How Many Grannies Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb? |
A few weeks ago I moved into a house that has a fluorescent light fixture in the bathroom, and the damn thing was acting all hinky. It refused to to come on at all unless I flipped the switch five or six times, then it flickered so furiously the whole time it was on it nearly drove me to commit mass murders There's a six week wait for electricians and handy people around here, so I figured, what the heck, I'll gird my loins and fix it myself.
The obvious first step would be to try new bulbs, right? Or tubes, whatever they're called. I've never lived with this kind of fluorescent fixture before. But this isn't rocket science. How many grannies could it take to change some flickery old light bulbs? Well, yeah. Hahaha. There's a reason they have jokes about that, as I was about to find out.
I climbed up on my little step ladder, and set about removing the plastic panel so I could get to the tubes. I futzed around for a while, pushing it and shifting it this way and that, but the stupid thing wouldn't come out of the frame. So, ever resourceful, I turned to my trusty computer. I Googled "how to change a fluorescent bulb," and selected one of about ten zillion handy dandy elementary how-to sites. Step One told me that in order to remove the lens, I should just push it up and tilt it, and it would automatically pop right out.
I'm here to tell you: these people lied. I tried again and again, but the damn thing had no intention whatsoever of popping out. Every way I turned it, it was too big to fit through the frame's opening.
Frustration mounting, I kept trying and trying, pushing and tilting and turning and twisting. My arms ached from reaching up, my neck hurt from leaning back, I got dizzy and almost fell off the ladder. I quit and made myself a cup of tea, then took some deep breaths, climbed back up and tried again. Finally, somehow, after about twenty minutes of valiant struggle, I miraculously managed to defy the laws of physics and reality and pried it out. Whew!
Now the next step was to remove the defective light tubes. Easy, right? Wrong. Following the handy-dandy web site instructions, I twisted the tube so the little prongs would pop out of their sockets. Bingo! But then the tube itself, like the panel, was too long to fit through the frame opening. I teetered around on top of the ladder and finally after another ten minutes of shifting and turning and cussing like the proverbial sailor, I managed to fit them out, one by one. By now my arms were killing me and sweat was pouring down my face.
I measured the tubes, wrote down the numbers, and drove over to the local hardware store to purchase four identical ones. When I came home, I had to go through the same damn Chinese puzzle struggle trying to get the new ones to fit in the sockets. Finally all four were in, but when I turned on the switch, the two in the center worked fine, while the outer two were still flickering. Arrrgh!!!
So. Ok. When I finally stopped screaming and setting my hair on fore and stuff, I checked my handy-dandy how-to web site, which told me this probably meant I needed to change either the starter or the ballast. It even told me what they hell these things are! I climbed back up my ladder and inspected the fixture, but there was nothing there that looked like the illustration on the web site. I couldn't find anything anywhere that even remotely resembled their starter or their ballast. Maybe mine were hidden somewhere, way up in the recesses of the ceiling? Which meant dismantling the entire fixture? Yeah, well, fuck that.
To make an already long story shorter, I finally ended up just taking out the two outer bulbs, the crazy ones that flickered. The room was bright enough with only the two center bulbs, the cooperative ones that were down with the program. Well, then I had to put the plastic panel back on. Of course the #@!$%* wouldn't fit. I struggled until I was in tears, but when after a half hour it still wouldn't fit, I gave up and hid the stupid lens behind a dresser.
But here's the point of this whole narrative: I feel like a total idiot. And I HATE being so helpless and incompetent. I hate being too stupid to figure out how to perform a simple task like changing four light bulbs. It shouldn't be such an insurmountable challenge! Why does it seem like all the men I know were just born knowing how to do this stuff? What the hell is wrong with me?
But after thinking it over and commiserating with friends, I've concluded there may actually be a couple of things going on here. For one thing, when guys are working on a task and something goes wrong, they tend to blame the environment "Cheap-ass piece-of-shit lens!", whereas I immediately rush to blame myself ]"Why am I always such an incompetent idiot?". Hmmm, wonder where on earth I picked up this destructive habit?
The other thing is that I didn't grow up being encouraged, or even allowed, to do this kind of stuff. It was always, "Don't touch that, you'll break it!" or "Don't fool with that, you'll hurt yourself!" I raised two sons, and I've seen how different it is to grow up male.
My eldest son did seem to be born with an innate gift for fixing things, or at least an intense curiosity about how things work. From the time he could stand, he was toddling around watching his dad fix and build, asking questions, taking things apart.
I remember once when he was five we were driving over a drawbridge. He'd never seen one before and and he practically threw himself out the window trying examine the mechanism. "How does that work?" he asked, and his dad replied, "Hmmm? Oh, counterweights." And even though as far as I knew this five year old boy had never heard the word counterweight in his life, you could see a little light bulb going on over his head: he just instantly got it. Another time when he was about seven, he was horrified that I was using a salad spinner without really understanding exactly how the internal gear mechanism worked. He insisted on taking it apart and explaining it to me.
But my second son had no interest whatsoever. He was more like me: a dreamy lad, always buried in a book or focused on animals. I don't think he ever once played with his erector set. When he was five, we were mortified to realize one day that boy genius had no idea how to turn on the light switch in the kitchen, because his big brother had always been there first to do it for him.
And yet in spite of his disinclination to be handy or mechanical, when the time came that he needed to do stuff, he never for one second doubted his ability to learn to master it quickly. When he moved in with his girlfriend, he decided to remodel the kitchen, and just figured out how to do it as he went. (Actually she probably showed him how to do a lot of it.) But he just believed] in himself in a way that's almost impossible for me to even imagine. I really wish I had that kind of confidence in myself.
But since it wasn't handed to me on a silver platter at birth, the only way I'm going to develop it is to tackle new tasks, acquire new skills, gain new experience, and chalk up a few successes. So maybe today I'll tackle that damn lens again. The sense of failure still gnaws at me, every time I think about it hiding back there behind the dresser. After all. Perseverance is my middle name. At least it would be if my parents had been the least bit imaginative. |
Vibrating Liz |
| About the author: |
| Vibrating Liz is an avid writer, dancer, gardener, weight lifter, and cancer survivor who firmly believes that 50 is the new 18. She lives in a small rural village in the quirkiest part of the deep south with an engaging assortment of flora and fauna |
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