Mystery of Electricity

August 20/08 8:17 p.m.

Last nite suddenly our lights went off, so we checked our fuses, turned out the main fuse had blown out, we switched it on, same thing a few minutes later. Then our neighbour showed up and told us his fuses kept blowing out. So obviously we kept turning off each others electricity and we could have continued doing this all nite, if he had not contacted us. We live in a duplex type house, but with complete seperate electricity circuits. Now lots of activity started, a team from the electricity company, and they also brought a test car, or whatever you call them, our own electrician, neighbour and man of the house, the last two only "watchers" tried to find the mistake, zero, nada. The fuses kept happily blowing. Outside supply lines were checked,no luck, so the team left, after having emptied half of our(messy) basement, embarassing comments towards Landfrau from man of the house included (which won't make me tidy up that ugly place) and the electrician and the two unlookers kept switching around, till we finally were left with lights minus groundfloor lights and had been better off than our neighbour,who had no kitchen and basement lights . This morning I got up at a real early bird hour, wanted to bake a prune cake for this afternoon's company of a friend from Southern Germany, suceeded to have it ready before the electrician showed up again, but put in the double amount of sugar in the rush. So, the place was checked and doublechecked, in the meantime we had elelctricity all over the place, so had the neighbour. Later on the electrician found a foul line in the neighbour's kitchen, the ceiling lamp, and now the neighbour has to have the painters in to redo the kitchen, because the ceiling and walls had to be opened. But the electrican claims, that this has not been the reason for the short circuits and that it will happen again for sure.
Then he left and we are waiting for the bill.