At the house where I hung from the rafters, there were other problems occurring with the wiring.  Various (well, nearly all) appliances and plug in devices were not working.  There had been some Utility work done lately, and it turned out that the serving Utility had left a neutral loose on their end of the wiring.

The loose neutral had produced strange variances in the wiring voltage.  As a consequence much of the household appliances and devices had been burned out.  It took me quite awhile to determine that all of the problems were caused by the power company’s wiring.  Sometimes it’s a relief to find out it is someone else’s work that is the root cause.  Besides, the Utility pockets were deeper than mine when it came to replacing all the damaged electronic equipment.

Another job we were re-wiring was a truck stop and café that shared one building.  There were also a trucker’s lounge, laundry and shower facilities in the building.  The job entailed re-wiring nearly the whole building as well as putting in some outside lighting to enhance the appearance.

While doing all the wiring, we kept the fuel pumps and café operating at full capacity.  It required some extra effort, but it wasn’t too burdensome.  One day while we were working, we accidently cut the neutral that governed many of the facilities.  Included among them were the controllers to the communication with the fuel pump charging devices and the office computers.

When the electrician called back to the office he said; “I just blew up the truck stop.”

My wife just about died.  Well, not literally.  But she envisioned sirens, fires, explosions, walls of flames, etc.  A veritable Hollywood Movie set explosion.  She asked if he was hurt or if anyone else was hurt.

Instead, it wasn’t that type of blow up.  I apologized to the proprietor of the establishment and told him that our insurance would take care of the damages.

It was one time I collected on insurance.

The proprietor was very understanding and we didn’t lose a customer.

(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.