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?

I was sent to wire a theater being built on the South Hill.  I ordered a bunch of ½ inch and ¾ inch EMT conduit and stocked it on the job site.  Before the cement floor was poured, I laid a lot of conduit where the floor slab would be poured, and brought the conduits up into the area where the walls would be built.

While the cement was being poured and finished, I went to work on other jobs.  Sometime later I learned that another electrician had been sent to finish the theater job.  Later still, I asked the estimator how the theater job was going.  The estimator said that the electrician kept running out of ½” conduit.  I was not the boss, but I was still somewhat disappointed.

After more time had passed I was sent back to the theater job to complete it.  The other journeyman had run parallel ½” conduit runs, each containing only one circuit, the entire length of the building.  My original plan had been to run 2, 3, or even 4 circuits in each ¾” conduit.  The upshot was that the ½” conduit was way over budget and there was a lot of unused ¾” conduit left on the job.  It had been a very wasteful use of material.

I believe that this man was the same journeyman that, on another job, had been sent into the basement to install a three phase motor starter switch.  We sent three fuses with him.  The fuses we sent with him were of the proper size for the job he needed to do.

Later on he came back out of the basement saying he needed more fuses.  Then later he came back for more fuses.  Finally I went to see what was going on.  He had wires sticking out everywhere from the switch and a big pile of fuses on the floor.

I determined that he didn’t know what he was doing.  He had apparently hooked it up one way, had blown a fuse, taken all the fuses out, hooked up the starter switch with the three new fuses and tried it again.  And again.

He was sent somewhere else and I cleaned up the mess.  I soned all the fuses to find out that approximately 2/3 of them were still good.  I think about this time he was laid off.  How he ever got his journeyman card I’ll never know!