Winning the inverted lottery

I remember the day I saved the life of my family. I was 9 years old and very excited by an experiment we did in class. Our assignment was to decorate the inside of a shoebox and to set up a tiny light bulb in it. The experiment fascinated me and I decided to push it further back home.

After dinner, I grabbed some garden wire, a pair of gloves and a couple of light bulbs. This time, the shoebox would be my room and the battery would be the power plugs (and they say video games are dangerous).

Quickly, several electrified wires invaded my floor and I had to walk carefully around them. My father came to say good night:

“- What are all these wires doing around?”, he asked with a puzzled look.
“- Hmm, I'm just trying some stuff”
He didn’t realize they were electrified:
“- Don't stay up late. Good night”.

My parents watched TV in bed. My little sister and brother went to sleep.

Then I made a mistake. A stupid one: I cut an electrified wire. The spark and the clatter that followed are still vivid memories. The blades of the scissors turned black and had a big molten hole.

The house went dark and my father rushed to my room despite the obscurity, suspecting the wires had something to do with it: “Are you okay?!". I was.

I went with him to restore the current. As soon as we hit the stairs, we noticed something was wrong.

“- It smells gas”, he said.

As we walked down the stairs, it was clear a gigantic cloud of gas had formed. We held our breath and rushed to open the windows. We turned off the gas tap and waited patiently for the cloud to dissipate. Our very old cooker was the culprit.

Given the oldness of the electrical network, it would probably have led to the “big explosion in the middle of the night” story we hear in the news. Our neighbors would have testified for us, assuring we were “decent people” and it was a “tragedy”.

It didn't happen, at least not in this dimension. My mistake was perfect. To hijack a Charlie Chaplin's quote: “I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.”

By shutting down the electrical current in the house, an explosion was nearly impossible and it gave us a chance to notice the gas leak. It was an incredible coincidence. We had just won the inverted lottery.

Nobody seemed to care though. Winning a lot of money is definitly more exciting than not dying in an awful explosion.