For quite some time I was tasked to work at the airport.  I had to learn my way around the various “secret” passages.

I would be working in one building wing and have to go to another building wing.  There were some doors that you could use for egress, but they wouldn’t allow ingress.  Other doors were strictly ingress but no egress.  Once I learned where all the hallways, stairways, doorways, etc went, I was able to come and go where and when I wanted quite freely.

The airport was very adamant concerning any extra or unauthorized personnel on the runway.  They didn’t want any of that while the planes were taxiing in and out.  Generally they pretty much ignored me if I acted like I knew where I was and what I was doing.  Looking back I suspect they knew more about me, where I was, and what I was doing than I ever realized.

I did a lot of work in the area of the building’s steam boiler.  As time went along, it became more and more difficult to know which doors to enter and which to exit.

In one of the buildings there was a lounge and a restaurant with cooking facilities.  The back way into the bar was a fairly long straight stairway.  It was possible to look down the stairway, straight into the rear of the bar.

One day when another electrician and I were working on the back side of the bar, we knocked over a bottle of liquid that was bright red.  Hurriedly we tried to mop it up before the bartender came.

Suddenly we heard a scream.  We glanced up the stairs in time to see a woman disappearing through the door.  We continued cleaning up the mess.  Soon a number of security people came to check on us asking who had been hurt.  We had to explain that we had knocked the bottle off the shelf and were cleaning up the contents and the glass.

I was never allowed behind the bar again.  Then again, they never charged us for the lost drink ingredient either.

The airport had a cart that was wheeled off the plane into the kitchen area.  It was plugged into a D.C. power source to keep it hot.  When an airplane was ready to go, they would wheel it out and plug it into the D.C. power on the plane to have hot food to serve.

At one point I had to install a transformer from A.C. to D.C. in the attic space above the kitchen.  I had to brace my knee against the edge of the opening and boost myself up in the attic space.  One of those times when I was boosting myself up, I heard a sharp “pop” in one of my knees.  That knee hurt for many months afterward.

But there wasn’t any telltale red signs to signify anyone got hurt.

The pain gradually went away.

I imagine the airport has changed significantly since those days.

A Government job with union workers is not very efficient at times.  On one job we were assigned to work in pairs.  My partner was a young man who also owned a saloon.  He liked the good pay on a union job, so he would take that work when he could.

He was also an excellent manipulator.

We were given an assignment to make a run of conduit to a junction box in a specified area.  Due to the secrecy of the project, the plans were written out in a very unusual way.  They were written in a code you had to be familiar with in order to read them.

In a day and a half we were nearly done when my partner got in touch with our foreman and explained how it was a mistake to run the conduit the way the plans called for.  He convinced the foreman who told us to take it down and do it over.  We finished the day taking it apart.

Day three we started over doing it the way it had been changed.  By the fourth day the superintendent came by with the foreman.  My partner got them to look at the plans with him.  The superintendent agreed to change the way of running the conduit it to a third way.  By the end of day five (Friday) we were exactly where we had been at the start of day one (Monday)!  All week-end I wondered how long this would go on.

Monday morning my partner did not show up.  The foreman asked me where he was.  I didn’t know.  All I could say was; “He didn’t show up.”  The foreman returned with the superintendent and informed me that my partner had decided to stay home and take care of business at the saloon.

The superintendent told the foreman; “Too bad.  He was a good man.”

Do you sometimes wonder why government work is so expensive?

One time I was called to a four unit business complex.  One of the businesses in the complex was a silk screening company.  They wanted to know what it would cost to put in air conditioning.

I scoped out the electrical service very carefully.  The electrical service to the building was right to the very limit of what it could take.  I notified the lady running the silk screening business that it would be quite expensive to install air conditioning in any one unit.

She would have to call the head office back east to get permission to spend the money for air conditioning.

When she got back to me with their response, it was; “In Washington it rains all the time, so air conditioning is unnecessary.”  (The head office experience in Washington must have been limited to the Seattle area.)  Their response kyboshed the whole job.

Sometime afterward, the National Electrical Code (NEC) came out with a ruling that you could have both heating and A/C considered as the same service load, as long as both weren’t operating at the same time.

If I had been smart enough at the time I could have figured that out!

I often think we didn’t have A/C in cars in my younger years.

Before electricity was brought to the farm we didn’t have A/C anywhere.

How did we ever survive?