Boy, you people are no fun at all. Fine, I'll explain. Gather 'round, children, and let me tell you a story.
So yesterday afternoon, the protagonist of our tale -- a ruggedly handsome, if somewhat overweight, fellow with an easy smile and a mop of thinning brown hair -- got home from work at the usual hour. He tossed his keys casually on the counter, got himself a drink, and went to stand in front of his aquarium. This was all very normal for him, a fixed routine that he'd fallen into for most weekdays. He noted with pleasure that the red firefish which had recently come out of QT was doing well, swimming here and there, interacting with the older tankmates, and generally doing what fish do. His eyes drifted to the broken powerhead on the back wall of the tank, the Koralia that kept spinning backwards every time it turned on. Our witty hero glanced at his watch, saw that he had plenty of time left of the afternoon, and decided that this would be the day that the powerhead would get fixed.
This was no small chore, however, not with a large tank and a heavy hood framing the top. The powerhead could only be reached by removing the entire top of the tank, so our man got to it: he removed all the little bits and bobs from the top of the side cabinets, then opened the hood and disconnected the power cords from the light fixtures. He carefully tucked them back behind the hood and hooked them on top of the side cabinets. Somewhere in the back of his mind a little voice muttered quietly about the cords being "live," but as I have already pointed out.....the protagonist of this tale looks like a nice guy, has a good mind for humor.....but he's not often the brightest bulb in the pack. He ignored the little voice.
Electrical connections "safed" away, he removed the light fixtures and the auto feeder from the aquarium hood, set them aside, then laboriously heaved the entire wood canopy off the top of the tank. Pleased with his work, he got a small stepstool out, climbed up, and reached back behind the tank to remove the back magnet from the powerhead. His fingers reached, stretched, and barely scratched the magnet, but no firm grasp could he find. "One step more," he thought, and mounted that final, fateful step.
While in this convoluted position, the charming aquarist had no chance to see the doom that was crouched below. This calamity came in the form of a white-furred cat, who until now had been content to sit and watch the antics of her tall, odd-looking food server as he bent himself into very ungraceful shapes on top of the footstool. As will happen with cats, though, a spark of wild eyed insanity had bloomed in her mind. It grew stronger with each passing second, like a thunderstorm building on a hot summer day, until the urge to act overcame her instinctual sense of decorum and the insane desire shaped itself into a single command, a simple imperative for her to act upon: LEAP!
The poor hobbyist only saw it out of the corner of his eye. A hurried blur, a streak of white fur and dead-black eyes, appeared from out of nowhere. The cat, having fulfilled her wild instinct, landed gracefully on top of the tank in much the same way as a stone does when thrown into the middle of a pond. In this way did she discover that water is not a solid surface...at least not in South Florida. All her feline composure fled as she landed IN the tank, two paws sinking through the unnatural wet while she struggled to maintain balance on the feet that had managed to stay dry on the rim of the tank. Her eyes caught her servant's, held his gaze, and in that instant he knew, he was certain, that he could understand the cat's thoughts....and that this whole fiasco was undeniably HIS fault.
In less time than it took to gasp, the cat was out of the tank and huddled in the corner. Her eyes were cold, calculating chips of obsidian as she regarded her human. Plans of his demise were hatched, considered, and abandoned as she remembered that her mysterious tin cans of food are devilishly hard to open without the use of opposable thumbs.
Meanwhile, our hobbyist friend turned back to the work at hand....but he noticed a dread quiet in the air. The return pump was off. The other powerheads where down. Vaguely he remembered a faint "click" sound when the cat had made her graceless bellyflop, but only now did he stop and consider the source of the sound. As he pondered, he looked at the surface of the tank. There, floating like two limp electrical cords in the aquarium......were two limp electrical cords, floating in the aquarium. The little voice who had muttered "still live!" at the beginning of this story piped up again and was finally heard....long overdue, and the voice had a definite smug "I-told-you-so" tone to it this time. Snotty little bastard.
The meaning for the sound was clear: The GFCI had tripped. Hopefully all the animals were all right; certainly the cat didn't show any signs of electrocution or death...at least not yet...but the night was still young. With nothing else to do but to get it fixed, the frustrated protagonist cleared off the books from one of the side shelves, moved the book cabinet, reached back and BARELY had enough room to hook his fingers against the outlet and press the reset button. After, it bears mentioning, he unplugged the offending light cords.
When the evening came to a close, the tank had been put back together, the powerhead fixed.....but the poor bedevilled hero sadly discovered that his firefish...the new addition, the FIRST animal to safely make it though the new quarantine system...had completely disappeared. The poor fish probably launched itself out of the tank at the first sight of a furry paw invading its domain. We may never know how it met its demise, but as you can imagine - the chances that it wound up in a feline belly are pretty good.
Ah well. Live and learn. The other fish seem OK, the corals are all in good shape, and at least our not-so-fictional hobbyist now knows that his self-installed GFCI works exactly as it's supposed to. And all it took was one wet cat and one flying fish.
Let's see if a few more people want to guess. I may post a hint later to keep this fun.
