The Electrified Sofa

I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a high effort, high payoff sort of guy. I freely admit that I might not be the easiest person on Planet Earth to live with. I collect machineguns, cook up my own homemade solid rocket fuel in the basement, and can’t seem to put stuff back in its appointed spot to save my immortal soul. Additionally, despite being fully 59 years old, I will try absolutely anything once.

That weird psychosocial milieu has taken me to some fascinating places. I got away with things in high school that would have put me in the state pen today. I once rolled an F-model AH-1 Cobra gunship inverted just to see what would happen (Putting the fan on the bottom makes that Bad Boy come out of the sky like a greased brick). Thanks for asking. More recently, I looped my own little fighter plane on a whim simply because I had always wondered how it felt (pretty freaking cool). As you might imagine, my wife and parents don’t quite share my insensible death-defying proclivities, nor might they condone such behaviors in me. Regardless, sharing my space for so long has made them, shall we say, leery of any unexpected chaos.

The Setting

Mom and Dad were visiting us back when I was an Army officer. We lived on post at a sprawling military base. We had one young son and planned to put my parents up on the hide-a-bed sofa in the living room. The fellowship was delightful, and, thanks to my amazing bride, the food sublime. With everybody pretty much spent, we all turned in.

The sofa occupied the center of the room with a lamp on either end. This was our primary reading spot, so good lighting was important. To power the lamp on the far side, I had snaked an extension cord underneath along the length of the couch.

My wife and I said our good nights, tucked in our son, and retired to our bedroom. Following our evening ablutions, we crawled into the sack for a little vapid reading prior to turning in. That’s when the lights suddenly went out throughout the house, and my dad shouted from the living room.

The Scene

I grabbed a flashlight and ran out to see what was amiss. Mom and Dad were both standing some distance removed now staring intently at the smoldering couch. A gentle trail of smoke wisped up from the edges around the mattress.

Dad said that he had folded out the hide-a-bed and been first to climb in. As the contraption took his weight, there was a not-insubstantial explosion from deep within its entrails. Copious blue fire shot out from around its edges. That’s when the lights went out.

Jumping to Conclusions

Dad admitted that his first thought was that I had booby trapped the bed in an inexplicable effort to murder him. That struck me as a bit harsh. My father and I have always enjoyed a rich and, I think, mutually satisfying familial relationship. I have never once wished him ill. However, putting myself in his shoes, I doubt I could have come up with a more plausible justification for the exploding furniture, particularly given the intensity of the moment.

The entire house by now spelled strongly of ozone. My wife fetched the kitchen fire extinguisher, while Dad and I carefully peeled back the mattress. What we found was both fascinating and terrifying in comparable measure.

The Culprit

A hide-a-bed employs a sort of scissors mechanism that telescopes out to support the weight of the mattress and occupants atop a simple spring base. As Dad had deployed the thing, the pivoting frame had serendipitously grabbed the extension cord and pulled it up into itself. As he stretched out in the bed, Dad’s weight had flattened the thing out, transforming the frame into an enormous set of wire cutters. That last bit of mass had snipped through the insulated wire, grounded the circuit, and quite effectively welded the end of the severed power cord to the steel bed frame.

I retrieved the charred components and discarded them in the rolling bin outside. We gave the bed a thorough once-over to ensure there were no residual embers, reactivated the electrical breakers, and once again bid each other good night. As I did finally drift off to sleep, I occupied myself with the observation that Dad’s first instinctive thought was that this had all been a failed attempt at patricide.

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