Unexplained Phenomenon #17
The following story is true. I cannot for the life of me think of a good scientific reason why this should happen. But it did. I swear.
As happens in many households this time of year, the Christmas decorations were released from their boxes this weekend at my parents house. We were in town for Thanksgiving and were able to partake in some of the merriment that is decorating for the Holidays.
Dad and I were tasked with the manly chore of hanging the outside lights. “Ah yes,” I thought, “a staple gun and an excuse to use it. The perfect job.” So we gather the lights from their storage and begin checking them. There are few things more annoying than stringing something like a 100’ of lights and finding that the third one doesn’t work.
The first set doesn’t work, okay, on to number two. That doesn’t work either. Odd. “Maybe the outlet is bad,” I suggest. So we plug them into another outlet. Still nothing. Dad had bought some new lights to add this year so we decide to test them in the original outlet. They work fine.
Okay so the outlet is good. Those two sets must be dead. On to the others. Dead. Dead. Dead. What the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks is going on here. Maybe the fuses are bad. Replace the fuses and re-check. Dead. Dad gets out his Multi-Tester. The electricity is flowing from one end to the other. We check the fuses with said tester and they are good. We check the lights and they appear to be fine. This is a real head-scratcher. Nothing to do but keep testing.
Dead. Dead. Finally, the last set of lights tested works. The only difference between this set and the others is that it was not stored in a ZipLock bag. That doesn’t make any sense though. We try a set of regular lights (the outside lights are those “icicle” style lights) that were stored in a ZipLock bag and they work fine. But the icicle ones were stored in a FreezerGuard bag, not your average, ordinary, every-day ZipLock bag.
Every set of lights that went out over the off-season was stored in a ZipLock FreezerGuard bag. There is no explanation as to what would cause these lights to die by being stored in a ZipLock FreezerGuard bag. But they did, and the bag they were stored in is the only discernable difference between them and those that did not.
So the moral of the story: When the Holidays are through and its time to pack it in. Save the FreezerGuard for the turkey.