To be fair, one of us believes the touch lamp to be the greatest invention in modern bedside furniture. The other has spent the last eighteen months trying to convince herself it hates her personally. Between Christmas and now, we haven’t shifted our positions by an inch.
Let us first address the appeal, which is legitimate: no digging around for a light switch in the dead of night, no perilous trailing power cords that wrap around your ankles trying to knock you onto the actual bed frame. Tap it — sometimes the base, sometimes any part of its body, depending on which you buy — and the light comes on. It even has that quietly futuristic vibe that a lamp legitimately has no business possessing.
And now the bad news: touch lamps are fucking moodists. They’ll randomly jump from off to blindingly bright with zero transition, apparently deciding you didn’t deserve the courtesy of the medium setting that particular evening.
Leave a phone charging beside them and they’ll decide to sass you by flickering at 3am, apparently offended by something nobody can understand.
Not great to wake up to, a temperamental lamp having a moment two inches from your face.
One of us experienced this phenomenon for an entire week before figuring out the cause was the phone. The lamp shrugged and took the blame.
There’s also the small matter of whose touch it likes. One of us operates them like it’s a normal, collective light switch, casually tapping them on and off without so much as looking in its direction.
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The other has deemed the lamp hers, and hers alone, to the point that she’ll huff if anyone else touches it without permission.
Like it spritzed perfume and sealed her fingerprint into the metal or something.
They are not changing their behaviour and the lamp couldn’t care less either way, which makes it perhaps the most reasonable entity involved in this debate.
Wait, what about cats? The marketing doesn’t mention cats. If your cat walks across the bedside table, odds are it’ll register as a touch half the time. So you’ll suddenly have your lamp turning on at 4am because cat thought sitting on the lamp looked like a good idea. It’s not so much a flaw in the design as it is an inconvenience no one mentions to people who own animals, and we have several.
We’ve purchased cheap models and expensive-as-fuck models, and cost was about as indicative of which would flicker at us first. What mattered every single time was how many steps the dimmer went down. Three is good, two is cheap, and if you don’t pay attention to that you’ll end up with a lamp that’s either blinding you or functioning as a goddamn nightlight with an ego problem.
The point is, we still can’t agree and likely never will. But touch or no touch, we all grab for our bedside lamp first when we wake up in the dark.
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