The job was a government job.  Not one of those “time waster” jobs you do for yourself.  Not one of the jobs that are done on the employer’s dime but are not something he can charge for.  No, this job was for the Government.  It was at a radar station control center.

It was the first time I had worked with square conduit.  Square conduit is used when bouncing a signal along the inside walls of the conduit.  The dimensions have to be precise, both in the manufacture and the installation.  When the conduit turns a corner, the corner has to be exactly correct.  It is comparable to the bounce on a billiard ball, off of a side rail, on a pool table.  A specific angle results in a specific direction.

Round conduit would result in the signal getting lost in transit.

The carpenters were framing up the forms for a wall of a concrete.  The wall was two feet thick.  Inside the forms, and laid up next to the inside of the form, they installed what is called a “key.”  The key produced a particular finish on the concrete, instead of a plain concrete look when the forms and the key are pulled away.  In this case the key produced a vertical channel about ½ – ¾ inch deep and about 1-1/4 inch wide, spaced at specific intervals, and sunk into the face of the wall.

This job was taking place back in the day when Senator Goldwater and President Johnson were both running for the same political office.  One of the carpenters was a Goldwater man and the other was a Johnson man.  Oh how they loved to tell derogatory jokes about the other person’s candidate.

The rest of the crew would feed it, too.  They would hear a joke about one of the candidates and tell it to the opposing side.  After a little while the joke telling escalated and things began to get serious.  The two principles were about ready to come to blows, and the rest of the crew thought they might have pushed things too far.  They quit passing on the jokes.  Gradually the two men cooled off.

After the cement had set and the forms were pulled away, they found that a key had been left out of one of the form areas.  The decorative grooves were missing on one portion of the pour.

On a Government job, you don’t leave out anything, whether it serves a purpose or not.  The contractor had to get a cement saw and put the grooves in.  It was necessary to chip them out and grind them smooth.

I don’t know if anyone got fired over the mistake.  The job was nearly done and so was the election.

The whole crew learned a lesson.

Sometimes something done in fun doesn’t turn out to be fun.

“And don’t go mixing politics with the folk songs of our land” – or with the job at hand.

There are a lot of problems you can solve with the correct equipment, tools, know how, and people.  But there are other times a simpler more effective solution is to just throw money at the problem.

Working on the power houses at the Grand Coulee Dam, I had to run some conduit from one side of a building to the other.  My conundrum had to do with the fact that there was a poured concrete wall between the rooms.  The wall extended all the way up to the roofline.

I contacted a concrete cutting company and received a quote to cut some holes in the 8” thick wall.  The next concern was, “what is in the walls that might be hit while cutting the holes?”  Possible choices were electrical wiring, gas lines, steam lines, etc.  Sometimes there are vibration sensors installed in concrete walls, especially in bank walls.

About that time I discovered some previously existing holes in the wall.  They were about 10 feet away from my planned access point.  I conferred with the engineers on the dam and asked if those holes could be used or if they were for another specific purpose.  I explained the problems we might run into trying to penetrate the wall, as well as the extra expense that would be involved in re-routing my planned run.

The engineers agreed with me that the better idea would be to use the existing holes.  It cost a little more for conduit, wire and labor, but cost wasn’t the only consideration.  It was the unknown in the wall.   The solution cost a little more in labor and materials, but it all worked out.

On another job I was running electrical power to some truck scales at a truck stop.  I had to go out of the office building, through a concrete sidewalk, under an asphalt parking area and driveway to the scales.

We obtained a saw to cut the asphalt all the way, but I had to hire a company to cut through the sidewalk.  They cut a slice out of the sidewalk all the way across its width.  We ran our conduit and poured the slice shut with fresh concrete.  We hired an asphalt company to replace the asphalt after our work had been inspected.  Nothing to it, all that was required was enough money!

Right next door to the truck stop we were hand digging in soil in order to run conduit and wiring to some storage sheds.  The sheds were new construction.  When my apprentice came across a black plastic pipe, I decided it was an abandoned water line and told him to cut it.  He took a shovel and sliced it clean in two.

Bad decision.

It was 100 pair of telephone wires.

We had to throw money at it.

One of my friends purchased a home and wanted some electrical work done in the bathroom.  He had decided that he wanted a fixture installed on each side of the medicine cabinet.  In order to feed both fixtures it was necessary to remove the medicine cabinet from the wall.

Most medicine cabinets are fastened to a stud on one or both sides of the cabinet from the inside.  I could not find any screws, or other type of fasteners for that matter, anywhere on the inside of the cabinet.  I used some flat bladed screwdrivers, my fingernails and my fingers to wedge the medicine cabinet out of the wall and carefully placed it on the floor.

I noticed the end of a string, which had been behind the cabinet trim, adhering to the outside of the wall opening.  I tugged on it and there was weight behind it.  The string was telling me to pull on it.  I carefully reeled in the string like taking a fish out of a stream, and on the other end was an empty whiskey bottle.  Apparently the bottle had laid inside the wall so long that everything inside had evaporated.  I gave it to the home owner as a souvenir.

I guess one of the previous inhabitants had used the area below the medicine cabinet as a place to hold his liquor.

When I completed the wiring job, I fastened the medicine cabinet securely to the wall.

Another time I and another electrician were working on a three story house on the South Hill.  It was a very old house.  We were trying to fish wires over a dropped ceiling on the bottom floor.  The other electrician poked his head up through an opening in the ceiling.  He could see something shining across the room.  We finally got it out and discovered it was a sealed bottle of good whiskey.

The whiskey had to be 100 years old.  We turned it over to the home owner, who told us we would break it open when the remodel was finished.  I’m sure at the time no one realized the real value of the bottle or its contents.

I came to this conclusion when we finished the job and no one made any reference to the whiskey.

It makes you wonder how many items are tucked away in the nooks and crannies of buildings all over the world.