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.

You wouldn’t think a pocket full of rocks would have any value.  However the phrase as I came to know it had its basis in a time when a pocket full of rocks kept our family financially cared for.

My father was pretty good at pitching a baseball.  Back in the Homesteading days in North Dakota, neighboring farmers would get together and form a baseball team.  My father was a better than average, dare I say good, pitcher.  In fact I will, because that’s how I remember it now.  He was accurate and fast and could put it where he wanted to.

I remember that when I was a kid, he still had some of the mitts and bats, and we would play with them.

During the 30s when the Dakotas had no rain, and thus no crops, and thus no income, the farmers had to look elsewhere to find income.

At that time they were building a highway just a few miles away from our farm.  My Dad got a job moving dirt with his horses and a Fresno road building machine.  The machine was designed to be used like a modern day front end loader crossed with a grader.  One of the neighbor farmers with a large family like ours also got hired on.

The highway construction company had a policy that forbade using whips on horses.  However they also had a quota to meet for the amount of dirt moved.  Because our neighbor was unsuccessful in getting his team of horses to work hard enough, he was unable to meet the quota and was let go.

Every morning my Dad would hitch up his horses to go to work on the highway, and he would fill his pockets with small stones.  (There was no lack of small stones around there.)  During the day while he was working the horses, if they weren’t fulfilling their potential, he would take a small stone out of his pocket and whip it side-armed at the horses back side.  And he always hit his mark.

A side-armed throw kept his hand from moving up around his ear.  He was never found out for pitching rocks at his team.  My Dad was able to keep the horses moving, and thus keep his job, until the construction project moved out of our area.  I guess you could say it was a great motivational tool.

Many years later when I had my own business and was hiring men, there were mornings I contemplated filling my pockets with rocks……

Of all the many jobs I’ve been on, and all of the different equipment and machinery I’ve hooked up, I’ve only ever hooked up truck scales once.  That job was truly unique.

It was necessary to dig a ditch from the site of the office, past the diesel pumps (a low explosion potential), to the area that had been set aside for the scales.  To get that far, we had to cut a chunk of concrete out of the sidewalk next to the office wall, in order to get power from the office to the scales.

We rented a backhoe to get the digging done.  Incidentally, the backhoe accidently damaged the housing for the scale mechanism.  (It was all the backhoe’s fault.  There was no operator error involved.  Really.  But the incident is the source of our since established policy of “All Digging By Others.”)

We ran conduit from the office to the scale area and then from one end to another to get all the wiring in all the right locations.  It was very involved.  The company supplying the scales sent a representative to teach us how to wire it correctly.  It seems a shame that after all that work and learning and correcting first time errors, that I never wired another scale.

I found it interesting to see how the scale functioned.  The scale was actually a very stiff piece of steel.  Very thick, and difficult to bend.  In fact it was designed to bend no more than ¼ of an inch to calculate the weight of a truck.

Eventually that scale was abandoned.

Comparatively I’ve done quite a number of X-ray machine hook-ups.  Once we learned how to wire up an X-ray machine, we not only wired quite a few, but we also moved many and hooked them up on their new location.

For the first one the machine supplier also sent an expert so that we could learn correctly, but after that we could do others without the experts.

One other machine that has become ubiquitous is the trash compactor.  Those machines did not require any expert guidance.

A trash compactor seems like a very useful piece of machinery.  We have wired smaller, residential sized compactors for some home kitchens.