Thursday, February 13, 2014

Buying lightbulbs is difficult.

One of my worst fears is that one day all the lights in my house will just stop working and I'll be forced to do everything in the dark. I frequently have nightmares where all the lights stop working in my room or bathroom and I get trapped in the dark.

I turned on the lights in my room one day and noticed it was darker than normal. I looked up at the fan that had three lights on it to see what was up and all but one of the lightbulbs was burnt out. I don't like to take immediate action on minor issues like this like a normal person would, so my thoughts were basically, "Wow, that's gonna suck when the last light goes out."

Well, lucky for me the last light burnt out the day I left to go home for Christmas break for about two weeks. This also didn't require immediate action, so I left and completely forgot about it. It was a shock when I finally came back and tried to turn on my lights only to be left in the dark. I have a bunch of Christmas lights hung around the walls in my room, so I just used those lights until I finally decided to complete the simple task of going to buy lightbulbs.



It turned into a much more complex task than I thought. The joke 'how many X does it take to change a light bulb?' should actually be changed to 'how many X does it take to BUY a lightbulb.' First, I couldn't find the lightbulb aisle anywhere in the store. I had to ask someone, they pointed me in the right direction, and I still wandered around in circles for several minutes until I found it.

Then, I had to pick out which lightbulbs to buy. At first I was like, 'I want the nice, energy efficient light bulbs!' Then I saw those are like a million dollars so I quickly forgot everything I know about helping the environment and moved over to the super cheap $4-pack-of-four bulbs. My plan was to bring one of the burnt out bulbs with me so I would know what size to get, because the ones I needed were not standard lightbulb size. Of course I forgot, so I basically just had to guess and hope it would work out.

I picked correctly and I'm no longer in the dark! The package of the bulbs I picked said the bulbs last twice as long as normal bulbs, but they are half as bright. What a great marketing technique!


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