Crap hotel wall light switch

On an ironing board that probably had a rectangle of asbestos-material where you stand the hot iron.

even now VIR cable is being removed from parts of Buck Palace (unless they have finished the job).

When I was eleven I went round with my dad doing aerials and installing tellys. Once the aerial was assembled and Dad was on the roof with it my next job was to connect the telly to the mains. Often this meant extending the flex and running it up the wall and across the ceiling to the light fitting. One day this bloke said, "I'm not having a kid doing the electrics in my house!" He took the job over, twisted the two cores on the TV flex together, did the same with the two on the extension cable, twisted it all tother, put tape on it, plugged it in. Big bang, all the lights went out. Dad comes down the ladder, looks at me. I say, "It was him Dad! He wouldn't let me do it!"

Bill

Nice anecdote!

PA

Possibly, but it'd be a bit of a pain if you had to put the mains bulb back when you actually wanted to see something. I know you could get the switched Y-adapters, but surely you'd build that into a night light, not require a separate unit?

Most of Bill's are.

My granddad and his brother in law worked for the local electric company and in 1931 they would connect the main and one light fitting for free, sockets and extra lights were cost items, or so I was told.

Seems to be a common thing for the un-initiated to do. Twist together all bare ends available, and hope for the best.

An ex-girfriend's father did that re-connecting some wall lights he'd removed in order to re-decorate. He had to redecorate again, to remove the large ring of shoot about them.

Her brother also blew up his stereo by extending his speaker leads in a similar manner.

Oh, and their telly had BBC 2 on button 3, and ITV on button 2, because they had just ran a simple rescan when they bought it so the channel order obviously just matched the UHF order.