An unexpected bit of forward thinking
November 20, 2024 at 10:43 PM by Dr. Drang
I think I’ve mentioned here before that sometimes I’ll run into a computer problem and Googling for the answer leads me to a post I wrote (and forgot about) years earlier. I had a similar experience today in the physical world.
I needed to turn an electrical outlet in the spare bedroom from unswitched to switched. The room is being reconfigured, and I wanted a lamp by that outlet to be controlled by the wall switch at the door. I knew the wiring to the switch was in the outlet box because I’d changed that outlet from switched to unswitched several years ago.
As I went down into the basement to flip the circuit breaker and cut power to the outlet, I thought about my previous forays into rewiring outlets, installing ceiling fans, etc., and expected I’d have to experiment a little to figure out which breaker was on the circuit for the outlet in question. As I recalled, two of the breakers were labeled “Bedrooms,” so I had a 50-50 chance of flipping the right one first.
This certainly isn’t the biggest burden in the world, but it would mean that I have to flip one of the breakers, go from the basement to the second floor to see if the outlet was live, and then possibly repeat the process with the other breaker. I really should label those breakers more clearly, I told myself.
But when I opened the breaker box, here’s what I saw:
The large writing was done by the electrician who first wired the house some 40 years ago. The small writing is mine. Yesterday’s me had already done what today’s me planned to do by writing “South” and “North” on the labels for circuits 15 and 17. Because the outlet being changed is in one of the two north bedrooms, I cut the power to circuit 17 and had to climb the stairs only once.
Note also that yesterday’s me—on a different occasion, as evidenced by the use of a pen instead of a pencil—figured out that the lights for the basement stairs were on the same circuit as the “dinning” room. This must have taken quite a bit of experimentation, because the stairs aren’t especially close to the dining room, but at least I was able to do those experiments entirely from the basement.
So good for yesterday’s me. Not only did he preserve useful information, he wrote it down where today’s me would have to find it. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised at his forethought; yesterday’s me often thought he’d remember things that he didn’t.
