I wish I had a clapper.

Call me crazy, but I feel like the world is backwards. The town home I currently reside in has a whole lot of switches in it... not light switches, but switches nonetheless. When I first moved in I noticed there was a switch on the wall of my bedroom just to the right when you enter the door. Exactly where a light switch should be in a bedroom. But you could flip this switch all day long and nothing would happen, because it isn't connected to a light, it is connected to an outlet. In fact, there are many switches in my house that are not connected to lights, they are connected to outlets. This is more annoying than having a scratch on the roof of your mouth.

I know the theory behind it. No permanent light fixtures means more versatility, but for goodness sake the outlet switch is so annoying. The switch always seems to go to an outlet that is in the middle of a wall, somewhere you would not put a light, a lamp, or anything that you could turn on with a switch. Instead, it ends up being where you need to plug in a clock, which of course you are not going to, because every time you enter the room you flip the switch out of habit resetting your clock.

In my bedroom, I have three lamps THREE IN ONE BEDROOM. It is still the most poorly lit room in the whole house. If I had just one light fixture in the middle of the ceiling I could light the whole room. And all my lamps just so happen to be in the best places to put lamps in that room, but as fate would have it, none of those outlets are controlled by the switch on the wall. So the switch on the wall becomes nothing more than a memorial to a more functional age, when houses actually were lit and a simpler time when I didn't have to walk across a dark room to manually turn on a lamp, when there is actually wiring in the wall for a light switch.

I'm saying, if you want to go the route of the outlet switch, there should be a control panel that has small buttons that correspond with each outlet in the room. Now that would be something. Then every outlet is a possibility for light, or have one switch that you could just unscrew the top panel and have a dial that allows you to choose which outlet you want to control. It just seems to me futile to use a switch for outlets instead of fixtures in the name of versatility, when in reality it not only limits you to ground lamp lighting, but only in certain places in the room, and limits the controllable outlets to not being fully functional. And there are subdivisions full of these fixtureless houses.

If I bought a house, or built my own house it would be really important to me that the light switches made sense not only in placement, but I can't stand when there is a double switch and one is up and the other down... and there is no way to make them the same. I feel like that is just poor construction.