The day that will never come
by Olivier Cleynen
For me the day that will never come was last Saturday. I made a stupid mistake, not reading the electrical panel labels well enough before proceeding to replace a broken switch in the electrical stove. At some point, my body became the thing through which the current was flowing. Within a few hundredths of a second, the main residual current device in the panel sensed that current was not returning through the expected cable. It thought “this is the day that will never come” and tripped, saving my life.
I have always been interested in safety and the systems that work to build it in. When someone tells me they avoided a car accident and the brake pedal vibrated under their foot, I know it is the anti-lock braking system kicking in. You should really never have put yourself in this situation to begin with, having to slow down so suddenly, and also in this moment of emergency you should be relieving pressure on the pedal so the tires do not skid. Yet here we are, and now, after ten years of continuously monitoring the wheel rotation rates on the car doing nothing, the little module thinks ”this is the day that will never come”, springs into action and keeps the car from careening into your accident.
I am aware that a thousand systems of kindness and care make it so that I am alive. I did not die as an infant, did not catch polio as a kid, did not succumb that time I got appendicitis, the roof above my head is at no risk of collapsing, and so on. It’s just that Saturday, I could hear the distinctive “click”. A million experiments and committees and regulations led to this thing getting reluctantly retrofitted in all the apartments in the country, so that the one in mine could trigger for me.
When we came back from the hospital where, thankfully, nothing noteworthy came up on the tests, the clock on the stove indicated the time elapsed since I had reset the mains switch. A measure of something, for sure. I live on with a sense of debt, unsure of how to pay it back, or forward.