Early one morning we were woken up by a buzzing or fizzing noise and then a pop. I heard the sound coming from under my side of the bed. The electricity was evidently now off, as my bedside lamp didn’t work. Janet went to the consumer unit and saw that the MCB for the bedroom had flipped off. She turned it back on and there was a bang and she saw it had flipped off again.
There was a cabinet by my side of the bed blocking the space between the bed and the wall, and Janet’s hands are bad from arthritis. I wasn’t strong or well enough to assist, so temporarily we ran a long extension cable from the next room into the bedroom and plugged a bedside light and my iPad into that. And so it remained for several days.
There was a kettle in the bedroom, which now didn’t work because that ring was off. Next day, Janet, wanting a cup of tea took the kettle and moved it into the office next door, plugged it into the wall and then fired it up. This destroyed my UPS which started beeping and ceased to deliver output power. She had effectively removed power from all the critical infrastructure- the router, all modems and the main switch so the whole network was now down. We could not get the crippled UPS to regain sanity so it was removed and devices moved over into another UPS which was still ok. I was not best pleased and told her that she had sinned, because moving non-approved high power devices into the office was verboten. Then immediately forgave her. Time to buy a new APC UPS.
Several days later Janet felt strong enough to move a small bookcase out from beside my bed, realising that that was in that space too. When this was removed, access to what was under the bed was now possible. A bit of digging reveal an 8-way Belkin mains distribution / surge protector device which was discoloured, yellow and smelled of cat pee. It was now clear who was the original guilty saboteur- some stupid cat, for reasons known only to god had decided to go under my bed and pee on the Belkin, thus shorting it all out.
We decide that in future such acts of feline vandalism must be effectively prevented, by physically blocking access to the space under the bed. Grr, stupid cats, who knows why? He or she whoever it was could have killed themselves, I presume.
So end of the tail, and a lesson learned, but who knows what they do what they do?