"But did it go kaCHUCK?"
Avoiding the situation wherein you have performed the action of X, without accomplishing X.
This is a knife switch.
You can open and close circuits by throwing the switch down (no contact is made, the circuit is open, electrons don’t flow, and your pump is OFF), and up (metal touches metal, the circuit is closed, electrons flow, and your pump is ON).
Because the safety housing prevents you from seeing the inner workings, here’s the guts of a knife switch, courtesy of wikipedia.
My grandfather sent my 8 year old father out with the instruction “turn on the pump.” The pump is governed by the knife switch you met at the beginning of this blog post—ON and OFF clearly labeled, with all current running inside a safety housing so that this task can be confidently delegated to an 8-year-old.
My father went out, and pushed the switch up from OFF to ON.
Several hours later, my grandfather saw that the water level was lower than the water level should be, if the pump had been turned on. So my grandfather concluded that his disobedient son had shirked his chore, and set home to deliver an upbraiding.
When grandpa got home, he and my father got into a heated argument. “I did turn the pump on!” “Then why is the water level low!?” After several exchanges, they went together to the scene of the “shirked” chore.
They discovered, hidden within the safety housing, the situation below:
My grandfather pronounced “Oh-ho. You performed the action of turning on the pump, but you failed to make contact, so you failed to turn on the pump. You needed to throw it hard enough to make it go kaCHUCK.”
Now that the phrase has been coined, This mode of failure can be noticed and repaired before several hours have passed. The delegator asks the triumphant returning chore-doer “Did you [turn on the pump]?” “Yes.” “And did it go kaCHUCK?”
This essay is part of a series on rural tech and how it works.