
Recently, flipping the light switch in the basement stopped working. That is, the lights stayed off. Did you ever hear of a light switch breaking? Well, there was no calling Maintenance, so that meant a drive out to the home improvement store. Anne came along. As she often does upon arrival, Anne pointed out the absurdity of having 16 handicapped parking spaces at a DIY store. I managed to find the one 3" x 12" cardboard bin in the store that held the thingy I was looking for. Walking back to the car, Anne suggested that an insurance fraud specialist would do well to park near the handicapped spaces at DIY stores.
Back home I had to cut power to the problem switch: safety first! Having a broken switch made this challenging - it's hard to tell if you've hit the right breaker when the lights are already off because the switch is broken. I found a lamp to plug into a wall outlet hoping it was wired together with the lights. Now, which breaker? The breakers were labeled "General", "AC", etc. Two said "Kitchen". So it was trial and error. Click off/on - the microwave upstairs beeped. A different one, off/on - the telephone said, "Press TIME to set DAY/TIME." And so it went, shutting down the refrigerator, the computer(s), etc. until breaker #13 of 14 did the trick. I was ready to start. Oh, except it was dark in there. I found enough extension cord to reach a working outlet, and another little lamp, and I was set.
Instructions for the new switch were printed on translucent onionskin paper, double-sided, in eight languages. They referred to four different colored wires - all the wires going to (coming from?) the bad switch were black. So I held my new switch in front of the old one, lined up the screws, and moved each wire, one at a time, to the new switch. This part took less than 5 minutes, and it worked perfectly. After cutting the breaker back on, I clicked my new switch repeatedly ON, OFF, ON, OFF. Very satisfying. I spent the next 10 minutes putting away lamps, extension cords, screw driver, and pliers, feeling a newfound kinship with Nikola Tesla.