You Know You’re An Adult When….

Apparently, you know you’re an adult when the most exciting part of your week, is getting your refrigerator light fixed.

The light in our refrigerator hasn’t worked in years. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time it did work. For years now we having been dealing with our lightless fridge. Sometimes ending up with three of the same thing in there, because whatever was being looked for couldn’t be found until the next time the fridge got cleaned out. Sometimes you might stumble across an ambitious person holding a spotlight, while fruitlessly searching the shelves for some random thing. Like a jar of pickles.

For the longest time, I just thought the button on the fridge was stuck from stickiness and that if I could just get rid of the stickiness, it would start working again. So I sprayed it and sprayed it and sprayed it…. Which upon reflection, probably didn’t do the switch any favors.

You would think at some point we would have gone looking for a replacement switch, but no. It was one of those things that, in my mind, was going to be this big expensive fix. It was probably going to involve having to remove some complicated part of the wall of the fridge or something and cost some exorbitant price. Or it would be one of those things where I would find the part, order it and then my husband would never get around to fixing it or something. So, I just didn’t look.

It wasn’t until recently, when the last remaining drawer in my fridge started to come apart that I finally took action. Not to look for the light switch mind you. I was trying to find replacement drawers. (Which is a whole other story, that isn’t complete yet, lol.) In my searching for replacement drawers, lo and behold I stumbled across a replacement switch. A two pack in fact, (you know, so we can use one now and lose the other later, right?) for less than twelve dollars. And the reviews said that it took less than five minutes to fix. I just sat there for a minute dumbfounded. I could have fixed this problem years ago for what then, was probably less than ten dollars and taken less than five minutes?! I spend more time than that each day looking for stuff in that fridge!

Straightaway, I ordered one of those babies up. A few days later it arrived. I promptly took it to the fridge and went to work. …..five minutes later I determined that that was long enough to try and figure it out and instead took a coffee break. A few hours later my husband got home. I showed him the part and the jankety tool it came with. He tossed the tool, whipped out his pocket knife and less than two minutes later, I had light in my fridge.

That was five days ago now. Yet still, every time I go to the fridge, (without a headache or migraine) I still feel a thrill of delight course through me to open up that refrigerator and be able to see everything inside of it. (We won’t talk about my realization that my fridge really needs a good cleaning out. That’s just another work in progress.)

Today, as I was standing there, gazing into my fridge with delight, I had the realization, this is what it is like to be an adult. When you are a kid, you open that fridge and exclaim in delight to see yogurt, chocolate milk, whipping cream, ect. We might still enjoy those things, but becoming an adult changes things it seems. Now, we take delight in things that make our children roll their eyes and walk away. Simple things, like having a working refrigerator light.