ValueSpeak
A Weekly Column
By Joseph Walker
THE MIRACLE OF THE FLIPPED SWITCHES
I’m feeling very righteous this morning. Our family’s carbon footprint today has been
a dainty size “0.” I’m expecting a
congratulatory e-mail from Al Gore at any moment.
I should probably mention that we didn’t actually
choose to be so environmentally cautious today.
I guess we would be more righteous if we had. But sometime in the wee hours of the morning
a vehicle took out a utility pole not far from our home, and from that moment
to this we have been without power.
Thankfully, my wife Anita has a built-in alarm
clock in her brain, so she got up at
“Oh,” I mumbled as I rolled over in bed. “OK.”
You can think of that as laziness on my part. I prefer to think of it as courage in crisis.
Besides, Anita had everything under control. She had checked the . . . you know . . . that
little box where all the switches are that control the power to different parts
of the house? She had checked that (and
you wonder why she prefers to handle this stuff herself). She had called the power company – that’s how
she found out about the vehicularized power
pole. She had even figured out how to
start our gas stove and make some breakfast.
It’s almost as if she expected me to roll over in
bed and say “Oh, OK.” And maybe she
did. When you have lived with someone
for nearly 31 years, there are few surprises.
The only serious problem Anita encountered in her
morning preparations was her hair. Her
hair is styled in such a way that she really needs a blow dryer to make it poof
where it’s supposed to poof. And no
matter how much our teenagers Jon and Beth and I huffed and puffed, we couldn’t
make the poof happen. So Anita was kind
of stuck as far as her hair was concerned.
For me, the obstacle was sound. I’m used to listening to the radio as I go
through my morning preparations, and so it was disconcerting to shower and
shave in dark silence. I had to actually
concentrate on what was going on inside my brain, and believe me, that can be a
frightfully empty place. So I got ready
as quickly as I could, flipped on my computer to check my e-mail (oops! No
computer!), threw a few towels into the dryer (oops! No dryer!), grabbed my
toast (oops! No toast!) and jumped in the car to head to work.
Except the garage door wouldn’t open. Those same garage door openers that can be so
wonderfully inconvenient in times of inclement weather can also be amazingly
inconvenient when the power is off. It
took me a few minutes to figure out how to open the door without electrical
power (actually, it was Jon who figured it out, and who pushed the door open
and held it up while I backed out – sort of a Flintstonian
version of a garage door opener, now that I think about it).
The power was on at work, and to me every flipped
switch was suddenly a wonder. Lights! Air conditioning! Computer!
Copy machine! Pencil
sharpener! Massage recliner! (OK, I
don’t really have a massage recliner at my work, but it would be a wonder if I
did, wouldn’t it?) You flip a switch and
without even thinking about it, great stuff happens. Most of the time. In fact, almost all of the
time. That’s why it’s such an
extraordinary thing when you flip a switch and nothing happens.
We live in a world of miracles. Every day we are surrounded by technology and
inventions that make our lives simpler, happier and more comfortable. And we don’t even think about them until, for
one reason or another, they’re not there anymore.
So take a look around you. Pause and appreciate the switches you flip –
miraculously mindlessly – every day. Offer
a silent word of thanks to the inventors, technicians, operators and
maintenance workers who make those miracles happen.
Daily. Wonderfully. Righteously.
# # #
— © Joseph Walker
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