I was sent to wire a theater being built on the South Hill.  I ordered a bunch of ½ inch and ¾ inch EMT conduit and stocked it on the job site.  Before the cement floor was poured, I laid a lot of conduit where the floor slab would be poured, and brought the conduits up into the area where the walls would be built.

While the cement was being poured and finished, I went to work on other jobs.  Sometime later I learned that another electrician had been sent to finish the theater job.  Later still, I asked the estimator how the theater job was going.  The estimator said that the electrician kept running out of ½” conduit.  I was not the boss, but I was still somewhat disappointed.

After more time had passed I was sent back to the theater job to complete it.  The other journeyman had run parallel ½” conduit runs, each containing only one circuit, the entire length of the building.  My original plan had been to run 2, 3, or even 4 circuits in each ¾” conduit.  The upshot was that the ½” conduit was way over budget and there was a lot of unused ¾” conduit left on the job.  It had been a very wasteful use of material.

I believe that this man was the same journeyman that, on another job, had been sent into the basement to install a three phase motor starter switch.  We sent three fuses with him.  The fuses we sent with him were of the proper size for the job he needed to do.

Later on he came back out of the basement saying he needed more fuses.  Then later he came back for more fuses.  Finally I went to see what was going on.  He had wires sticking out everywhere from the switch and a big pile of fuses on the floor.

I determined that he didn’t know what he was doing.  He had apparently hooked it up one way, had blown a fuse, taken all the fuses out, hooked up the starter switch with the three new fuses and tried it again.  And again.

He was sent somewhere else and I cleaned up the mess.  I soned all the fuses to find out that approximately 2/3 of them were still good.  I think about this time he was laid off.  How he ever got his journeyman card I’ll never know!