The Tale of the Tongs
May. 26th, 2019 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherOne thing about the house I live in now is that every light bulb that needs replacing is its own little adventure, due to high ceilings, stylish light shades, or in the case of the living room, both.
The overhead light in the living room is high up, suspended on a chain (which makes getting leverage tricky), and the fittings have these glass covers with narrow openings -- wide enough to admit a normal sized light bulb, but not wide enough to admit a normal sized light bulb with my fingers around it.
When I moved in, all three sockets were fitted with the long narrow sort-of-rectangular kind of compact fluorescent bulb, which mitigated the problem: they're long enough to counteract the depth of the cover and narrow enough to counteract the narrowness of the opening. When one burned out recently, I had no trouble getting it out of the fitting.
At which point I discovered that nobody in town sells that kind of bulb any more, only the varieties that are more or less the traditional short round shape.
Not to worry, I said to myself, I've seen a gadget people use for getting light bulbs into hard-to-reach places. It's a sort of cup thing on the end of a stick. I just need to go and get one of those.
Nobody in town sells those, either. I went around all the hardware stores, and nobody had one. Several of the people I tried to describe it to said they'd never heard of such a thing. (When I was telling this story to my sister later, she knew exactly what I meant as soon as I mentioned it; she reckons they've probably become less common since the end of the traditional incandescent light bulb -- ten years ago, how time flies -- because that also meant the end of a single standard size and shape of household light bulb.)
One of the guys at the last hardware store went so far as to intimate that he thought I was making it up, but to be fair he's a friend of mine and also he followed it up by offering to come around my house the next day and see if he could figure out a way to get the new light bulb in.
At which point, because I am actively terrible at accepting help from people, it became imperative that I solve the problem myself immediately so that he wouldn't have to go to any trouble on my account.
I did find a tool at that same store for getting light bulbs into hard-to-reach places. Unfortunately, it was specifically designed for one particular kind of light bulb, the kind with a flat top that sits flush with the ceiling, but fortunately, it gave me an idea.
The tool I found was less of a cup thing, like the one I'd been looking for, and more like a pair of tongs. And I had a pair of tongs at home...
And that, internet, is how I came to be changing a light bulb with a pair of salad tongs.
That wasn't quite the end of it, of course. Once I had the light bulb inside the glass cover, I couldn't see whether the end was going into the fitting, and sense of touch lost a lot of sensitivity when mediated through a pair of tongs with a tendency to slip, so there were a lot of tense moments where I wasn't sure whether the bulb was locked into the fitting or not. But eventually it was locked in, and there was only one more problem to solve...
...getting the tongs out through the narrow opening now that there was a light bulb in the way.
The overhead light in the living room is high up, suspended on a chain (which makes getting leverage tricky), and the fittings have these glass covers with narrow openings -- wide enough to admit a normal sized light bulb, but not wide enough to admit a normal sized light bulb with my fingers around it.
When I moved in, all three sockets were fitted with the long narrow sort-of-rectangular kind of compact fluorescent bulb, which mitigated the problem: they're long enough to counteract the depth of the cover and narrow enough to counteract the narrowness of the opening. When one burned out recently, I had no trouble getting it out of the fitting.
At which point I discovered that nobody in town sells that kind of bulb any more, only the varieties that are more or less the traditional short round shape.
Not to worry, I said to myself, I've seen a gadget people use for getting light bulbs into hard-to-reach places. It's a sort of cup thing on the end of a stick. I just need to go and get one of those.
Nobody in town sells those, either. I went around all the hardware stores, and nobody had one. Several of the people I tried to describe it to said they'd never heard of such a thing. (When I was telling this story to my sister later, she knew exactly what I meant as soon as I mentioned it; she reckons they've probably become less common since the end of the traditional incandescent light bulb -- ten years ago, how time flies -- because that also meant the end of a single standard size and shape of household light bulb.)
One of the guys at the last hardware store went so far as to intimate that he thought I was making it up, but to be fair he's a friend of mine and also he followed it up by offering to come around my house the next day and see if he could figure out a way to get the new light bulb in.
At which point, because I am actively terrible at accepting help from people, it became imperative that I solve the problem myself immediately so that he wouldn't have to go to any trouble on my account.
I did find a tool at that same store for getting light bulbs into hard-to-reach places. Unfortunately, it was specifically designed for one particular kind of light bulb, the kind with a flat top that sits flush with the ceiling, but fortunately, it gave me an idea.
The tool I found was less of a cup thing, like the one I'd been looking for, and more like a pair of tongs. And I had a pair of tongs at home...
And that, internet, is how I came to be changing a light bulb with a pair of salad tongs.
That wasn't quite the end of it, of course. Once I had the light bulb inside the glass cover, I couldn't see whether the end was going into the fitting, and sense of touch lost a lot of sensitivity when mediated through a pair of tongs with a tendency to slip, so there were a lot of tense moments where I wasn't sure whether the bulb was locked into the fitting or not. But eventually it was locked in, and there was only one more problem to solve...
...getting the tongs out through the narrow opening now that there was a light bulb in the way.
