Socket to me

It's always the mundane things that get you.  Or get me, anyway.  And it doesn't get any more mundane than electrical sockets, or plugs, or outlets, or whatever they like to call them in the US.  I think it's outlets, but it is one of those things I still get confused about, probably because it doesn't come up very often.  I know where they all are in my own house, but if I'm in a strange place and I ask, cell phone charger in hand, if there's a plug handy I get a the a dumb stare in reply, or occasionally that look that suggests they think I need to be sectioned.  As an added confusion I recently discovered that the electricity in the walls isn't called "the mains" here - and I imagine that if you go into a stranger's house and start babbling on about plugs and the mains they only let you use the plastic cutlery (which, incidentally, they don't call cutlery, either...sigh).

On top of the language confusion the sockets don't look the same.  In New Zealand the plug on the end of a cord has two rectangular slanted pins on top and optionally a third vertical one below.  In the US the top pins are vertical and the bottom pin is huge and rounded.  Like this..

This system does have the advantage of looking like a little surprised face.  If you look carefully at that picture you'll notice that the left hole is taller than the right one, this is because some (but not all) plugs come with one larger pin to make sure you plug it in the right way around.  I didn't immediately realise that this was the case and spent many puzzled seconds wondering why I couldn't plug in the coffee machine.  There's nothing like being stumped by something most American children have mastered.

You'll notice, too, that the sockets don't have switches attached (though sometimes they have switches some distance away, presumably to add an element of mystery to the thing).  The juice is flowing all the time, which seems a trifle dangerous to me, but probably Thomas Edison wanted to save money and so convinced everyone that switches would make your hair fall out or something.  Sounds like the kind of thing he'd do.

Light switches still give me trouble, though.  Movies were kind enough to show me that they are reversed here: up is on and down is off.  But to be forewarned is not always enough, because like all those other little reversals, like the way the date is written and the driving on the right, I just find myself horribly confused most of the time.  I still have to consciously think about it each time I flick a switch, and then I still get it wrong sometimes.  A lot of switches are helpfully labelled like this one, and still I muck it up.

Ah, well, it's early days yet.  Perhaps like with the dates, in time I will see the light.