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Walked into a 1980s house in Portland last week and saw their original panel still had a blinking trouble light
The homeowner said they never called anyone because it had been blinking since before they bought it in 2003 - how often do you run into systems that have been sitting with a fault nobody cared about for that long?
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colescott16h ago
That's the kind of thing that shows how people just accept broken stuff as normal. I see this all the time with cars too - someone's check engine light has been on for YEARS and they just treat it like a permanent dashboard decoration. Same with a leaky faucet or a cracked phone screen. Once something becomes familiar, people stop seeing it as a problem. The trouble light probably just became part of the house's personality to them, like a weird neighbor or a squeaky door. It's kind of wild how humans just adapt to stuff that's obviously wrong.
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alicer5312h ago
The two year mark is when I finally stopped noticing the crack in my bathroom mirror, so I get it. Twenty years of that trouble light blinking must have just become white noise to them. It's kind of sad but also a little funny how we just build our lives around stuff that's broken.
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the_jake14h ago
Ask them what other stuff in their house was just accepted as normal. Was the roof leaking too or did they draw the line somewhere? I feel like once you ignore one blinking light for 20 years you probably have a whole list of "character features" you live with. Like that one outlet that stopped working in 1996 but nobody mentions it anymore.
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