After the recent run-in with Bambi, I replaced the totaled car with an electric car.  That part was pretty easy.  I had an electrician install a charger in my garage. I was skeptical that there was enough capacity in the service panel on the house, but he said I had capacity to spare.  He is a real licensed electrician, not the guy in the circuit breaker aisle at ACE Hardware, so I assumed he was right. It all worked well until late one night when I got up to go to the bathroom. The car was down in the garage, charging its little lithium heart out. When I turned on the bathroom light, it pulsated. Not really going out, but a clear cycling of dim/bright/dim.  “Well, that ain’t right,” I thought. So I did the only reasonable thing and turned the light off before going back to bed. Nothing had caught fire by morning, so I decided to investigate further. The electrician didn’t pick up the phone, so while I waited for him to call back. I took the leap into AI to investigate the situation. It was surprisingly helpful. I explained what was going on. It asked some reasonable questions, like if I was a long way from the power company substation. My house is not at the very end of the grid, but I can see it from here. Then AI wanted to know what kind and brand of light globes I had.  A little more back and forth, and AI came up with some very specific suggestions.  Buy better quality light globes because, it said, the cheap house-brand bulbs I bought at the big box store were basically junk and “notorious for being unable to cope with minor voltage fluctuations and dirty power.”  Adjust the charging rate of the charger so it didn’t create such a big draw on the system.  Pee in the dark. AI specifically recommended a couple of high quality (expensive) globes that with the free downloaded apps could change color from anywhere in the world, whether I was home to see them change color or not. And now every website I open is advertising expensive light globes. I don’t think that is a coincidence.  Changing to another brand of cheap light globes I had on hand made a big difference, though didn’t completely solve the issue. So I decided to slow the charging rate down a little bit to reduce the voltage drop on the system. To do that, I had to download the app specific to the charger.  I downloaded the app. The instructions for it all ran off the edge of my phone screen, so I had to kind of guess what the right hand third of every line said. But somehow I figured out that it wanted me to scan the QR code on the charger box, which is conveniently located on the top of the box mounted high on the garage wall where it’s pretty dark. The ladder was still upstairs in the bathroom where the “swapping out light globes” experiment was still underway. Eventually, it got enough of a picture of the QR code to register the device. Then I could create an account with a unique password. Then I had to download a “firmware” update. That took 40 minutes, and the app was not happy with the quality of the wifi signal in my garage.  Then it wanted to know the login information for the app that controls the car. That’s on facial recognition, so I don’t know the password. Finally, it opened the charger control app on the phone.  Three or four screens in, there was a screen with a little slider that would let me adjust the charging speed/amperage from Chernobyl down to as low as 20 amps. There was no clear indication of where it should be set to keep the cheap lights in the bathroom from flickering, but I guessed that 40 amps would be enough to solve it.  That whole process took a little over an hour by the time I got it all set up to where I could access the slider touch screen in the app. It solved the issue, and the cheap house brand LED lights aren’t flickering while the car is charging.  It probably used up half a data center to figure all of this out and store the app-based setting on my charger. I shouldn’t complain about success, but I can’t help wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier to leave the phone and AI and data center out of the whole process, and — bear with me because this is a radical suggestion — put a goddam knob of the front of the charger panel with a little plus and minus sign on either side of it. I could turn that to the appropriate setting and never touch it again.  Yes, but I would not be able to make adjustments from anywhere in the world that had a wifi signal. I could only adjust it right there in the garage where I actually plug the car into the wall with my own non-virtual hand. And that would be a bad thing because …? Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. The post More Dogs on Main: In the dark of the night appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less