Outlet of Frustration

Day 532 – January 4, 2013

Summer in our corner of Peru means it is time for the mosquitoes to come out. The little critters south of the Equator are not the tan buggers I am accustomed to from our time spent in Virginia. These Peruvian examples from the family Culicidae are small, black, and emit a high-pitched whine that keeps the family up at night.

For the past several weeks, we have relied on a device that plugs into the wall to scare off the mosquitoes. One inserts a small tablet into the device. The device heats up courtesy of being plugged into the wall and the heat causes the table to disseminate its anti-mosquito scent.

I’m sure the folks at Raid have a better way to describe it, but they can use the comment section of this blog to let me know.

This device has been working relatively well but the tablets are only good for one night. So, I decided to purchase another product that claims to work up to 45 nights. Here it is…

This device has a vial of mosquito repellent that is also dispersed by having the device plugged into an outlet. However, I noticed a slight flaw in my plan after I brought the device back from the local grocery store. Look back up at the picture above and note the horizontal configuration of the plug. Now look below and note the configuration of this outlet, which is how all the outlets of our house look.

A horizontal plug combined with a vertical outlet result in this…

…which also equal a spillage of anti-mosquito liquid.

I grant you that this leakage of whatever this compound is pales in comparison to the Exxon Valdez or the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but a high concentration of this anti-bug juice is not a pleasing odor.

I was, as you could surmise, quite frustrated over this incompatibility of plugs and outlets. When my lovely wife came home, I shared with her my frustration by showing her the horizontal configuration of the device and the vertical configuration of the outlets.

She took the device in her hand and twisted the plugs so that they were now vertical, like so…

I’ll be honest here. I had no idea electrical devices could do that or that there would even be a need for plugs to rotate. With the configuration problem solved, the device is in the wall scaring away all the little mosquitoes.

That doesn’t mean that I still didn’t feel like this when I saw my lovely wife reorient the plug…

About these ads