In my office at work I’ve got this torchiere light and because I’m lazy I have it hooked up to a wireless power switch. With a flick of the battery-operated switch on my desk the light turns on and off.

This setup has worked well for over a year. Until now.

Yesterday my light started turning on and off all by itself. I thought maybe it was just a fluke, but today the same thing happened around 10AM. Repeatedly.

I am now engaged in a daily battle with an unknown opponent. Someone in this building must have the same type of transmitter, and by chance it also happens to operate on “Channel E”. (The channel is not changeable – you’d have to buy a whole new switch that uses a different one.)

When he turns my light off, I turn it back on, which probably turns his off, and we go back and forth for a little while.

Sometimes things will be fine for an hour or two, then the light will go off again and we’ll get into a heated battle of flickery switchitude! Or switchery flickitude. Whatever you want to call it, it’s ON.

Eventually I got tired of fighting and tried to send him a morse-code SOS. dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot.

I don’t think he knew what I was trying to do because he just flicked the hell out of his switch after that.

Then I tried to send him a message in the UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF MATH. Unfortunately the Fibonacci sequence was lost on him/her/it because I got nothing back.

I have no idea what to do at this point. I could go around to all of the other building tenants within a 100 foot radius of my desk, angrily waving the switch in the air and be like “DUDES. WTF! Let’s be friends.”

Or I could just continue this battle and hope the other side gives up.

Passive-aggressive works for me!