Today I can’t recall all of the manufactured homes I’ve worked on.  Nor can I remember the dates of when I hooked them up.  For awhile I was able to do both, but when the number passed 200 I could no longer remember them all.  I do remember that on at least three occasions, working under the home got me seriously wet.  And it wasn’t warm weather.

On two of the occasions I had to lie in a pool of water while I worked.  In the third instance it was raining very hard.  Every time I crawled out or under the home, the rain coming down the side of the house was like a full shower.

However, worse than any of those was the time I was working underneath a home and had to cut into the belly wrap under the home.  I needed to run a wire from one part of the home to another.  To do so, I had to open the belly wrap, feed the wire through the underside of the home and then into an electrical box.

I opened up the belly wrap and about 1 – 1-1/2 gallons of liquid poured out of the belly and over my face and head.  Well, I was already underneath.  I might as well finish my work.  It probably isn’t going to get any worse.

I completed my work and crawled out and went inside.  I checked about where in the trailer the liquid might have come from.  It just happened that the area where I had been working was directly beneath the bathroom toilet.

I hadn’t noted that the liquid had a particular odor, but I immediately went home and cleaned up and changed clothing before I went back to work.  I didn’t get sick, so I figured the water had come from a different source.

Sometimes the underside of a mobile home would be plastered with mud from being transported in wet weather.

In my opinion, the most difficult manufactured home I ever hooked up was a double wide that was set on top of a full open basement.  We had to run the conduit underground, through the cement wall of the basement.  The job involved some basement wiring and then routed back to the manufactured home.  Putting the wire into the home involved “fishing” the wire up into the panel.  With the amount of labor involved it became very expensive.

There have been times when I have hooked up the electrical feeder for manufactured homes that were set on solid rock.  The solid rock makes it problematic when it comes to grounding them.  There has to be two ground rods driven, no closer than 6 feet from each other, and grounded by wire into the metered electrical box.

In one case the grounding parameters required me to run 150 feet of copper wire to a well casing to get ground.  In another case the only ground to drive a ground rod into was an earth fill portion of the project – 60 feet away.  So I drove the ground rods and then ran the ground wire the 60 feet to the ground rods.

Another time I drove a ground rod nearly horizontal along a basalt rock plain.  Still another time I inserted the ground rods into a fresh pour of concrete.  Today that is referred to as a “Ufer ground”, and it is now accepted as the superior way of grounding.

The human condition has deteriorated to the point that honest workmen are no longer just “expected.”  That is what I found when I was sent to some large jobs.  Theft was everywhere and on every job.  I have seen men walk off the job carrying fluorescent tubes, and/or new parts and pieces.  You’ve probably heard the song by Johnny Cash – “One Piece at a Time.”  There is a lot of truth in that song.

One of the Government jobs I was on was using a type of oil that cost $70.00 per quart.  It was not usable for any residential application.  At all.  But just because it wasn’t usable at home did not prevent many of the men from emptying their coffee thermos and filling it with the oil and walking off the job with it.  It ruined their thermos and was not usable, but Hey!, it was expensive.

I wonder how many residential garages still have a quart of that oil that nobody knows how to use or what it is for.

One time I was driving a truck for an electrical contractor and parked it on the street at the job.  The spare tire was mounted in front of the radiator.  One of the times I came out of the building to my truck the tire and wheel were gone.   I immediately called the shop.  They were to report it to the authorities and I had to return to the shop without a spare.

A couple days later, one of the men in the office approached me a asked what I got for the tire.  I asked; “What tire?”

“The one that was a spare on your truck.”

I remembered the saying “I thinketh the gentlemen protesteth too much!”, so I said; “Not enough to risk my job over.”

Years ago I heard a story about a man who left his job every day with a wheel barrow full of straw.  Everyone knew he was stealing, but they couldn’t tell what he was stealing.  The guards at the shack would search diligently every day and find nothing except straw.

Some time later, one of the guards was on another job with this man, though he wasn’t working as a guard this time.  The Ex-guard asked the worker confidentially; “I knew you were stealing something and I never could understand what.”

The guy answered; “Wheel barrows.”

Before we left Montana to move to Spokane, my father and mother had established themselves in the Spokane area.  My father had done some preliminary investigation by going down to the Electrical Union Hall to enquire about work and wages.

The Union people told him that electrical work in Spokane was good and that the wages were $6.01 an hour.  My father said; “I don’t know what the 1 cent is for; maybe postage.”

By the time we moved my father had passed away.  When we arrived in Spokane the wages were about 30% higher than they had been in Montana.  Within a week of moving to Spokane, I had been called to work.  Right away I was in on some of the large construction jobs in the Spokane area.  One of the jobs required someone to install light fixtures on a large commercial building.  It was around late October/early November – early winter, so many of the guys were reluctant to do the job.  I gladly volunteered to do it as it was a cinch compared to 40 degrees below zero in Montana.

The other guys stood inside and watched me work.  I believe they thought that at some point I would freeze and they would have to come pry me off the ladder, bring me inside, and thaw me out.  That was never necessary.

However the situation reminded me of a story I heard about construction in New York City.  The office workers were looking out the window watching the construction workers outside in the cold.  They made a sign which the hung in the window for the men outside to read.  It said; “It is 75 degrees in here.”

The workers outside promptly made a sign and put it up for the inside office workers to read.  It said; “$12.00 per hour out here.”

It is pretty common that office workers get a significantly smaller pay rate than construction workers, hot or cold.  Even in the mild temperatures here in Spokane that is true.

On the other hand (there are 5 more fingers), it is also true that office workers work more steady than construction workers.  In Montana we always counted on a slowdown in work in the winter months.