Spousal Anxiety

Light switches rarely go bad, but in a forty-year-old house anything can happen, so when my wife left the house yesterday I was in the process of replacing a light switch and she was in a state of anxiety about it.

Electricity scares her to death, and it doesn't help for me to point out that electrical work is the one thing for which I have actual training, since I was an Electrician's Mate in the US Navy and the government trained me very thoroughly for that task. I then worked as an industrial maintenance electrician for some years after I got out of the Navy.

None of that helps, and she is convinced that when I am doing something electrical someday she is going to come home and find me dead. I have a suspicion that she leaves because she doesn't want to watch me die horribly, but she denies that.

When she got home she carefully did not express her relief that I was still alive, but did comment that the switch I replaced was whiter than the one next to it, and readily accepted my explanation that it was because it was forty years newer. She then noted that the new switch was upside down, and I don't think she was entirely convinced by my assertion that I had done that on purpose.

If that seems at odds with the "very thorough" training I received while I was in the Navy, I can only tell you that it was a domestic switch of a type that the Navy does not use.