The Wiring in My Apartment

In China, you buy an apartment and it’s nothing but an empty space in a building. Then you put in walls, plumbing, electrical, flooring, windows, fixtures, furnishings etc. The Chinese system for doing this is through guanxi – or networking. Basically, you need walls in your apartment and your business partner’s son-in-law needs a job so he gets paid to do the work. Thus, you get the work done on your apartment and you solidify your relationship with your business partner. Most transactions in China are done this way. The problem with this is that no one knows what they hell they are doing and everything gets done half-assed, backwards and unsafely.

This leads me into a discussion of the wiring in my bedroom. Last night, Randall and I came across an interesting discovery. We have three lights in our room and three outlets. One light is over the desk. It works. One outlet is for the air conditioner. It’s rusted and we can’t plug anything into it. The second outlet is beside the desk. It works. The second light is beside the bed. It doesn’t work. The third light is a ceiling fluorescent thing. It kind of works. The third outlet is beside the bed. The light bedside the bed and the ceiling light are both controlled by two switches, one by the door, one by the bed. In theory, this means that you can turn off the light from bed, which is great for Randall, since it’s his job to turn off the lights at night.

Anyway, as usual, Randall went to turn off the light. Except this time, it wouldn’t turn off. It did dim a bit. We tried flipping the other switches, but the switch for the second light does nothing and flipping second switch for the ceiling light at the door didn’t work either. While we’re flipping all the switches in combination to see if we can figure out some reason for the light turning off, I noticed that every time we turned the ceiling light off, my cell phone – which was plugged into the outlet beside the bed – beeped to let me know that it was charging. This was important information.

This is what we concluded:

1. The outlet beside the bed only works when the light is off.
2. When the light is off, it’s not off, it’s just dim.
3. When anything is plugged into the outlet beside the bed, the light won’t turn off, it just dims.
4. Occasionally, for some reason, the light flickers like a strobe light.
5. When the outlet does work, it only has enough power to charge a cell phone and can’t run a space heater.
6. The apartment is trying to kill us.

*Update*

Having avoided the use of the outlet by the bed, the problem with the light has apparently resolved itself, however the light in the living room now constantly flickers... Also my fridge roars when it's open for more than five seconds...