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James Thurber on the tech paranoia of his maternal line:
The telephone she was comparatively at peace with, except, of course, during storms, when for some reason or other she always took the receiver off the hook and let it hang. She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.
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itsbruce
@Stonehedge
Reminds me of my old gran.
She used to keep the TV remote on top of the TV so if she wanted to change the channel, shed get up, walk to the TV, change the channel with the remote and put it back in the Tv before sitting down again.
My Mum who is in her 70s does the turning everything off thing. Even turns off the isolators for the oven, and hob etc in the kitchen. The first thing she does when she gets up in the morning is sets all of the clocks on her kitchen appliances!
She even does it with lamps. I'll never stop being frustrated at trying to turn a lamp on but then having to operate two switches to do so!