Monday, November 27, 2006

The first three Christmas Light Gremlins

1) The Transformer Gremlin
This tricky little gremlin uses the ploy of hiding the transformer stored with a more demanding string of lights and swapping it with a weaker transformer, of the correct voltage of course so the lights do light, for a while at least before the poor under powered transformer goes into permanent melt down. The result is a double whammy two light strings out of action!

2) The Spare Lights Gremlin
One of the tricks that this gremlin uses is to provide copious supplies of different types of replacement bulbs, that one never remembers purchasing that fit none of the strings available. He gains much pleasure from watching his victims trying in vain to make any of the different bulb types fit any of their strings of lights. Another of his tricks is to retreive previously discarded dead bulbs and reinsert them into a seemingly new pack of spare bulbs. (His cousin the "Dead Match" gremlin uses a similar ploy with matches.)

3) The Invisible Dead Bulb Gremlin
This gremlin has many tricks up his sleeve, his favorite appearing to be the hands on "Swap the dead bulb" trick. Which due to his invisbility he can do during his favorite time, which is when his victim is swapping their spare bulb in a string of lights that clearly has one dead bulb stopping it working. There are many who will not have realised that it was not the fact that they lost track of which bulbs thay had not tested. It was the IBL Gremlin's greatest pleasure to swap two broken bulbs into a string that had just been proven to work. Another of his tricks is to carefully move the string of bulbs beneath the feet of his victim so that they crush at least one more bulb than they have spares.

I am sure many of you have had the misfortune to have been visited by these gremlins....

1 comment:

Trundling Grunt said...

I am particularly plagued by the on-again-off-again gremlin. Also the little bastard who turns all your spare bulbs into flashers that you will never ever use.