Planning Ahead

I went to turn on the lamp Mom and I use most often in the living room yesterday evening and it wouldn't work. Mom said she thought the bulb was out but it's a CFL and fairly new. I switched the bulb out for one from the lamp on the other side of the couch (also CFL) but that wouldn't work either which led me to believe there was something wrong with the lamp. Except neither bulb worked in the second lamp, either. So.

These lamps are on the same circuit as the microwave in the kitchen with which they share the wall and an in-kitchen circuit breaker. The microwave was fine. The circuit breaker was fine. The telephone, which is plugged into the same outlet as the first lamp was fine. So either there was something wrong with both lamps or there was something wrong with the top outlet of the double wall plug. I switch the phone and the lamp and . . . the lamp worked. So I moved the plug for the second lamp from the top of its outlet to the bottom. It worked. There was something screwy with the top half of both outlets.

Then my brother called from work.

He wanted to let me know that in an attempt to keep Mom in her room at night he had disabled the living room lamps on the theory that she would rather not just sit in the dark. He did this by flipping a switch over by the front door and had forgotten to flip it back again.

There is a switch, over by the front door, about as far away from these lamps as one can get, that does nothing but turn on and off the top halves of two separate outlets. That's it. The top halves of two outlets. Nothing else.

Who . . . when this house was being built and wired twenty-five years ago . . . ever thought that would be a necessary or desirable feature?