I have this little story, brought on by reading a couple of things on the internet.

Back in the day, when we'd bought our wonderful house (because all houses you've just bought are wonderful, or so you think) in Dublin, we'd called a contractor in to perform some semi-remodeling kinds of tasks.

However, after their first walk-through, they ABSOLUTELY had to talk to us, like not one minute after we possibly could be free. "Please," they also said.

So, off we trundled to the conference with our contractors. It was then we learned, as they were required by Irish law to inform us, of the state of our electricity in our recently-purchased house. Long story short: the system installed by the previous owner not only lacked much conformity to the code, it was downright unsafe - there was an old fashioned fuse box, with absolutely no sense to the groupings, no grounding for anything save the group for the washer/dryer, and a clearly shock-ready arrangement for the power shower.

A few Anglo-Saxon expressions later (the builders nodded with great sympathy, and no surprise at all), we'd come to the decision that we'd have to put the money we thought we would be spending on redecoration into a complete re-wiring. Including "chasing" the electrical outlets so that a proper ground/earth conduit could be added.

Later on, one of the supervisors added, "By rights, the pre-sale survey should have caught this, but with the way the housing market keeps going up and up, the surveyors tend not to look too closely at the properties they're supposed to inspect. They're almost there more for the banks than the people paying for the house..." You can say that again - the item with which the surveyor could have discovered the problems with the electricity was a 10 Punt (Irish Pound) plug that would light up in succession to indicate the presence each of the needed wires. If we'd know to buy one, it would have been in our own househunting kit.

Ah well, 6 weeks later (and a double whammy of paying the rent in the previous place while also paying the first month's mortgage), we got into our "new" house, with a full moving truck of our possessions, and spent the next several hours overseeing the immediately necessary bits like getting perishables into the 'fridge and building our bed. Ah, yes, our bed... the one that had a kind of headboard lighting, two small 30 watt lamps, one on either side. We settled down for the night, after a long day of moving boxes and furniture (even if most of the carrying was being done for us, there was a lot of little detail to sort, and would remain so for a while to come). We were both a bit buzzy from all the new activity, the dislocation from our previous place, and both ready to read in bed a bit before we would sleep. We turned on the bedstead light and --

ZZZT! *click*

The house was plunged in darkness. Mr Sweetie made the first realization: "That click must have been the circuit breaker downstairs." Our spanking, new electrical system had already kicked in its first safety - the bedstead lamps had worked before without a bother, but something from the move must have jiggled loose a connection, and created a short circuit, which the new system caught just as it was supposed to.

It did occur to me to wonder, rather later on - what if we'd elected to ignore the legally mandated warnings from our contractor, and moved in with the house's electricity un-renovated. It didn't seem to bear much thinking about. I could be glad that, in the absence of being able to know everything about absolutely everything, including our electricity supply, there was a resource we could employ for our protection. One that was not dependent on the self-perceptions of a large multinational company with profit as its main motive. In the main, I'm much happier considering the reliance on my fellow humans through the social contract that says we have duly-elected representatives, who - with input from us - map out the rules of play for all our mutual benefit.

It's a pity that seems such a difficult concept for some people, these days.