NOT SURE, LEAVE IT is the whole household's policy

A dirty-white tee, held up by two hands. Low on the chest, a small two-gang switch plate. Towering over it, a torn scrap of paper taped at both corners, block capitals in thick black biro: NOT SURE on the first line, LEAVE IT on the second, underlined twice in red. Nothing else is printed.

The note takes up four times the space the switch does, which is the entire argument: nobody in this house knows what that switch controls, and the note is what they did instead of finding out.

Why is the note drawn so much bigger than the switch?

Because the note is doing the actual work in this household and the switch, functionally, is doing almost nothing — it just sits there, un-flipped, for years.

Scale here follows attention, not size. A two-gang plate is a couple of inches of plastic; the warning about it has been re-taped, re-read and referred to at least once a year since somebody first wrote it. Drawing the note enormous and the switch small is just being honest about which one actually matters day to day in that house.

Why hasn't anybody just flipped it to find out?

Because whatever it controls is something nobody wants to discover by trial and error — the fear is never the switch, it's whatever's on the other end of the wire.

Cut power to a freezer full of a year's shopping. Kill an alarm silently, so nobody notices it's off until it matters. Trip something in a fusebox two floors away that then takes an evening to work out. None of that is dramatic enough to investigate properly and all of it is annoying enough to avoid, so the household's actual policy becomes: don't touch it, and warn the next person who might.

When somebody eventually does flip it

Some households do eventually solve it — usually an electrician doing unrelated work traces the circuit in ten minutes flat. The note doesn't come down even then. By that point it's not information anymore, it's furniture.

What makes the lettering work as a print?

Keeping it exactly as handwritten — thick, uneven biro strokes in block capitals, not a typeface standing in for them.

A clean printed font would turn this into a generic warning sign. The specific unevenness of a real hand under biro pressure, the double underline in red gone slightly outside the lines, is what makes it read as an actual note written to a household rather than signage. Four words carry the whole design, so every stroke has to survive at chest size without turning to mush.

Do I need permission to print my own handwritten note?

No — your own handwriting, on your own scrap of paper, taped up in your own house, has nothing in it that belongs to anyone else.

There's no name, no likeness, no borrowed mark in a note like this — just capital letters and a biro. If the wording happened to quote something copyrighted, that would be worth a second thought, but four improvised words about an unknown switch were written by whoever wrote them, and that's the whole chain of ownership.

Does every household actually have one of these?

Yes — almost every house has at least one switch, valve or button nobody currently living there can explain, taped over or simply left alone.

It might be a magnet holding an instruction to the fridge door instead of a switch, or a box in the loft with a warning of its own — the object changes, the household's method doesn't: write it down once, and let the note do the remembering nobody wants to do themselves.

Isn't this basically just words printed on a shirt?

No — a generic quote works anywhere; this only works because of the physical thing it's stuck to, the tiny plastic plate the giant note is actually about.

Take the switch away and NOT SURE, LEAVE IT reads as a mood, interchangeable with a hundred other slogans. Keep the switch small and specific underneath it and the same four words become a report on one particular object in one particular house — closer to a loft box labelled in marker pen than to a slogan tee.

Does it print well?

Yes, in two flat colours — black for the lettering and tape, red for the double underline — both sitting on an off-white or dirty-cream tee close to the paper's own colour.

Keep the letterforms as bold, simple block capitals rather than a script; biro pressure varies too much to survive fine detail at print size, but a thick, slightly uneven capital holds its shape. The red underline should stay a clean flat line, not a scribble — one deliberate mark, not several messy ones.

How do I get one made?

Describe the switch and the note at JustOG — the exact wording, how it's taped, what colour the underline is. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The tape has gone yellow at the corners. The switch has never once been touched.