The fault in my electrical stars: Let there be light, and fans too!

 Yes, this is going to be one more rant post. After having been woken up from my slumber for the fifth time, I am in a grumpy and grouchy mood alright. 

The lights, fans and geysers in my room are smart. They're so smart that they decide when to turn on and off. And if you're imagining some tech-savvy house where there are sensors that detect presence/movement, stop right there. That's not what I'm talking about. This is a bug, not a feature. In my room, the lights turn on in the middle of the night, arbitrarily. When we're sound asleep. I detest getting out of bed for anything, and turning off lights is no exception. My spirit animal must be a sloth bear, because I'd rather sleep with the lights on than get out of bed to turn them off. My husband is way more bothered by the lights than I am, so he's usually the one to get out of bed to turn them off too. No complaints there.

But today, he's not at home you see. And so, the Narada of electrical Gods has decided to mess with me and have fun. I fall asleep, and 20 minutes later, a light turns on, startling me awake. I curse, and sleepwalk the distance to the switchboard and turn it off, and tumble back into bed. A few winks later, it turns back on. Two times in a row! What are the odds? I repeat my sleep addled shuffle, and try to go back to sleep. I am rudely woken up again, this time by the fan turning on, and at that on a cold rainy night. This time, I'm determined not to get out of bed, and I wrap the blanket tighter and decide to sleep through it. As if hearing my thoughts, the fan speeds up one step, then two, and then three, till it's going at full speed. What on earth is happening? I am shivering due to the cold now, and a little spooked too. It feels like one of those scary movie scenes where the fan gets faster and faster and then finally falls on the person below. :D I have to get out of bed, I conclude. I trudge wearily to the switchboard yet again, and turn off the fan. I'm glad I don't believe in ghosts, I muse, or this whole thing could have looked quite sinister. 

This time, I decide that I don't want to be woken up again. And with that, I realize I'm better off with no electricity than this sad excuse of a switchboard. I head to the electrical unit, locate the MCB and flip the appropriate trip switch off, grinning victoriously. Darkness, and blissful sleep. I will you to turn on now. Go ahead, try. 

P.S: If you're looking for some context on this, we have a "cutting edge" touch panel that the builder put in all the apartments as opposed to regular switches. And this touch panel's sensitivity seems to be super high, so much so that it registers phantom touches even at the slightest change in temperature/humidity/wind. We've had the technician come in and look at this, but thanks to how irreproducible and sporadic the issue is, all we've gotten is hand-waving explanations. We could replace the panel, of course, but that's going to cost an arm and a leg, and I honestly have no hope that the new panel from the same vendor would be any better than this one. Getting the whole room rewired is out of the question, given that we're tenants. I think it's a time to invest in an IR blaster that lets us turn off these dratted switches without getting out of bed. Either that, or I brush off the cobwebs of one of my Masters' course projects where I captured the hexcodes used by the remote and modified the IR driver to blast them out. Either way, I'm done with all this smart switches nonsense. Give me good old switches any day, and I promise you a sound night's sleep.