talking to him for a moment with my neighbor, and I found out some even more bizarre info:

  • Most of the wiring for the upper floor where we live goes through a fuse box on that floor — which makes since.
  • Some of the lines run through another fuse box two floors below us.
  • My neighbor had power everywhere except where his fridge was plugged in.

“Who the hell thought up such a wiring plan?!” I wanted to scream/laugh, but I bit my tongue and thanked the maintenance man for his help.

An hour or so later, the power all came back on, but I’m still scratching my head over it.

That’s not the only example of weird wiring in Poland. The switches for most bathroom lights are outside the bathroom. You flip it on as you enter. In the first apartment I lived in, though, the lights were on the hinge side of the door, so if you forgot to turn on the light (which happened when I first arrived), it wasn’t just a matter of sticking your hand out the door. You had to go back out into the hall, close the bathroom door, and turn the light on…

Hootin’ ‘n’ Hollerin’ in Polish Schools

Wednesday 19 January 2005

We have an apartment above an elementary school. That’s living hell when they have school dances. They usually last from two in the afternoon until eight at night: the first two hours for the younger kids and the last four hours for the older elementary school students.

I remember the after-school dance I chaperoned while student teaching in a junior high school. It was an hour and a half.

Four hours seems a bit of an exaggeration.

Our apartment is one floor above the area where they dance, though not directly above it. The junior high kids who come in and serve as DJs turn the music up so loud that the floor of our apartment literally vibrates, and the you can hear the super-low-frequency bass tones reverberating throughout the whole apartment — walls, glasses, ceiling, everything shaking.

You never truly notice how repetitive techno music is until you can only hear the bass and drums. Then, “variation on a theme” seems to be too generous a description.

For an elementary school dance.

I asked one of the teachers if she didn’t think that was perhaps a bit too loud for such young ears.

“It could do serious, lasting damage,” I said.

“Yes, but if we didn’t play it so loud, they couldn’t hoot and holler as they like to do during dances,” was the response.

I’ll pause for a moment to let that one sink in.

All sorts of things were swirling in my mind, and the delicacy of the moment was highlighted by my lack of Polish fluency.

First reaction: “Hum, I always thought it was the teachers who ran a school.” Tactless no matter the level of fluency.

I settled for something along the lines of, “Well, why not simply tell the kids, ‘Look, it’s too loud. You’ll have to be quiet or you won’t hear the music,’ or, ‘This is as loud as we’ll play it. So if you don’t like it, you don’t have to come.'”

“We should,” she laughed.

But they won’t.

So here I sit, thirty-six minutes into a four-hour marathon of “thum-thum-thum-th-th-thum-thum-thum” techno hell.