Editor's Note: The following column was originally published in 2007.

A few years ago, I was rather disappointed to learn that I'm not smart enough to dig a hole in my backyard.

My cousin Ken had come over to help me build a deck off the back of the house by doing all the work. My father was there, too, and was assisting by watching the basketball game and keeping us informed of the score, and complaining that we were low on beer. Ken seemed grateful that I had assembled such a crack team to assist him.

Running short of beer during lunch is against my father's religion. He believes the forces of good and evil in the universe are precariously balanced between sandwiches and beer, and that failure to maintain the correct ratio between the two will result in Total Catastrophic Destruction. He demanded to know what I was planning to do about the looming beer shortage.

"Dad." I spread my arms to indicate the deck-building operation that was underway, which at that point consisted of Ken cutting boards and my watching him do it. "I'm a little busy here."

Muttering darkly about being able to eat "only half a sandwich," he went back to the basketball game.

Eventually, Ken asked me to use the post-hole digger, which is a gasoline-driven auger that bites into the dirt like a corkscrew and then spins the person holding it in fast circles until he finds the shutoff button or passes out. "How's that going?" Ken asked me, as I staggered around like Mel Gibson at a sobriety checkpoint.

"OK, except I think I might throw up now."

I seized the handles of the post-hole digger — the whole thing resembles a pogo stick with giant drill bit on the end. I started the motor, took a firm stance and engaged. This time, I stood rock still, but the entire planet twirled beneath me. Every half second or so, I would see my father's face at the kitchen window, frowning at me because I was horsing around instead of solving his beverage crisis.

I was thrown to the ground and lay there, the entire universe out of balance.

"We need a rodeo cowboy," I told Ken.

"Just keep your feet still," he advised, as if I'd been using the post-hole digger to practice my ballroom dancing.

I grimly took the handles and this time actually managed to dig the hole, the auger going straight and true and my arms coming out of their sockets.

Then there was a puff of white smoke from the hole, and the motor died.

"What happened?" I asked Ken, who was sniffing at the burning-rubber smell with suspicion.

My father appeared. "All of your electricity just went off," he announced in a that's it, I'm getting a new son tone of voice.

Eventually, we decided to call the phone number on the sign that said, "Before Digging, Call This Number." It hadn't seemed important before.

The two men who were dispatched by the utility company were very impressed when I explained to them that they could have free sandwiches. They drank iced tea with their lunch, which my dad found so heretical he had to lie down on the couch.

"The thing is," one of them told me, "you have three wires going into your house. Two are hot, and the one in the middle is the ground. You managed to put the tip of that auger right between the ground and one of the hot wires."

"I've been getting pretty good with the thing," I admitted.

"So what I'm saying is, if you had gone a quarter of an inch in either direction, the shortest electrical path to the ground would have been up through you, instead of through the metal auger. We'd be picking pieces of you out of the bushes." He held up a slice of turkey as a visual aid.

So here's the lesson I learned from all this: Even if you are an expert post-hole digger like me, and even if you have the universe balanced between lunch and liquid, you really should call that number on the sign before you start screwing with the Earth.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his Website at www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.