Month: February 2019

I’ve put a new plug on our hoover.

That maybe doesn’t sound like anything worth getting excited about, but it’s not something I do every day. This is only the third time I’ve ever done it (and one of those times was in a school science lesson entitled ‘How To Wire A Plug’ so I’m not sure that even counts).

In my defence, nothing nowadays seems to come without a plug already attached. I know that once upon a time all electrical appliances came sans plug (in much the same way that a lot of gadgets still come ‘batteries not included’) but thankfully we live in more enlightened times, meaning that when we bought it, our hoover came with a moulded plug already wired in so that we could plug and play (well, plug and hoover) as soon as we got it home.

Until I stood on it.

This isn’t the first plug I’ve stood on, I clearly remember as a child standing on the pins-upward plug of a steam iron. On that occasion the plug won, it remained fully intact while I had a bleeding foot with a flap of skin hanging off it. Four decades on, it was a very different story – our hoover plug came off a definite second, its topmost pin coming clean off, while I’m pleased to report I suffered no injury whatsoever.

Of course, it was a pyrrhic victory, because it rendered the plug, and by extension the hoover, non-functional. Which is where I came in, fitting a new plug.

I was able to find a You Tube video showing exactly how to do it, from cutting off the moulded plug and exposing the wires, through the whole fitting process. Am I the only one who never knew the third pin is largely for show? In most cases it’s not even wired in, it’s just there to fill the third hole in the socket.

I broke the hoover on Saturday, put the new plug on late on Sunday, didn’t get to test it on Monday (sorry, this seems to be turning into a Craig David song) and in fact only got to it today (Friday).  

I have, I think, a slightly superstitious relationship with electricity. Maybe it comes from those adverts I used to see as a kid, exhorting all right-minded people to not just turn off but to physically unplug their TV set each night. Whatever the reason, my instinctive response to the outlandish notion that I have fitted a new plug, is to suspect I’ve probably fitted it wrong. As such, the last thing I wanted was for my other half to try it while I wasn’t there, for fear of her going the same way as Valerie Barlow.

So, anyway, it’s done. I’ve hoovered (twice) with no ill-effect, so I’m going to tentatively call this a success.

As ever, with these traditionally-male activities (wiring plugs, fitting shelves, changing tyres, even going to the tip) I feel an awkwardness, an uncertainty, as if I ought to instinctively know what to do, how to behave. My initial reactions to breaking the plug were: one, I hope my wife doesn’t find out; and two, I suppose I’m going to have to buy a new hoover – and when I then decided to try and avoid both scenarios by repairing it, I felt an embarrassment, inadequacy even, about resorting to the internet to ask firstly ‘Can I replace a moulded plug?’ and then secondly ‘If you’re so bloody clever Google, tell me how?’

Of course the flipside of all this gender stereotype confusion is that I now feel a ludicrously disproportionate sense of pride in my accomplishment, in being able to state that I was able to switch on and use the hoover without explosion, implosion, smoke, fire, black out, or power cut. I know it’s not really a big achievement in the scheme of things, and yet… I feel that it sort of is.

Plus I suppose it proves that there are a lot of things we can do, if somebody just shows us how.