Steven Lore Update: In my second year of university, I found myself without UBC housing, so I decided to rent an apartment with a buddy of mine, John, a fellow second-year UBC science student.
I can still vividly recall that fateful night. It was a typical dark and rainy evening in Vancouver. John, my roommate, had attempted to use his air fryer to cook pork ribs when, suddenly, the entire kitchen was engulfed in darkness. The abrupt blackout sent his fridge – the sanctuary of his beloved lemon ice creams – into turmoil.
Now, John, not being an engineering student, immediately spiraled into a full-blown panic. He couldn’t cook, and his food was teetering on the brink of spoiling. He was perilously close to surrendering to the siren call of McDonald’s, the last refuge of the desperate.
And then, in the midst of this culinary chaos, I emerged as the hero, puzzled by the mysterious commotion in our kitchen. A swift assessment of the situation revealed that this was no ordinary power outage. The lights in the rest of the apartment were humming along just fine.
As a student of electrical engineering, my intuition told me that we were grappling with a circuit breaker, one of those electrical switches designed to shield circuits from overcurrent or overload disasters.
I turned to John, who confessed to a kitchen appliance frenzy, using multiple power-hungry gadgets simultaneously. My suspicion was confirmed. With an unwavering determination to rescue my roommate from the clutches of fast food misery, I set out to track down our apartment’s electrical lifeline.
Lo and behold, right in front of my bed, there it was—the circuit breaker panel. The switch had been flipped, defying our kitchen’s power flow.
“Click.”
The kitchen erupted with light, and my roommate was saved from his impending McDonald’s catastrophe. His lemon ice creams were safe, and his food was spared from an untimely demise.
Being a hero isn’t always easy; it’s demanding work. But on that dark and stormy night in Vancouver, I emerged as the electric savior my roommate never knew he needed.