Today
started out okay, I mean no real emergencies.
Feeling better after being ill is such a gift. A gift you no longer take for granted! As I left the bedroom I accidently touched
the remote control of the Hunter ceiling light and fan. It is mounted on the wall and the last time
it was touched the lights went on and we took two days to find a way of turning
them off. You ask the simple question
why have remote controls for lights and stuff, surely a simple on and off
switch would suffice? I spent the next
hour and half pointing a useless remote at the roof lights from various perspectives
including balanced on a kitchen stool, leaping off the bed, etc to no avail.
Deciding
that batteries were probably the problem I drove to the nearby petrol station
to buy over priced batteries. But even
with these brought no progress, and I turned to the internet for advice. The Web turned out to be flooded with other
owners of Hunter ceiling lamps with much worse problems than mine. Their automated ceiling lights came on in the
middle of the night, during the day, whenever they dammed please. The fan had a mind of its own and decided when
and if it would work. Horrified, I tried
to find a solution to my problem. Most involved
unscrewing the light fitting and buying a £60 replacement thingy. Desperation kicked in, why not try the
caveman approach. I went to the fuse box
and tried pulling out all the fuses that said lights. This made no difference and I crept up the stairs
with a growing dread to find the spot lights still blazing from the
ceiling.
At 50 watts on
each lamp, there are three, my electricity meter was all the while spinning
like a demonic trooper. Fuelled by the
memory of my last electricity bill, I threw caution to the wind and threw the
mains switch. I might have turned off the
fridge/freezer/ etc but at least that meter would not be spinning like a wild
thing. I went up the stairs to gather my
thoughts below the ceiling lamp and found it still on! At this stage I must admit to a dance of
anger and profanity beneath the spot lights.
After some
re-grouping I remembered another fuse box outside in the garage and tripped
that switch as well. Going up the stairs
there was such a heave of relief to find the lights off. Never, have I been so relieved to find
something not working. Felt I had bearded the beast and yet there
was no real progress. If I left the mains
switch off, as it was now, my freezer would defrost, no computer, no cooking,
no kettle this was not a viable solution.
Every time I put on the mains the blasted spots lights came on again. Then
studying the lights I figured if I could remove the bulbs a cure maybe
possible. Because the lights had been on
five hours or so the bulbs were hot but a handy towel sufficed and they were
unscrewed and removed. This was duly
done and I was at last able to put the mains on. Do you remember that moment in Cast Away when Tom Hanks eventually makes a
fire on the beach and jumps about caveman like screaming in delight, “I have made fire!” ,well I did a dance around
the bedroom screaming the equivalent
about successfully killing lights. Why did it take me so long to come up with this? There was an idiotic part of me that thought
things could be resolved if the right button was pressed in the right
order. And isn’t that a common thing in
all our lives. We fiddle around while
Rome burns and are reluctant to take steps to make real change. A very big part of us just hopes that the
problem will be resolved, go away, be avoided or ignored. We waste huge parts of our life and energy in
the time that follows. While we do that,
our own electricity meter, our ticking heart, beats away the lost time and the
cost. There has got to be a lesson
there!
