(And Sometimes Hanging Upside Down)

There was a time when I had been in the hospital for some reason or other, and shortly after being “released” I was back at work.  My body wasn’t working exactly efficiently.  There were a few times I was a little embarrassed by the result.

One of the jobs I went to was for a lady who was getting, or had already obtained, a divorce.  She was selling her house and moving west.  She needed some work done to make it more appealing.

Her ex-husband had turned the garage into an automobile repair shop.  I don’t know who had done the wiring, but it left a lot to be desired.  When cable wire with a ground had been introduced as a new material for electricians, some electricians didn’t know what to do with the ground.  Whoever had done the wiring on this garage had clipped off all of the ground wires in the boxes and thrown them away.

At the time I was there to fix the wiring I had on hand a new product that was, basically, a splice cap designed to just work great in instances like those.  There was about a ¾” long piece of ground wire in every device box.  I was able to place a longer ground wire in one of the ports of the splice cap, and then cap the small piece of exposed ground wire to produce a longer ground wire.  Today the boys use these caps extensively when they are wiring a house.  They are not just for splicing anymore.

As you may guess it was a pretty delicate operation that required intense focus and dexterity.

I had to take apart all the wiring in the garage, including in the “attic” above the ceiling.  Well, to be accurate, it wasn’t really an attic.  It was more of a crawl space.

In the crawl space I had to get back into one narrow corner above the ceiling.  The toe of one of my feet was resting on the sheetrock tacked to the ceiling.  While I was making a valiant effort (with many grunts and “aye gollies”) to splice wires in the boxes in the ceiling, the sheetrock broke in half and was hanging down into the garage.

I was left hanging on the bare rafters.  It was at this time that my cell phone, in my shirt pocket, began to ring.  I was trying to get the cell phone out of my pocket without losing my grip and taking a short trip to the concrete floor below.

It was my wife on the phone wanting to know when I would be coming home for lunch.  Usually a cell phone is handy, but at that moment it was anything but.

My frustration must have come out when I answered the phone because my wife wanted to know why I was yelling at her.  In my time of inconvenience I had to explain to her that I was hanging upside down from the rafters, trying to figure out how to get out of there.

After almost 62 years of marriage we are still learning patience.

She was about 10 minutes away so she came and rescued me.

When you do many small jobs, you run into many different types of atmosphere.

For instance, when I was working in Montana, one of the small jobs I was sent on was to put stock tank heaters in a feed lot.  I had to run circuits to several locations in the feed lots.  That atmosphere was permeated by living livestock and their accumulated waste product.  In effect, I was knee deep in mud and manure, and so were the animals.

Having grown up on a farm, I was used to caring for livestock and the waste that they produced.  On the farm we always used rubber knee-high waders.  Being so recently away from the farm, I was somewhat acclimated to the “atmosphere.”  Being in the fall of the year when this job came up, the day wasn’t too warm, and thus it was not offensively populated with odor.

Many years went by before I was once again called to work on a similar project.  By then, working in Spokane, I had lost my toleration for that particular “atmosphere.”

One of the most difficult jobs I had was to work in a cat atmosphere.  We did a job for a family that housed their cats in the basement.  It was a very undesirable air to work in.  The second day on the job we showed up with a lot of deodorant.  It was worth the effort.  The owners hired us for several new construction jobs.

Bad atmosphere can be encountered under a mobile home, especially if cats and/or dogs have been nesting there.

Another source of bad atmosphere I have encountered is in old folks’ homes.  Sometimes when I would arrive for the job, the odor of excretions, voluntary and involuntary, were overpowering.  I did find a product called (if I remember it correctly and can spell it appropriately) “Vom-oose.”  Applying it to the walls and floor of the work area took away all the unpleasantness of stomach distress and involuntary urination.

One job I had involved ditching across a yard.  I accidently cut through the sewage pipe between the house and the septic tank.  That job was outside.  The outside atmosphere made the odiferous atmosphere much more tolerable.

I came to respect working outside – in either hot or cold atmospheres.

Many of the buildings that existed in Spokane when I moved here in 1969 have been torn down and replaced.  Then again, several of the older buildings have been renovated and made new again.  One example is the often mentioned Davenport Hotel, but there are also other significant buildings.

When a multi-story building is torn down, safety requirements usually dictate blocking off foot traffic anywhere near the work site.  For one of the tear-down jobs I was on, it meant blocking off all access to the building right to the edge of the street; on all four sides of the building, taking up the whole block.

Some of the construction offices were placed on the edge of the street next to the building being torn down.  Often these construction offices were used for a lunchroom during break times and lunch time.

The electrical foreman heading our job was in his office one day reviewing the blue prints.  He got up from his chair, grabbed his hard-hat and was on his way out of the trailer to go on the job site itself.  Unbeknownst to him, a 2×4 had been knocked off an upper story and came down, end first on the construction trailer.  The 2×4 penetrated the construction office roof, AND the chair he had just vacated.

Usually when you work in the construction office you have your hard hat off.  The incident worried me quite a bit, so I started eating my lunch inside the construction site, wearing my hard hat.  I don’t know what all the other men did, but I decided the construction office was not a safe place to be.

Just lately I watched a television program about taking down multi-story buildings from the ground up, one floor at a time.  It was done to alleviate all the dust and debris from an implosion or other means of destruction.  I’m not sure how it was accomplished, but I would have liked to watch it.

Another instance of safety, from a different perspective, came from an incident with a couple of brothers that think of as troublemakers.  They were troublemakers in the sense that they would travel around and cause problems for the business owners.

For instance, one time on the job, one of the brothers was struck by a falling piece of wire.  The wire was about 18 inches long and about as big around as my thumb.  It struck him on the shoulder from the height of about 3 feet, and he was the person who had placed it on the shelf in the first place.  He “had to go to the hospital” for extensive medical care.  He wound up being compensated for numerous problems stemming from a small occurrence.

The brothers disappeared after that and I never came across them on another job.  But after I moved to Spokane years later, I was talking to one of my friends who owned an electrical contracting shop.  He was telling me about this guy that “amplified” an on the job injury and nearly cost him his business.  He had been sued for lost wages, hospital and doctor costs, etc.  When I asked him the name of the person who had done that to him, it was the same guy.

Trouble maker!

You could be working in a dangerous area, ignoring all the safety regulations and never wind up getting hurt.  Then again, you might be following all the safety regulations and be caught in a disaster.  But why take the chance?

Sometimes “Safety” is an assumed concept.