The switch in plain sight.
Doing a bit of spring cleaning, I thought it best to give the kitchen a once over with the vacuum cleaner. Get rid of all the cobwebs, crumbs and whatnot that rest in the cracks and crevices a little too inconvenient to reach with a broom.
The cord wasn’t quite long enough to stretch from the living room nor the dining room, and I really didn’t fancy moving the microwave or unplugging the coffee maker. As an aside, if you ever want to create a ruckus in this household, unplug either the coffee maker or the computer.
So that’s when I took notice of the range of our stove. On either side is a switch and an electrical outlet. Now the one switch turns on a light in the stove. The other switch I’d always assumed would send the juice to the outlets. So I plug in the vacuum and flick the switch…
…and suddenly the stove top is bathed with light from a fluorescent bulb tucked under the rim of the range. Five years of using that stove and this was the first time I’d ever figured out that light was there. When my wife came home, I showed her, and she too was surprised that we had a light there. That was the first time the switch had been used since we’d moved into the house.
Many years back I did some administrative work for a major bank. Part of the job involved transcribing account numbers from a database to a Word template to be printed off and delivered to another department where the transfer of cash would occur. The person training me for the role would copy these long strings of numbers onto a notepad and then re-type them into Word. I asked if it wouldn’t be faster and more accurate to simply copy/paste the account numbers into Word, to which the person training told me, “I don’t think that you can do it. Just stick to writing it down on a notepad.”
I decided to give the copy/paste a try. Sure enough, it worked. The simple Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V could eliminate the transcribing errors that used to occur and could have saved that person almost a half-hour each day. Yet she’d never tried. Even when the idea was raised, it was dismissed.
All of us have switches we’ve never thrown; things we’ve never tried. We need to try throwing the switches a little more often. Clicking the button, just to see what it does. Maybe it’s something good. Maybe it’s something bad. But who can say until you give it a try?
So go on. Throw the switch!
