You could throw leds at the t8s in the Ceiling hopefully break a few

Those GE 4100k F32T8s in the ceiling are good lamps.  It's the fact that many walmarts don't maintain the fixtures and clean them which irks me. 

I had some similar thing in a school trip

We came for the night to a camping site, this one was a field with Indian style tents. The place was lit over with 400W MH floodlights (HQI-T's, Pulse Start), on posts mounted to a block of bathrooms/showers, that was stretched along the end of the area

I found out that around the back of the bathrooms block is the main electric panel for the site, and.. pulled the main breaker off. Beautifull starry night, Screaming girls in showers, you name it. Then i flipped it back on. Everything came on except the Halides

Long story short, it was not hard to figure out that if Ash is on a trip and electricity goes haunted, those things are related. One teacher walked straigth to me and asked me to go and switch back on the "big lights". Took me a long time - basically untill they started coming on and i pointed at them - to get him to understand that i am not lying and there really is nothing that can be done other than waiting for them to come on by themnselfes

And those were exactly the odd setup that takes AGES to restrike, 45 minutes or more



Also in that trip :

The lighting in the tents was 24V E27 incandescents, wired through single core wires laid in the gravel, powered from a big transformer. The wiring was broken in mny places, so when you walk near the tents sometimes the light there flickers. Well, did not take me long to dig out one of the wires for one of the tents (upstream - away from the tent itself), and add in series a "dimmer" made of bucket of water, salt, and aluminum coke cans

The showers were a row of "shower cubicles", similar to "bathroom cubicles" where the partitions dont get all the way to the floor or to the ceiling. The shower heads are mounted on L shaped pipes coming from the wall and turning down. I replaced the showerhead on one with a garden sprinkler (found one thrown in the "pile of technical stuff" behind the block) and turned it upside down, so that the sprinkler have good coverage of most of the shower cubicles in the room above the height of the partitions. Opened cold water to the max. Everyone around got a dose of ice beam

Sorry for the necro post but I love your stories! I wonder if you have more?