Who Knew You Could Actually Miss Local 3?

Who Knew You Could Actually Miss Local 3?
Originally uploaded by jakeyd.

This picture is from last night – just before our electricity went out. Sasha came over to fix it. (He turns out to be an amateur electrician in addition to everything else. It may be that you have to be a jack of all trades here……) We collectively discovered that our fuses – besides apparently being the old-fashioned ceramic cylinder type – consist of a bit of wire wrapped around said ceramic, and that getting to the fuses involves brushing away a spider web of various mysterious wires wrapped in varying amounts of different vintages of electrical tape. Sasha initially got the electricity back on by touching one of these wires to the breaker box itself. “Oh,” says Sasha, “Soviet wiring.”

This morning, a “real” electrician came over. A gentleman of about 50 with a Navy tattoo on his hand – odd choice of service for a Kazakhstani. Half the building came out to watch him work. Unclear to us what the attraction was. (Was he a celebrity electrician? Do people never call pros?) Anyway, he muttered some incantations and left. Afterward, I opened the fuse box to see what he might have done, and a big spark jumped off one of the wires. Presumably the three of us will get home before the building burns down.