My Dangerous Life

A light bulb tried to kill me.

No, seriously, it did.

I lie in bed each night reading, always have, sometimes for hours, sometimes just for a chapter or two, but it's my nightly ritual (and often what I most look forward to at the end of the day.)

We've had some windy weather around here lately, par for the course at this time of year and my parents keep having their power go out on them so it's something I've had at the back of my mind.

So when I was reading the other night and there was a giant bang, a bright blue light followed by darkness my first thought was "power outage."

My second thought was something along the lines of "power surge causing power outage" because the bang and the blue light seemed more like electricity over-doing itself than under-doing itself.

I stumbled out of bed in the dark to figure out what was going on and saw that my bedside clock was still running so I deduced it wasn't a power outage (I'm smart like that) but rather that my light bulb had probably blown.

I flicked on the overhead light and went back to deal with the burnt out light bulb except it wasn't there.

Yep, you read that right, the light bulb wasn't there.

Now you know how when you're reading at night you can get really into the book but you can also get a little zoned out because it's late and bedtime and well that's the reason I think my brain thought that maybe the light bulb had gotten so hot it had disintegrated somehow. You know, vaporized.

I really thought that. But just for a moment.

Then, once I'd figured out that that wasn't physically probable, I started looking for shards of glass; evidence that the light bulb had somehow shattered.

It was on this search that I found the bulb itself, very much intact, wedged next to my pillow, inches from where my head had been. (Alas, it missed its mark and did not manage to assassinate me as it was obviously planted to do by a rival spy agency thank you very much.)

Still not really understanding, I looked up inside the shade of my bedside lamp and found the rest of the light bulb, the silver screw in portion, still safely screwed into the lamp.

I was still pretty sure this wasn't real, but after unplugging the lamp (I'm smart like that) and using my pliers (I'm handy like that) I found that the bulb part of the light bulb had shot out of the screw in base part of the light bulb.

It turns out that the bulbs are glued in there under some pressure and that occasionally (rarely) they heat up and the glue melts and the bulb is shot out.

It also turns out that I can't seem to throw away the two light bulb pieces. They're amusing me to no end.

It also also turns out that I won't be buying cheap light bulbs again.

The end.

(Or is it? Duh duh duuuuuuuuuh!)