Last night, a funny thing happened.  I completely threw the rules of logic out the window and ignored Occam’s razor.  Simply put, the meaning is “the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one”.

The initial problem as presented was that the light in our house’s upstairs hallway would not turn on.  An additional symptom is that the lower light switch was loose.  Knowing that our children have a fondness for flicking the switch up and down, my assumption was that it had been flicked one too many times and the switch no longer worked.  A non-working switch means a non-working light, right?

So I went to the hardware store and bought some light switches.  I figured I might as well replace the upper one at the same time.  Introducing complexity to the problem was probably not a good idea.  Anyways, I turned off the power, replaced the switches, and turned the power back on.  The light did not work.  So I figured that I had wired them wrong.  I turned off the power again, and rewired the switches.  In the process, I broke a couple of the wires so I needed to cut and strip them, taking even more valuable time.  I put the switches back in the wall, turned the power on.  Nothing.

The next thing I did was check the light bulb.