With all due respect to the agency that created it, I’ve altered Home Depot’s slogan to better reflect my own history with it: The Home Depot—You can screw it up, we can help. I do not belong in a “home improvement warehouse” because to me home improvement is a concept to be feared, like midget porn and family vacations. I don’t like it, I don’t know how to do it, and I am rendered horrified by my own failure whenever I attempt to do it.
About two years ago I was here to purchase a ceiling fan for our living room because we thought it might help us reduce our electric bill by enabling us to use the air conditioner less frequently. I spent an entire weekend assembling the thing and hanging it from the ceiling, and by Sunday afternoon all that was left was to make the appropriate electrical connections. That was the first—and until now, the last—time I ever touched anything electrical in our house. See, our house was built in 1963 and in those days people must have been really short—like Oompa-Loompa short—because our “attic” is more like a death trap. There’s only about two feet of vertical space up there and the nails used to adhere the synthetic roof tiles to the house poke straight through, creating the very real possibility of being impaled whenever I go up there. Naturally, the entrance to the crawl space is on the east end of the house and the electrical junction box I needed to access was on the west end of the house. Despite spending almost an hour in the hundred-degree crawl space, I finally managed to twist the appropriate wires together and make the ceiling fan whirl. I excitedly began the long crawl back to the exit, and when I got about two little scootches from there, I put the size eight Nike on my right foot straight through the ceiling. My leg was junk-deep in the hallway outside Breana’s room. “Can I help you find something, sir?” asks the man in the orange apron. He’s older than the typical employee here, maybe in his early sixties, but he’s got big muscles.
“Hi, uh, yeah. I’m looking for a switch.”
“A switch? Well, we’ve got lots’a switches. What kind ya lookin’ fer?”
(Another accent to decipher. I’m going to guess Texas. West Texas. El Paso, maybe.)
“Just a light switch,” I say. “Think the one in my garage is fried.”
“Yeah, well, that’ll happen,” he says. “Let’s take a walk down to Electrical.”
“Oh, it’s OK. You don’t have to escort me all the way down there. I think I can find it.”
“Ya sure? It’s no trouble.”
“I’m sure,” I say. “Thanks for the help.”
“Not a problem.”
Not for him, maybe. But for me? Big problem. Big! If there’s more than one variety of light switch in that aisle, I’m completely hosed. I clearly would have loved to have an escort to show me what kind of switch I need, but the problem with these damned Home Depot employees is their expectation that you have at least a scintilla of an idea what you’re trying to accomplish. I have no such thing. I have only my ignorance and my credit card and my resolve to be a better man. A better homeowner, too.
Fortunately there is really only one kind of light switch. I get it home and show it to Breana, as if I’m about to impart some of my wisdom so that she might be able to replace a light switch in her own home someday (assuming I don’t electrocute her first).
“…and see this thing right here? That’s the on-off switch. The lights go on when you flip it up and off when you flip it down. Cool, huh?”
“I already know that, dad,” she says with a frustrated eye roll as she turns her attention back to her iPad.
“OK,” I say. “Well…good chat, Pumpkin.”
The disciplines of home improvement that terrify me most are plumbing and electrical, which, with the exception of patching drywall when people stick their legs through it, comprise the majority of repairs in our fifty-year-old house. The reasons to fear these two minefields are rather obvious to me—plumbing mistakes flood the house and electrical mistakes fry people. That’s why I’m having such a difficult time convincing myself to install this new light switch in the garage. I know the steps I must take in order to protect myself—starting with turning off the power to that part of the house—but I’m generally a nervous person and I cannot banish from my mind the image of myself as a house fly and the wires in this light switch as one of those fluorescent blue lights that make flies like me spontaneously combust on contact.
Despite my reservations, I have killed the power, unscrewed the plastic overlay, and carefully pulled the existing switch out of its metal housing. There are two wires connecting the switch to the electricity—one red, one white. To a seasoned household repair ninja like my brother Paul, changing out a dead switch like this is about as challenging as scratching your balls. That’s why I’ve always called him when I need something like this (and perhaps why he looks at me like I’m helpless idiot whenever he comes over to repair shit). But this is a new time. I am a new man. I’m taking responsibility for my own home. And to me, this looks like a scene out of The Hurt Locker. I’ve just opened a car trunk loaded with seven improvised explosive devices powerful enough to turn my whole existence into a fine red mist, and now my survival depends on carefully removing the red and white wires without so much as a twitch. I produce a small flathead screwdriver (despite the screws being threaded for a Phillips head screwdriver) and slowly begin to loosen the screw connecting the white wire. After a half-dozen turns, the white wire pops free. I close my eyes and wait for the explosion, but it never comes. Because I’m that good.
I then turn my attention to the red wire, and since red is the color of blood and the devil and a smacked bottom, my muscles tighten. I slowly begin turning the screw to the left (I remember learning this phrase in junior high: “Righty tighty, lefty loosie.”) (But at the time I thought it mean left-handed girls were looser.) and suddenly I feel a bead of sweat form on my brow and start sliding down the bridge of my nose. I want badly to wipe it away but I’m dealing with lethal electrical force here and I know even the slightest twitch could kill me. Or worse. I continue to unscrew while the sweat slowly slides over my nose. It tickles. It itches. But I persevere until the red wire shoots free, and with one jerk of my head the sweat plummets to its death on the garage floor.
“Hey, Breana!” I holler a few minutes later.
“Hey what?”
“Can you come out to the garage for a sec? I want to show you something!”
She appears. There’s a look of apprehension about her, but I’m smiling when she sees me and that seems to disarm her.
“Go ahead,” I say, pointing at the light switch proudly. “Give it a try.”
She smiles.
Her eyes open wide, as if turning that switch will make the sky open up and unleash a hailstorm of hundred-dollar bills. With her eyes open wide, she flips the switch.
And nothing happens.
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