Our house is high tech. Our dryer stops running when the laundry is dry. Our door talks to us. The refrigerator dings when we have held it open for too long. Our air conditioner has a remote control, and can cool our cavernous living room from the corner. Perhaps the houses of the well heeled do this everywhere, but we did not have such appliances until we moved to Korea. As we recently learned, in addition to all of our smart appliances, our electrical grid has a self destruct feature.
We were not aware that there is an outlet under our kitchen sink. We bathe Xander in there, and he loves to splash around. Apparently one day--Lunar New Year's Day, in fact, the biggest holiday of the Korean year--the outlet decided that it had had enough, and it turned off the power to our house. We fiddled with the circuit breakers, trying to turn it back on. We called our landlord. He came by and demonstrated to us that the problem was in one area, so with some masterful fiddling, we could turn on the power in the other five areas of our house. The house had no problem with that. It was only when we tried to return power to the cursed section that the house decided that to protect us all, it must shut the power off.
We rigged up our refrigerator with an extension cord and called it a night. The next day, the landlord prodded us about our new appliances. Surely we had plugged something in that did not please the house. We insisted that we hadn't changed anything, and he called the electrician, who discovered the outlet that none of us knew about. Which, as I mentioned, was under the sink. The perfect place for an outlet. Happy New Year!
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