One time I was temporarily out of work.  There wasn’t much going on and I was sort of “on-call” for little odd jobs.

I was called in to do an emergency job about 30 miles south of town.  It was a small town that had an old septic management system.

The town’s sewage was piped down to a large tank outside of town.  There were two submersible pumps that would pump the sewage from the tank to a nearby, manmade, pond.  For lack of a better term, you could call it an “open septic pond.”

The two submersible pumps were regulated by a set of controls that would work one pump at a time and use them alternately.  There was one, critical, flaw in the control set up.

If one pump failed, the controls would not automatically turn the second pump on.

One pump had failed.

Remember, the pumps were submersible pumps.

Raw sewage is not fun to deal with.  What could I do?

First I rewired the controls so that the alternate pump would start working and continue to work until the second one was back on line.  Then I pulled the second pump and, as carefully and cautiously as I could, secured it in the back of my work truck.  I then went as rapidly as the law allowed to a well known motor/pump repair shop and delivered the “mess” to them.

Then I went home, cleaned up, and burned my clothes.

Some days later I was called by my employer.  They informed me that the motor repair shop had called them and had informed them that there was nothing wrong with the motor and pump.

I replied that they probably had not wanted to open it up and look at it.

I also told my boss that they could send someone else to re-install the motor.  It wasn’t worth it to me for just a couple hours of work.  (After all, I had a limit to the amount of clothes I owned.)

I never heard anymore from anyone about that job.

And that was a good thing.

The Fred Myer Corporation was going to build another store at a location that already had some existing businesses and a manufactured home park.  The owners of the manufactured home park purchased property about ½ mile away and moved their tenants to the new location.

The manufactured home park had about 30 homes and I wound up hooking up about 20 of them.

Every electrical hook up for a manufactured home is different.  There are no two hook ups that are alike, but I was able to do about two a day.  They didn’t move all the homes at once, as a consequence I was at that site for about 3 weeks.

I met some interesting people, including the manager.

After all of the homes had been moved, set up, and occupied, I would be called back every so often when an existing home would move out and a new one would move in.  The manager would recommend me to tenants that wanted small wiring jobs done.  I also wired several projects for the manager, such as an RV garage and landscaping additions.

Above the new location for the manufactured home park was an old meat packing plant.  In order to have access to the meat packing plant, the road was built around two sides of the manufactured home court.

I don’t know how much traffic went back and forth to the old plant, but there was extensive traffic in and out of the court.

One time I was talking to the manager and I commented that it was strange that the road had not been re-routed so the access to the plant would not go by the court.

The manager, who was getting up in years, near retirement, said to me; “I’m just too tired to fight city hall anymore.  All I want now is another cookie.”

I know what he meant.

I have come across similar circumstances in dealing with the “powers that be.”

I was working on the job one time with a bunch of painters.  One of them was from Germany, and had learned the trade there when he was a kid.

His starting job in Germany was to beat on the old, empty paint cans.  The purpose of this practice was to save, grind up, and reconstitute the paint chips as usable paint.  His comment was “They don’t waste stuff in Germany.”  He added; “I saw a man there once that blew his nose into a handkerchief so that he could take it home and his wife could make use of it.  I don’t know what she did with it, but she used it.  Over here, they just blow it out on the ground.  They waste everything.”

O.K.  Sure.

If examples of waste are what we’re talking about, here’s another example.

When the lighting was going in along the Freeway through Spokane, all of the posts, fixtures and wire were shipped in from elsewhere.  The wire came in wound around large reels.  To add a further degree of difficulty, the wire was expensive.  The foreman, thinking ahead, had the apprentice pre-cut the wire for the poles to an exact length that he had determined.

His reasoning on the matter was that it was going to be much easier to transport the wire in cut lengths than to haul around the large reels.

When the poles and wiring began to be installed, they learned that some poles were longer than the rest.  They were the poles that had to be tall enough to extend past the height of an overpass.  The solution the foreman came up with was to use some of the remaining wire and make a splice inside the pole.

There was a small problem with this solution.  Well actually, there were two small problems.  The first problem was that it was not an NEC code compliant fix.  The second problem was that the wire was heavy and hung without support down the length of the pole.  (Which, incidentally, was one of the reasons why it was not code compliant practice to splice the wire inside the pole.)

And it came to pass that an inspector happened to find the spliced wire in one of the poles.  The inspector threatened to make the company pull all of the wire out of all of the completed lighting poles to be assured that there were no splices in any of them.

I don’t know how it ended up being worked out, but I bet that painter from Germany would have had something to say about the whole situation.