Hotels, motels and restaurants have a difficult time staying in business.  The competition for the shared customer base must be fierce.

As I have mentioned before, several investors had put a lot of effort in keeping the Old Davenport Hotel going.  It finally closed for a few years, and then was remodeled, refurbished and, after bringing it back to its former glory, it was reopened.

My wife and I stayed there for a night on our 60^th wedding anniversary.  I was unable to visit the “bowels” of the structure as I had when I was working on the building, but the surface is beautiful.  I must admit however, that I missed the stuffed Polar Bear located above the old lobby that used to greet visitors.

I recall one of the restaurants that we wired completely from the ground up that had, apparently, been designed by an inexperienced architect-engineer.  When the kitchen was finished, the installation of the appliances completely obstructed access to the back room with the electrical panel.  It was necessary to shuffle all the appliances so that access could be attained.  Shuffling the appliances meant that all the electrical receptacles and power supply locations had to be moved.

When we installed the lighting over the booths in the dining area, the plans called for a specific size of booth.  When the booths arrived they were of a different size.  This made it impossible to center the booths under the fixtures.  That wasn’t a pretty sight.

Once when I was in charge of wiring a motel, the boys working under my direction grabbed a roll of number 10 wire instead of number 12.  The umber 10 wire, being heavier and harder to work with, increased the labor hours as well as raising the material costs.  It was a waste of time and material costs, since there was no offsetting benefit.

The subject of wire gauge brings up another subject.  Many times inexperienced home owners, or other tradesmen, will tell us (or inform the people having work done) that they only want number 12 wire installed.  They don’t want any number 14 wire in the building.  This request is usually made because the requestor feels that the #12 is more of a safe choice.  What they don’t realize is that household appliances do not have a plug and cord designed for that much of an electrical load.  Most appliance cords are limited to about 10 Amps, using number 16 or even number 18 gauge wires.

The breaker required for number 14 wire is a 15 amp breaker.  As you can see there is a built in margin for safety (15 Amps minus 10 Amps = 5 Amp margin).  If you increase the capacity of the wiring in the wall to a 20 Amp capacity you have doubled the safety margin.  On the surface, this looks like a good idea at first.

However if there is a problem with an appliance it will take longer for the 20 Amp breaker to trip, leaving more likelihood that a problem will go undetected and become ever more dangerous.  Coupled with that possibility is the probability that more receptacles will be added to a 20 Amp circuit.  More receptacles invite an increase in the number of devices using the same circuit.  Thus it adds to the element of difficulty to narrow down the options in finding a problem appliance or device.

It’s better to trust the professionals that know what they’re doing.

One of the jobs I did was to wire an unloading dock at a distribution warehouse building.  There are a number of such buildings in use.  Material will come in by truck or train.  It will be received into the building over a dock, stored on shelves, and then eventually shipped out again.  Some of these operations are “cross-dock” points where the material does not rest on shelves but goes from in ingress dock, across the building, and out an egress dock.

The buildings are large enough and the materials (usually) heavy enough, that forklifts are used to load, transfer, and unload the material.  Some of the forklift operators become very experienced at their job.  However, if you are inside one of these buildings, and on foot, it serves you well to keep a sharp lookout for the lifts and their drivers.  You have to be very careful to stay out of their way.

I saw evidence in one case where a driver of a forklift had run too close to an upright beam and had driven one fork tine entirely through the upright.  I inquired if anyone had gotten hurt.  I was told that no one had been injured, but that the operator had been bounced off of his machine.

In another instance, at a different location, a forklift operator had hit an upright so hard that the electrical transformer mounted on top of it had fallen off.  I had to go re-mount it.  I hoped that no one would hit that beam again while I was up in the air putting the transformer back on.

At another distribution center, where I had done the wiring from the ground up, there was an outside dock with a roof over it.  The dock did not have walls, and the men working on the dock needed some heat source for the cold weather months.  We mounted heaters under the roof for them.  Of course, with only a roof and no walls there was a terrific amount of heat loss.  I don’t know what kind of electrical bill they had, but it couldn’t have been small.  In the summer it would get hot, but apparently the ownership drew the line at air conditioning.  Many such places had enclosed docks.

There was a building in downtown Spokane that had at one time been a theater with a projection room.  The building had been remodeled for a mercantile store.  Underneath the highest point of the ceiling, they had built an employee break/lunch room.  Sometime later there occurred a controversy over work place tobacco smoke.

Our company was given the job of installing fans in the lunch room so that the tobacco users would not offend the non-tobacco users.  However after the fans were installed, the employees complained that they would get cold when the fans were on.  And of course, the fans had to be on when anyone lit up a cigarette.

We were called back to install a fair sized baseboard heater in the lunch room.  This was so that the employees could “feel” warm as the warm air was sucked past them and out through the exhaust fans, into the large un-insulated space over the lunch room.

There are a lot of reasons why merchandise costs as much as it does.

The job was a government job.  Not one of those “time waster” jobs you do for yourself.  Not one of the jobs that are done on the employer’s dime but are not something he can charge for.  No, this job was for the Government.  It was at a radar station control center.

It was the first time I had worked with square conduit.  Square conduit is used when bouncing a signal along the inside walls of the conduit.  The dimensions have to be precise, both in the manufacture and the installation.  When the conduit turns a corner, the corner has to be exactly correct.  It is comparable to the bounce on a billiard ball, off of a side rail, on a pool table.  A specific angle results in a specific direction.

Round conduit would result in the signal getting lost in transit.

The carpenters were framing up the forms for a wall of a concrete.  The wall was two feet thick.  Inside the forms, and laid up next to the inside of the form, they installed what is called a “key.”  The key produced a particular finish on the concrete, instead of a plain concrete look when the forms and the key are pulled away.  In this case the key produced a vertical channel about ½ – ¾ inch deep and about 1-1/4 inch wide, spaced at specific intervals, and sunk into the face of the wall.

This job was taking place back in the day when Senator Goldwater and President Johnson were both running for the same political office.  One of the carpenters was a Goldwater man and the other was a Johnson man.  Oh how they loved to tell derogatory jokes about the other person’s candidate.

The rest of the crew would feed it, too.  They would hear a joke about one of the candidates and tell it to the opposing side.  After a little while the joke telling escalated and things began to get serious.  The two principles were about ready to come to blows, and the rest of the crew thought they might have pushed things too far.  They quit passing on the jokes.  Gradually the two men cooled off.

After the cement had set and the forms were pulled away, they found that a key had been left out of one of the form areas.  The decorative grooves were missing on one portion of the pour.

On a Government job, you don’t leave out anything, whether it serves a purpose or not.  The contractor had to get a cement saw and put the grooves in.  It was necessary to chip them out and grind them smooth.

I don’t know if anyone got fired over the mistake.  The job was nearly done and so was the election.

The whole crew learned a lesson.

Sometimes something done in fun doesn’t turn out to be fun.

“And don’t go mixing politics with the folk songs of our land” – or with the job at hand.