but now, for the real news

The real news is that I called my building's electricians and got them to repair my flickering, fading kitchen light, which had been dying for the past year. It finally gave up the ghost around the middle of last week. Having never opened my ceiling lights' casings since I moved into this place in 2018, I was surprised to find out that the lights aren't fluorescent at all: they're a checkerboard arrangement of tiny, aggressively luminescent LEDs. I'd never seen such a thing before, and this was even more of a shock because of the eerily fluorescent way the dying lights had been flickering. Truth be told, my other two ceiling lights are currently in the dying phase, so I'm going to have to call the electricians back in the next few months.

When I called the electrician's office on Saturday, the old guy on the other end of the line told me I'd need to buy the required light, then call him again, and he'd come up to do the installation. When I'd shopped for my bathroom light a few years back, I'd taken a trip all the way out to the Euljiro district across town, which is essentially a huge, sprawling Home Depot or, as Koreans might put it, a hardwarepia (Koreans put "pia" on the ends of words to indicate that a place or website is a utopia for whatever you're looking for, e.g., a Buddhapia website is a utopia for all things Buddhist... as an English speaker, though, I think the ending should be "opia," but Asians clip English words in unsatisfactory ways, like the strange, nonsensical way Chinese people carve up a chicken), but in this modern age, the idea of physically going shopping is analog thinking: the guy told me to just "use the internet"—no Euljiro excursions needed. So I went to Coupang on my phone, looked up my light's model number, and found what I thought would be the right light.

The light arrived on Sunday, so Sunday evening, I called the electrician's office again, and a two-man team came to my place. The first thing they discovered was that my product was the correct length (the only dimension I'd bothered to measure), but the wrong width. Luckily, the light-installation kit had come with other parts, and the two-man crew said they could make do with that. Another element inside the box, aside from the LED lights themselves, was a "converter," which is what the guys ended up switching out. And sure enough, when they turned the lights on, it was obvious that the converter had been the problem all along, not the lights. So the next time one of my ceiling lights starts to weaken and flicker, I'll know to order the appropriate converter. I get the impression that the LEDs are built to last forever.

End result: the team took the better part of an hour to finish repairs, and I now have a strongly functioning kitchen light. I'd been without proper kitchen lighting for a few days, which meant avoiding cooking, one of my favorite activities. On Friday, I finally had the overpowering urge to cook, so I moved my vertical lamp kitchenward from its place next to my computer desk (I only use the lamp when Skyping). Things were like that for only a day, and now, we're back to normal again. So! All is right with the world, and my flaccid Korean skills did me proud.