Breaker Breaker

There’s a Philip K Dick story which I read decades ago, and which I don’t remember very well, but I remember the key scene, so that’s okay.

In the key scene, the protagonist walks into a dark room and reaches for the light pull cord that he’s pulled many times before, but it isn’t there, and instead there’s a light switch on the wall.  And the protagonist comes to realize that all of reality has shifted since the last time he walked into that room, and the light switch is the proof, and that he needs to go on some kind of metaphysical quest in order to find out what’s really going on.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time, and I haven’t gone on an metaphysical quest yet, but the other day reality shifted for the first time with an actual light switch.

I had to replace a defective light switch in the kitchen, and this involved turning off the power at the breaker, which is in a room at the back of the house.  The breakers were labeled with a light No. 2 pencil in tiny lettering, and scribbled over several times, and often it’s difficult to decode them, and the house was wired in the first place by an amateur assisted by his teenage sons, so there’s no guarantee that throwing a breaker will actually turn off power where it’s supposed to, and not some other part of the house, or just turn off everything but the one switch it was supposed to turn off.

Which is all a way of saying that the foundations of reality are not very strong to begin with, at least where household wiring is concerned.

Turning off the correct breaker involves getting on my knees in a crowded corner, and turning on all the lights in the room, and sometimes using a flashlight as well, while also deploying a magnifying glass to better read the tiny print on the breaker box diagram.  And then there’s switch-flipping and a good deal of shouting back and forth from the breaker box to the place where I’m trying to turn the power off, to find out if the power is actually turned off, or if some other damn weird thing has happened.

This method actually succeeded, and then I replaced the broken switch, and I returned to the breaker box to flip the switch back to its normal position.  Which I did.

Only to discover that there was now no power at all in the kitchen, except for some reason the dishwasher, where the lights were still on.  And because one of the appliances that suddenly had no power was the refrigerator, there was a modest amount of panic happening, plus a whole lot of anger and frustration, because really I had so many better things to do.

Well, clearly the only thing to do was throw more switches.  Which I did.  And then, when I turned one whole bank of switches to off, all the power came back on.

See, there are two columns of switches in the breaker box.  And up till that moment, if you wanted the power on everywhere, you threw all the switches to the left.  But now, if you want the power on, you throw the left-hand switches to the right, and the right-hand switches to the left, so that the switches are sort of leaning toward one another.

Which had never been the case, until that particular instant.

The foundations of reality had shifted, and the breaker box was no longer following the rules it had followed for at least the preceding twenty years.

So it’s clear that the universe has put Philip K. Dick in charge of reality.  Which some of you may have suspected all along.

But as for me, I’m still wondering if I need to go on a metaphysical quest.  Because if so, I need a hint a little stronger than a freaking breaker box.

On the other hand, certain other hints are too strong for my purposes.  Rain of blood, nuclear meltdowns, plagues of locusts, etc.  I don’t need any of that, thanks.  A nice moderate-sized hint, thank you. (And if I can find the answer through Google, so much the better.)

Now the odd thing about this is that, though I replaced the switch, the light fixture still doesn’t work.  Which means the problem is probably the fixture itself, which needs replacing.  But when I try to replace it, will it be in the same place?  Will it be the same fixture? Or will it have shifted away, retconned into a new universe where it was always this way?

Stay tuned.  If, that is, we’re both still in the same place.