Well you're using a PC, that's why. When you plug in the light, the PC contacts open and when you unplug it they close. Did you try covering the Pc window or putting a shorting cap in?

Yeah but the one I was using is a thermal PC. When I plug it in it should take a minute or two to shut off. Plus the lamp was only on for a second so it wasn't hot enough for it to have to cool down to strike again. It may have been something with the wires but who knows. I opened up the ballast door and checked everything then closed it and tried again and it worked fine.

Sometimes thermal PCs do weird things, which is why I don't like them but maybe the powr/plug was loose. Even if it was, it shouldn't have behaived like that.

Yeah it was weird. The ballast was buzzing but the lamp was off. . . .When I wiggled the plug in the outlet and the lamp flashed a few times, I thought maybe the wires attached to the outlet in the wall are loose. A lot of the outlets are loose in our apartment. Most of them have loose contact blades inside so when I plug something in, the plug falls right back out of the outlet. Or the entire outlet is loose and if I plug something in, the whole receptacle pushes back into the wall. But the property management company doesn't want residents fixing things like that. They want us to put in work orders to have maintenance do it for us. But I'm not always ok with having someone else do stuff like that for me because that would require them to move my stuff around so they can access the outlets. And I don't really like that lol.