Switch labels in Sawyers Bay flat say 'maybe', pass inspection

A student flat on the hill above Sawyers Bay has passed its housing inspection with a tick beside "switches labelled". Four months earlier an electrician had written the word "maybe" on every one of them and driven off towards Port Chalmers.

The flat, built when the harbour still had more ships in it than students, was visited in June by a sparky the tenants know only as Deano. He opened the board, said "righto" twice, stuck masking tape under eleven switches, wrote "maybe" on each in vivid, and left. The tenants assumed it was a joke until they started using the switches.

"The one by the back door is the kitchen light, some days," tenant Harriet Mulholland, 20, said. "Other days it's the heat pump. Tuesday it was nothing and then it was both, so, I mean, he's not wrong. I'll give him that. I'd still quite like to fucking know which one does the hall, because you can't see the stairs and the stairs are shit."

A second electrician, Lyle, was called out last month to replace the labels with ones that said what the switch did. He spent twenty minutes at the board with a torch, closed it, and declined the job. "Nah, he's right," Lyle said. "Whoever wired that place in about 1974 was guessing too, they just didn't write it down. Deano's the honest cunt in this. I'm not touching it, I've got a wedding."

The flat's property manager confirmed the inspection checklist "does not specify what a switch must be labelled with, only that it is". The labels, she said, "arguably meet the standard better than most do". The same inspection recorded the laundry as "damp, labels pending", which she said was a separate matter and "a bit of a theme this week".

Deano has not been reached. His invoice, which arrived on Thursday, is for $340 and is labelled "probably".