The silence of the lamps

“The man who wired this up is a bloody idiot”.

Not my comment, but that of a professional electrician, describing just one of the curious battery of switches that line up by the back door. One is marked Floodlight, so you might, in your naivety, imagine that this would turn on the floodlight for the back drive. Oh no. Instead this light is on permanently, 24 hours a day – at least it is now I’ve replaced the bulb. It also has an auto sensor so you might think it turns on and off when you walk through in the dark. Think again. Time and space is in a continuum, empires may rise and fall, but that blinking bulb refuses to blink.

I kept on trying to figure it out, but I was barking up a brick wall.

Now elsewhere in the world if you want to fix something, you can fix it yourself. Not so in Aussieland, where there is such a closed shop that you can’t touch a wire yourself, because the electricians union say only they should touch the wires – and the government is so full of closed shop surrender monkeys, they believe them. In the UK the sparkies tried to bring in regulations like this – but initially just tried to stop DIY work in kitchens and bathrooms (the so called Part P of the Building Regs) have now been watered down at DIY insistence, and all you have to do is tell the council you’re rewiring it yourself, and if they want to check it, the council has to pay their own inspectors to have a look. Come down to the Antipodes, and the closed shop system is so (in)effective not only are wires out of bounds, they won’t even let you do your own plumbing. I kid you not: even taps come with legal warnings that if you change a washer without a licence, you’ll spend the next ten years down the local nick.

Which doesn’t explain why so called professionals have made such a total bodge-up of the whole job, that my switch doesn’t.

Thankfully, I have a tame, professional, electrician who was stunned at some of the bizarre logic employed for the lighting. Never mind the light-that-never-dies, there is also a switch that turns on all the lights in all the bedrooms (but no switch actually IN the room, which might be considered useful). Which offers a unique way of waking up the household at 3am when you stagger around looking for the bathroom. Add in the upstairs sockets on the downstairs lighting circuit, stove on a plug, and the three-phase supply for a small domestic dwelling, and...

We finally came to the conclusion that the man who originally wired up the house was either a genius or an idiot.