DEATH TO WIMPY LIGHT SWITCHES

No big deal I thought, like the waterless rock was for Moses back in the day. Just a light switch, in this case - the one in the bathroom - gonna go dead any day now, getting wimpier by the flick. So, sooner - I guess - than later, I should go wander around the huge electrostore and find the identically serial-numbered light switch, buy it and bring it home, get out the tools, set aside some light switch time, hopefully I can reuse the switch plate, avoid electrocution - you see how this is building up - if you are an electrician this is child's play, but that is the very reason I am trying to avoid your hourly prices, I am DIY to the max.

Yet how ingrown is our growth, I feel at the edges of this undertaking. How incestuous, our increasingly helpless dependence-- I feel diminished by this impinging need for an electrician, things have gotten ever more complicated, but I'll take my chances, I've taken worse. If I survive, then I have learned; if not, other knowledge awaits.

Perhaps I'm an oddball in this regard, but I keep feeling that in the process we call progress we are advancing by weakening ourselves through aggravated specialization... And then, thinking this thought, I pull the wrong switch in the circuit breaker (the bathroom switch isn't under 'Bath Room,' but under 'Bed Room'...) and in what I guess would have been a first, almost get electrocuted because of a linguistic problem. Once disparate things are beginning to overlap in dangerous ways...

Back in the old days, a person could do it all; why, I remember I used to be able to fix my own car, on the spot, with my own tools in my own hands, before the dawn of the black boxes, when so many tasks disappeared from all our own hands...

But at least I'm still here, a bit buzzed, and that light switch is no longer wimpy.