My mother-in-law-to-be is very sweet, but is hopelessly clueless about some things. For example, she thinks that a thief can access your bank account if they find your receipt for something you bought, and she thinks she finds “shortcuts” when driving that actually make the trip twice as long.
Recently, my fiancé and I went on a weekend vacation and asked her to house sit and feed our cats. I realized that I’d left a light on that I didn’t mean to, and told my fiancé to ask her to turn if off next time she visited. Big mistake.
He texted her with this request, she said she would turn the light off when she stopped by our house next, and we went about our vacation. Later, my fiancé noticed several missed calls from his mother and finally a text:
“I’ve been here for over an hour, and I can’t figure out how to turn the light off!”
We were baffled, as it was a small, simple box lamp with a switch on the back and a cord going into the wall. Nothing more, nothing less. He called her, but she said she’d already left our house. “She was there for… an hour?” I asked, incredulous at the thought that something as simple as locating a switch on a small object was so daunting. He rolled his eyes and tried to explain to her how to turn it off when she next returned.
On her next trip, she still couldn’t figure it out. So, the lamp remained on all weekend, and when I next saw her, she complained about how it was just impossible to turn off. I still have yet to understand how a box with a switch was so perplexing… and why she didn’t just unplug it.
