The Tricky Black Switches

While helping to clean the house yesterday to prepare for the coming of Grandma and Grandpa, Eris shouted out to me that the bathroom light went out. We all thought that it probably needed a new light bulb, so on the way back from the vegetable market, I stopped at the local Tesco Lotus Express to see if they sold light bulbs. I found one that I thought would work and brought it home. Philip locked himself in the bathroom so that the girls would not see him standing on a stool on top of a chair (something I have had to repeatedly remind them not to do) and replaced the bulb. It still did not work. Then he tried the new bulb in a different socket, and it worked. Oh dear, something was wrong with the electrical wiring, a much more complicated fix.

The girls took a shower before supper so that it would still be light in the bathroom and took their last potty trips by the light from the adjoining room. After they were tucked in bed I remembered an important fact about our house and a similar event shortly after we moved into the house and my parents were visiting.

A day or so after my parents arrived for their first visit to Thailand, the electricity stopped working for the whole upstairs floor. Without air conditioner or even fan upstairs, they moved downstairs to the girls bedroom for the night. We thought it was related to some wiring and amp issues that should have been resolved before we moved in. The next morning the landlord and some workmen arrived to see what could be done. Before much investigation had been done, the landlord remembered a switch in our bedroom downstairs that triggered the electricity for the whole upstairs. The electricians hadn't wanted the extra hassle of taking the wiring outside to the breaker box where it should have gone, so just spliced it into the switch which previously controlled only the air conditioner in our room. When my parents were trying to adjust settings on the air conditioner in their room, it reminded me of the switch in our room. I thought that since we never use our unit, I might as well turn off the switch. It was shortly after that when my parents noticed the electricity upstairs was not working. However, I did not connect the events together until after Muk figured out the mystery for us.

Our house has black "light switches" all over the place that turn on and off the electricity to certain parts of the house. There is no identifying pattern as to which switch is for which part of the house. I remembered that while I had been cleaning the outdoor kitchen, the cover had fallen off a black switch the function of which was as yet unknown to me. I replaced the cover and finished clearing the cobwebs and dust away from the area. Again, I did not connect the events until hours after the fact. Suddenly, it came to me that maybe that switch was for the bathroom and that it had gotten knocked to the "off" position when the cover fell off. Sure enough, it was "off" and when I flipped it up, light flooded the bathroom. I felt silly for not recognizing this before. But now we have an extra light bulb should we need it, and least this time we hadn't called the electricians in yet.