Color-Blind Electrician Pretty Sure This Wire’s Red

Commercial electrician Smokey Waters told reporters Thursday he was “pretty sure” he had finally identified the red wire, moments before asking everyone in the immediate area of the food court to stand back “just in case this was one of the other ones again.”

Witnesses said Waters, 43, arrived at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa with the confidence of a seasoned professional, only to slow down once he opened an electrical panel behind Panda Express and was confronted with what he later described as “a distressing amount of color-based information.”

According to shoppers, Waters spent much of the afternoon standing silently in front of the open panel, lifting individual wires toward the light and studying them with the intense concentration of a man performing a task that was both central to his profession and visibly beyond his abilities.

After several minutes of squinting, Waters reportedly pointed to one wire with growing conviction and announced, “Okay. I’m pretty much sure this one’s red.”

Concerned shopper Marvin Buckwheat said the statement did little to calm fears that had been mounting ever since Waters arrived and described the repair as “basically a game of trust.”

“At first he seemed professional,” Buckwheat said. “Then he started picking up different wires and saying things like, ‘No, not this one,’ and, ‘This one definitely wants to be red.’ At one point he offered a Cinnabon voucher to anybody who could just confirm it for him.”

Shoppers reported hearing Waters murmur to himself in an increasingly reflective tone throughout the afternoon. By 4 p.m., he had reportedly developed a working method based on intuition, process of elimination, and whether a wire seemed like the kind of wire that would be red.

“I don’t really think in terms of color,” Waters explained. “That’s beginner stuff. A seasoned electrician reads the whole situation. Placement, energy, confidence. Sometimes a wire doesn’t look red so much as it carries itself like red.”

Coworkers confirmed Waters had been allowed to work mostly unsupervised ever since management determined that asking for help with “every single red-wire situation” was creating unnecessary delays across multiple job sites. One colleague, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Waters had become surprisingly efficient at turning straightforward repairs into broader electrical emergencies.

“He’s not always right,” the colleague said. “But he gets everybody’s attention very quickly.”

At press time, Waters was reportedly “almost completely sure now” about a blue wire.