In the winter, the house gets darker earlier. To make our living room a little brighter, I turned on the table lamp, but nothing happened. The lamp was plugged in, so, in my best Sherlock Holmes manner, deduced the lightbulb was dead.

In the past, a burned-out light bulb was no big deal. All I’d do is go to the store, pick up a yellow and blue pack of GE bulbs and be on my way.

Not anymore.

Lightbulb manufacturers decided to ramp up their selections to the same level as measuring isotopes in plutonium.

Oh how I miss that old basic box.

One-hundred watt bulbs were for areas where we needed heavy-duty light. Sixty-watt bulbs were the standard for reading lamps, and bulbs for the refrigerator were in a special box marked “appliances” for those of us who had trouble figuring out what bulb to buy for the fridge.

They also offered colored lightbulbs for Christmas and a yellow lightbulb that supposedly repelled mosquitoes.

My parents installed one of those lightbulbs on the patio, but all that ever did was make our back yard look like a school bus was parked back there.

Consumers now have to know what size lightbulb base they need — 12mm, 14mm, 26mm or 39mm and that doesn’t include European sizes.

No longer can you waltz into the hardware store and pick up a box of lightbulbs.

Buyers also need to know if they want a compact fluorescent lightbulb or one with a filament, the number of lumens they want and the temperature scale.

If that sounds like space-age jargon, you’d be correct, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are incandescent, halogen, and LED lightbulbs.

Recently I decided to pick up some extra bulbs for the lights over the bathroom sink. I knew to take the old lightbulb with me for comparison, but I might as well have been holding a metal bottle opener.

I stood in front of the display and was overwhelmed. I kept comparing the old bulb to the boxes on the shelf, and nothing seemed to match.

I finally asked an associate to help me.

“Hmmm,” he said, looking at the old lightbulb like it was from the Stone Age. “What temperature do you want?”

“I thought these things came in watts,” I said.

“These days, brightness is measured in lumens and can run from 80 lumens to 3,000,” he said. “The temperature is measured in Kelvins and runs from classic warm white to cool daylight.”

He saw the confused look on my face.

“I just want a lightbulb that looks like this one,” I said holding up the old bulb.

“They don’t make those anymore,” he said.

I grabbed a box that looked like it would work.

“What about these?” I asked.

He looked at the instructions on the CFL – compact fluorescent light – and frowned.

“You have to handle these carefully as they contain mercury,” he said, an apology in his voice. “Also you have to recycle them.”

He looked at me, his customer, standing there with a burned-out, ancient lightbulb in her hand and a vacant look on her face.

“You could always buy a smart lightbulb,” he said with hope in his voice. “They connect to an app and you can change the color of the bulb with the touch of a button.”

Thirty minutes later, I walked out of the hardware store with a new lamp, lightbulb included.

There’s a ton of jokes about how many engineers, Aggies or psychiatrists it takes to change a lightbulb. All I’d like is a lightbulb that, when it needs replacing, doesn’t require a master’s degree in engineering.

By the way, it takes five Aggies to replace a light bulb – one to screw in the lightbulb and four to rotate the ladder.

 

This Aggie Mom’s email is dhadams1955@yahoo.com.