I can tell you everything you need to know about electricity in four words.

It can hurt you.

I don’t really understand it and I’m not taking any chances with it.

The cemeteries are full of people whose final words were, “It’s only three wires … I can do this myself.”

So the other morning just before daylight I was backing out of the driveway and I heard something slap up against the back of my vehicle. Then I heard this weird rubbing sound, so I stopped.

Then I saw the limb in front of my SUV hanging five feet or so from the ground.

A limb had fallen from one of the oak trees in the front yard the night before and gotten entangled. The slapping noise was the limb hitting the back of my vehicle. The rubbing noise was the sound of it dragging across the top.

This was nothing new. Limbs occasionally fall from those trees but this was the first time one hadn’t made it all the way to the ground. I retrieved a flashlight from my toolbox and got out to take a closer look.

The limb wasn’t really very big. It had become entangled in some black wires that extend from a utility pole at the front of the driveway to one corner of the house.

When I say I don’t understand electricity, that includes being able to tell the difference between power lines and any other type of similar-looking lines, for example, TV cable lines.

My first inclination was to simply walk over and pull the limb down. Then, standing there in the dark, it suddenly occurred to me that kind of reaction could be dangerous. I could see me grabbing that limb and being lit up like a Christmas tree – complete with sparks and popping noises — right there in my own driveway. They would play the footage on one of those TV bloopers shows and Dick Clark would just laugh and laugh. Then Dick Clark would say something funny, probably about barbecuing or some other type of outdoor cooking, while they showed my lifeless body smoldering on the asphalt. Hah-hah. That Dick Clark is s-o-o-o-o funny.

When I was a kid, we lived near a cinder block/lumber company. And despite the regular stern warnings about what would happen to me if my mom ever caught me playing over there, I still managed to sneak away with my buddies occasionally and dig tunnels in the giant sand piles or play cowboys among the piles of lumber and cinder blocks.

One drizzly rainy day I climbed to the top of one of the buildings over there. As I made my way across the tar-andgravel roof, I reached up to lift a black cable that stretched across the top of the building so I could go under it. The next thing I knew I couldn’t let go of that cable. It didn’t hurt. It was like I was frozen. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t loosen my grip on the cable. I finally fell and the weight of my body collapsing caused the cable, which, of course, unbeknownst to me was a live electrical line, to snap loose from my grip.

Ever since then, I’ve had sort of a phobia about power lines.

So I left the limb hanging there and called my friendly neighborhood power provider, which in this case is the Gaffney Board of Public Works. They sent a person over to assess the situation. I met the guy when he pulled up in front of the house and explained to him that I couldn’t tell if that was a power line or a TV cable line the limb was hanging from, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Then, just to make sure he didn’t mistake me for a big sissy boy, I made some grunting noises a la Tim The Tool Man Taylor, and tried to engage him in a manly topic of conversation, you know, like power tools or the towing capacities of various 4-wheel drive vehicles.

“It’s a cable line,” he grinned as he reached up and pulled the limb down.

I appreciate him and the BPW handling this situation in a timely, courteous and efficient manner.

Even though he probably thinks I’m a moron.

But I’d rather be a live moron than a dead person featured in a film on a bloopers show.

(Klonie Jordan is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger. You can contact him via e-mail at editor@gaffneyledger.com)