In the dark

Our new sports hall lights were activated from the corridor. One day a teacher wanting to use the hall came to the PE office to ask how to turn the lights on. Always “game for a laugh” I informed him that the lights were voice activated and offered to show him how to operate them. A fellow PE teacher in the office realised what I was up to and followed us to the sports hall which was in total darkness. I went into the hall with the teacher and shouted towards the top left corner “Lights On!”. As I did so the PE teacher in the corridor duly switched the lights on. The teacher was amazed. I told him he had better see if it recognised his voice so he did a series of successful “Lights On” and “Lights Off”s. He was very impressed by the technology and then we left him to it. A few days later the PE office telephone recorded an irate voice message from this teacher who, with no shortage of expletives interspersed, informed us that he had spent 5 minutes in a dark sports hall shouting, unsuccessfully, for the lights to come on. He then said that he went to tell the caretaker that the voice activation lighting system had broken down, the Caretaker laughed, and then showed him the switch in the corridor!