Every once in a while, when talking to my wife, I'll bring up something unpleasant that happened years before. "Remember…?" I'll say, bringing up some event at which I still shake my head. Inevitably, she'll shrug and tell me she has absolutely no memory of the stressful event. She claims she has a magical ability to block out things she doesn't want to remember, to pretend so hard that it didn't happen that, to her, it didn't. It's a skill I've always envied.

About three weeks ago, our brand-new dryer in the basement stopped working. As I paced back and forth, flipping the circuit breaker that controls it, I explained to my wife that the dryer, which requires a tremendous amount of power, operates on a separate 220-volt circuit. I didn't know exactly what that meant in technical terms, so I explained that if you accidentally touched a 110-volt line, you'd shake like a crazy person, your teeth would chatter, and you'd fall to the ground and swear like a sailor. Were you to touch a 220-volt line, however, you would explode like a tomato dropped from a 10-story building. This was not, I assured her, something I could fix myself.

We went through two different electricians, who both determined that the circuit was good and the line looked fine as far as they could see, but that somewhere back in the wall behind the dryer, the line had shorted out. Both electricians said they'd have to run a new line — a big job, one they'd have to come back for some other time.

Meanwhile, our clothes started to pile up till it looked like we were running a laundry service. Finally, I found an electrician who would come by the house during the workweek and get the job done. I came home from work early and tramped down to the basement, only to find him shaking his head.

"I don't get this," he said. "I unscrewed your old outlet and started to pull on the cable, and that's when 'that' came out of the wall." He pointed to a 10-foot length of thick 220-volt wire, one end connected to the offending outlet, and the other, for some odd reason, to another 220-volt plug.

On both ends, there were exposed wires, just waiting for some poor sap to come along, touch them and get blown up. It looked like something the Unabomber might come up with.

I stared at the wire for a minute, shaking my head. Suddenly, it came rushing back to me. Fifteen years ago, as a novice home repairman, I wanted to move around stuff in the laundry room to make the whole process more efficient. I didn't have the time, patience or money to pay for an electrician to move the 220-plug across the room and thought (idiotically) I could just buy an extension cord. Every other electrical item in our old house was connected to some sort of extension cord, I figured, so why not the dryer?

I went to a local hardware store and asked an aged salesman where they kept the 220-volt extension cords. The salesman looked at me like I was an idiot. They didn't make 220-volt extension cords, he said, because it was so dangerous. "Not up to code," he said dismissively.

Looking around to make sure no one was listening, though, he confided that there was nothing to stop me from making my own extension cord out of scrap wire. We smiled at each other, two idiots on the same pathetic wavelength.

Back home, I somehow screwed the components together into a somewhat illegal and highly dangerous science project. I carefully plugged it in (this was before I had enough experience in home repair to even think about exploding tomatoes) and waited for sparks to fly. When nothing happened except the dryer humming to life, I shrugged, patted myself on the back and began building a wall that would bury my idiocy behind fresh drywall.

Now, years later, the electrician joined me to stare at the wire on the ground.

"Never seen anything like that in all my years as an electrician," he said. "Lucky your house didn't burn down. I can't even imagine what someone was thinking!"

I thought of telling him who'd done this ridiculous, shortsighted thing. Before I could open my mouth, though, the identity of the person in question just slipped right out of my mind.

"I can't either," I said in a shocked, mortified tone. "But it's pretty clear he was an idiot!"

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