Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Pet peeves

Pet peeve: Upside-down light switches. Up means on. What kind of electrician screws this up?

Bad enough: Dual light switches, where the light is on if switch 1 XOR switch 2 is up.

8 comments:

Larry said...

You think dual light switches are bad? Try triple light switches like you can find for the interior lights in Freightliner trucks!

If all three of them are down, the light in question is on. If all three are up, the light is off. It takes two of them being up to turn the light on; if only one of them is up, the light will be off. Half the time, even I f$ck it up. :-P

Actually, my parents' house (built 1954) has a dual light switch for one of the upstairs lights. We always just use one of them, the one at the bottom of the stairs, to control the light, and don't bother playing with the one at the top of the stairs at all.

MajorLB said...

Another bad one is when there's a whole panel of light switches, but they don't appear to be in any logical order at all. I didn't realize how annoying that was until my parent's house was really bad that way. Oh, the second one from the left turns on the hallway light off to the right? And the one next to it is for the kitchen counter light?

Matthew Johnson said...

To add to Laura's post, it sucks when the garbage disposal switch is right next to the kitchen light switch, but you can't tell which one to use. You eventually learn by conditioning.

Derrick Stolee said...

You should really replace the garbage disposal switch with a black one. That pretty much distinguishes it, and most people will hesitate from flipping it.

Anonymous said...

Hmm, I have a triple light switch and love it. If I come in through either my front door or the garage door, there is a switch handily available to light up the stairwell up. Then when I'm ready to go to bed, I can just toggle the third switch at the top of the stairs to turn it off before going to bed.

I know you get confused by the up and downness of the switch but you really get used to it for the convenience of controlling a single light from multiple locations.

Travis said...

I should replace all of my light switches with LCD touchscreen control panels. Each light switch would show the status of every light in my home in a 3D rotatable view. Then I'd just need one in every room.

Andy Misle said...

Upside-down outlets are worse than upside-down switches. At least you can look at the state of the light and see whether you need to flip the switch opposite to the current direction. With an upside-down outlet, you have to guess which way to insert the plug unless you get down and look really closely.

Travis said...

After a quarter century I've still never completely memorized which side of the plug has the bigger prong, so I don't think that would bother me that much since I'm always wrong anyway. And, I rarely need to plug anything grounded in.