A friend came over today to help me try to finish papering the kitchen (How long, O Lord, how long?) and remarked that one of our light switches was upside down. No big deal. My dad and The Squire had cut the wire too short when they installed that light and it wasn’t worth redoing the entire thing.
On the other hand, all of the switches in the house where I lived with the Late and Unlamented were put in right side up, but wired upside down.
I asked him about it, and he looked at me as if I was a banana short of a bunch. “See that?” he said, pointing to the word OFF on the switch, which was pointing down at the moment, but the lights were on. He flipped the switch up, so the word OFF was hidden, and we stood there in the dark. “Now, what’s so odd about that?”, he asked.
I didn’t have the heart – or the nerve – to tell him, but it did have a sort of odd-ball logic to it. I simply had to remember they were Russian switches.
Good old Colonel Upizoff.
thisendoftheswamp 
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