So this afternoon Dave the Electrician showed up to replace two decrepit fluorescent fixtures in the garage. The things had circular lamps that were hard for a savvy male to change out and downright impossible for an elderly woman. I’d bought ordinary closet light fixtures for Dave to install in the annoying fixtures’ place, and while at Home Depot picked up a couple of CFLs to put into them. HD Dude said no problem, of course CFLs would work just fine in these excruciatingly cheap ceiling fixtures.

Dave installed the new light fixtures at 1:30 p.m. By 3:00 in the afternoon one of the CFLs was dead. By 6:00 p.m. the other died.

Now understand, neither of these worthy lightbulbs...uhm, lightswirlies...was left on all afternoon. The garage has a motion-sensitive switch, so that when I back my car in the lights come on and I can see to make my way to the kitchen door. In the absence of any motion, they stay on about eight or ten minutes. I set them to stay on that long because the sensor can’t “see” me while I’m working in front of the washer and dryer and I don’t like having the lights go off while my head is in the dryer.

This is not the first time CFLs have died in an ordinary light fixture at my house. When I changed my household lights over to the things, one lamp killed three of them before I realized, for sure, the problem was not defective lightswirlies but that the pricey CFLs do not work in that lamp and that after having been screwed into said lamp they will not work in any other fixture, either. They were, in a word, Dead Lightbulbs, Swirlies Sent to Their Maker, Stiff Parrots.

Funny how no one tells you about that, isn’t it?

frugality