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WWLATE # 3 Electricity
Written by Jimmy
This is written with love and kisses – we love you English. We share your passport and sleep and eat on your soil. But you make us laugh some time and love you even more. This is the number 3 reason “Why We Love The English’:
Part One: The Thing We Love: You’ve got this weird love hate thing going on with electricity. As we wonder around uor house we feel like this strange and new energy source in our house, electricity, is as scary and un-safe as a Three Mile Island nuclear reactor (see note below).
Part Two: The Evidence: There are so many built in extra safety features, unique to this island.
1. Industrial Plugs: My goodness. You really want to get the connection right! No leakage, no possibility of a broken connection. Three screwdrive size prongs, 4.3 kilos of steel, 8 square inches… you’ve got amazing plugs. When Americans visit England they have to check in luggage just to bring adapters. The US has gotten along fine with a little plug the size of a 10 P coin. But you guys feel you need this massive industrial product just to connect your thing to your electic grid. You know what they say about countries with big plugs?
2. Redundant Safety Systems: having installed the world’s largest plug, you’ve concluded that isn’t enough. You need to add on/off switches to your electricity, so it doesn’t rush into your appliances, out of your appliances and run around your house stabbing things! So, rather than just be satisfied with what the rest of the world does – turn off the toaster – you go further. We’ll turn off the toaster. Then we’ll go to the wall. And we’ll make sure the electricity doesn’t decide ON ITS OWN to turn back on the toaster. We’ll trap it in the wall. And you turn off the wall. Even your extension cords have on/off switches. I turn on more buttons than a 747 pilot just to play Air Traffic Control. I turn on the wall. I turn on the extension cord. Then I turn on my i touch. There has been less electricity escaping from English homes than convicts from the tower.
3. Bathroom/Toilet Room Strings: You read somewhere that water and electricity don’t go well together. So you make us pull strings in the toilet and bathrooms, under some illustion that most Brits are standing in the toilet or bath when they turn on electrical appliaances. I have my own theory here. When Thomas Crapper completed the first flush toilet, the flushing mechanism was a string pull from the cistern that was situated high above the toilet (to let gravity work and throw the water down at your little Crappers). The string pull company was making a killing. When the toilet shape changed they were about to go out of business. But then electricity caught on (no pun intended) and they forced the government to mandate that toilet strings would now be used to turn on bathroom lights. Sounds very plausible because there is NO OTHER REASON why pulling a string in a bathroom makes you safer (indeed it can make you happier but that is a different topic).
Part Three: A Detailed Academically Support Explanation: Okay. This gets deep. There’s a deep and well proven culture tendancy of the English. When you form a council and that council sets standards, you decide those standards have to be higher than any place on earth. There’s an exception to this – it doesn’t apply to Education, Science or anything where you’d actually want to be world class. It applies to ‘other stuff.’ So here’s the actual quote from the Electrical Safety Council: “You should never assume you are as protected abroad as you are at home. Electricity safety standards in the UK are higher than in many other countries.” Then there’s another 2,456 web pages to teach you about electricity safety and what to do when you travel to those electricity negligent countries abroad. In there downloadable guide to landlords about their saftey obligations, they use pictures that show the evils of electricity left unchecked by English superior standards:
All of that waits for you in OTHER COUNTRIES where electricity runs amouk and sets out at night to start your toaster and wait for you as you p ut your feet in your hotel toilet. The horror.
Part Four: And a Final Note on Threee Mile Island: I mentioned Three Mile Island. It was the biggest nuclear accident on US soil. No one died. Then there was Ted Kennedy’s accident in 1969 involving a young woman who died at Chappiquiddick. When Ted, an opponet of nuclear energy, was running for office, one of the most popular bumper stickers was “More People Died At Chappiquiddick than Three Mile Island.” Ouch.