>Killing the Messenger

“Oh. No.”

“What is it?” Hubs asked.

“All of the sockets are out on this wall,” I said, sighing deeply after unplugging the coffeemaker from the bum outlet. “I’m going to have to call an electrician.”

“I can’t believe it,” Hubs replied dourly. That morning, we had shelled out several grand to buy a new heating and air conditioning unit. We were already broke. And now, we were going to be broker.

Later in the afternoon, an electrician named Pat showed up. “Did you try resetting this outlet?” he said, pointing at the reset button on the socket.

“Yes,” I said in a polite ‘duh’ tone. “I tried it three times.”

“Okay,” he said gamely. “Where’s your fuse box?”

“It’s in the garage,” Hubs volunteered. “I’ll show you.” In a moment, he came back inside with a stricken look on his face.

“It’s working again,” he said. “The breaker was tripped.”

“What?!” At that moment, Pat came back in the kitchen. Hubs and I moved to the den.

“I thought you checked it!” I whispered.

“I thought you checked it!” Hubs retorted.

In the next room, Pat cleared his throat.

“You told me you checked it!” I whispered, even more quietly.

“No, you told me you checked it!”

“Hubs, you’re the man. You’re supposed to check it!” I whisper-yelled. Hubs sighed in exasperation.

“Now what?!” I asked him. He shrugged. I gestured toward the kitchen. “Get Pat out of here!” I mouthed. “He’s going to try to stay for a while so he can bill us!”

“What am I supposed to do?” Hubs mouthed back. I thought for a moment, then slowly drew a finger across my neck. Hubs stared at me, aghast.

But it would be so easy, I reasoned to myself. We could just hide Pat’s body in our basement crawl space. All I knew was that we were not going to pay $120 for some guy to come out and flip our breaker switch, that much was certain. We would do what we had to do.

Of course, there was the matter of his truck… I couldn’t quite figure out in my mind how to get rid of it. There really weren’t any convenient cliffs to drive it off of, and the nearest pond was right beside a busy road. As the gears turned in my brain, Hubs and I looked at each other for a long moment. My fingers twitched with impatience.

“Your transformer here needs replacing!” Pat announced loudly. Hubs and I jumped. He turned to go back into the kitchen and I grabbed his arm, making the universal “Strangle him!!” symbol with both my hands. Hubs frowned and went to confront the unlucky electrician.

Oh, put down that telephone, readers. We didn’t kill Pat. But I just might commit hara-kiri when his bill arrives.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.