Extra Wires

When my wife and I rented our first apartment, I wanted to flex a little about how handy I was and help her understand how lucky she was gonna be with me as her husband.

The job was simple. We had a chandelier with two switches across the room from each other. We wanted to replace one of the toggle on/off switches with a dimmer switch. Piece of cake.

I bought the circular dimmer, grabbed my tools, and found the circuit breaker. Ten minutes later, I had it done. Except there was this one extra red wire that disappeared into the wall. I didn’t know what it was, so I just properly taped the exposed end and tucked it back into the box behind the new switch.

I tested it, and whamo, it worked great.

Until you switched the other light switch across the room.

Hmm. This was before YouTube and the internet, so I didn’t have easy access to information to debug this.

We went along for a few weeks like this. Dimmer worked great as long as the other switch was in a particular position. No problem, we just left it like that.

Then my in-laws came for dinner. My father-in-law was a savant at maintenance and fixing stuff. It’s what he did professionally and as a hobby. Could fix anything.

Given my new son-in-law status, I didn’t really want to ask him about it (because he was also a ball-buster), but my wife let the cat out of the bag.

“Hey, Dad, how come…” And she shows him what’s going on.

He looks at it for 10 seconds, and asks me, “How did you connect the traveler wire?”

“Um, what’s the traveler wire?”

“This is a 3-way switch circuit. It requires a 3rd wire. What did you do with it?”

“Oh, I didn’t know what that was. I just tucked it back in, unconnected.”

He just stared at me with a little smirk, and my shame was on full display. Then he laughed. Then my mother-in-law laughed. And my wife just smiled at me.

“You should never have extra wires. If you do, you did something wrong.”

Extra wires. Duh.