house imps

My new house contains a few imponderables....like the light switches that don't seem to turn anything on and the electricity outlets that work some days but not others. One of them is the washer/dryer plug, and I'm finding it enormously inconvenient to have my walls telling me which days of the week I can do my laundry.

The first time I tried to turn on the washer and nothing happened, I figured the plug had simply burned out. So I called my dad, who has the unfortunate job of counseling me on all my handyman projects. He drove over, flipped on the washer, and voila. Water came surging out, just like it's supposed to.

"Well," said my dad, "my job here is done!"

Geez! And no matter what I did--what switches I flipped, what utilities I turned on--I could not get the problem to replicate itself. Until he left, of course, at which point the plug decided not to work again.

So what's up with that? I cannot explain these things, other than to attribute them to house imps. I have always been plagued by house imps. House imps like to follow me around, hiding my stuff, turning my lights off and on, and otherwise plaguing me with small household annoyances. They think that kind of thing is really funny.

My weirdest house imp story took place in my old house. I have a battery-operated mouse for my computer, and the batteries went out. So I took the old ones out, left the mouse on the mousepad, and went off to get some new batteries so that I could continue my work.

When I returned, the mouse was gone.

I searched everywhere for that mouse. I figured that in my usual absent-minded way, I had perhaps carried the mouse with me when I was getting the batteries, and perhaps had stashed it on a shelf somewhere. I do that sort of thing all the time.

But it could not be found. I probably spent half an hour turning the house upside down, trying to find that mouse. I looked all over my desk--all around the computer, inside drawers, on the floor in case it had fallen off. I retraced my steps to the utility closet. I even checked the bathrooms.

At last I gave up and got a new, plug-in mouse out of the closet.

And when I returned to the computer to plug it in, there was the mouse I had been looking for, sitting right there on the mousepad, in exactly the place I thought I had left it.

House imps. There's no other explanation.