Like the pirate with a steering wheel in his pants once said:
“Argh! It drives me nuts…”
Five weeks. Seven Levels of Purgatory. All courtesy of Eden Cove Nine.
I promise, folks, that I am almost done with my way-too-in-depth vacation home rental review of the infamous fun house known as EC9. For those out there unacquainted with old friend EC9, they can catch up on all the fun here.
And for those of you keeping score at home, you will recall that last week I covered Level 6 of Purgatory. Soo I bet y’all have got your hopes up that this week would be the 7th and final level of the Purg’, right?
Um, so, I have some bad news for you then: I got one more light-themed complaint that I need to get off my chest before we can ascend (or is it descend?) to the 7th Level.
Level 6b: A Thousand Points Of Light And One Heart Of Darkness
“A Thousand Points of Light”…besides being former President George H.W. Bush’s favorite catchphrase, I strongly maintain that that’s what they really should have named this place instead of “Eden Cove.”
Though I don’t have another milquetoast anecdote to illustrate my point, this place was absolutely rife with nuanced bits of questionable design, and the lights were no exception to this.
In addition to the master bathroom lighting shenanigans that I spoke of in Level 6a of Purgatory, EC9‘s illumination situation had two main flaws that would only become apparent to a vacationer until it was far too late.
Let’s shed some light on the first one, shall we? Now, take a closer look at the Figure 1 below:
Looks just like a run-of-the-mill place to relax and recuperate, right? Not so fast, my friend!
You may note that there are regularly spaced lights on the ceiling. Well, I actually sat down and counted exactly how many there were on this level, which comprised the kitchen, living room, and dining area.
Not counting lamps, fridges, bathrooms, and stove hoods, there were thirty-six lights on this floor. THIRTY-SIX! Me-thinks that to be a bit excessive, no?
In fact, it makes you wonder if whoever designed this was over-compensating for something–say, the emotional darkness pervading their insides–right?
But! The Heart of Darkness is not merely a random-ass theory I just pulled out of thin air. There is more evidence to support this crazy idea. And that leads me to bullet-point #2.
As if having an incessant amount of light fixtures baked into the design of the condo wasn’t bad enough, the least they could have done was wire them up to the light switches in an intuitive manner.
As foreshadowed by my previous light-related tale, that was most definitely not the case. Like, there was almost zero correlation between where the light was, and the location of the switch that controlled it. This was especially notable in the kitchen, where the kitchen light switches were located more in the dining area, next to the bathroom, and half the lights in the dining area were controlled by lights in the ----- kitchen.
During our 5 weeks there, I spent many a late night at the dining table working on home-reno related tasks. And for about half of those nights I was on baby-monitor duty, as The Younger is prone to waking up in the middle of the night in a fuss, and will need some comforting stat before she wakes everybody else up.
There were countless times that she did indeed wake up and I needed to hastily shut things down for the night, and almost every single one of them played out like a Benny Hinn Hill montage, with me running back and forth in a panic trying to find the right light switch(es) by trial and error.
Given the sheer number of pairs of lights on/lights off sequences that would ensue, combined with the funky sweat smell that I would work up in the progress, and then add in the rhythmic cries of a toddler coming through the baby monitor…and, yeah, the second level of EC9 would basically transmogrify into Oak Island’s hottest discotheque every other night…
…
Okay, well I guess I did have a milquetoast anecdote in me after all. I have to apologize, as the whole “The system is down…the system is down…”1This pop-culture reference goes out to all of you old-school HomeStar Runner lovers out there. techno beat now playing in my head distracted me from doing what I came to do: reveal to you the theory-of-everything that could possibly explain how such a place like EC9 could even exist (apart from me being stuck in the all-time lowest-rated episode of The Twilight Zone).
Like a seasoned forensic analyst declaring that a crime scene is so gruesome that “it had to have been very personal for the murderer to make such a gratuitous mess”, Mom and I formulated our own hypothesis that EC9, too, must have been an act of personal aggression.
So the point of the story is, if you’re going to invest money in building the most luxurious condos on all of Oak Island, for the love of G0d, don’t hire your ex-husband to handle the electrical engineering…
Content created on: 28 August 2021 (Saturday)
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