One of my past employers came from a farm near where I grew up in North Dakota.  Growing up on the farm and working among farmers the first several years of my life, I had heard many interesting farmer stories.  One time while the boss and I were visiting with a number of people with a farming background, I couldn’t resist sharing one of my “farming stories” with them.

One of the farmers near where I had grown up had a calf that he kept inside his barn in a calf pen over the winter.  All farmers know that when you keep animals in the barn over the winter one of the natural consequences is that you have to clean out the barn floor periodically.  In practical terms this means that you must pitch the manure from an individual pen out into the main floor area of the barn.  It’s not a pleasant job.  Then you must follow up with transporting the manure from the barn floor to the manure pile outside.

After cleaning the manure out of the pen and the barn, the farmer would then replace the straw on the floor of the pen with fresh straw.  Over the course of a winter this would happen several times.

Though the job has warmth to it, it is not an inviting occupation to consider or to accomplish.  The farmer decided that, instead of go to all that work during the winter months, he would just add some fresh straw to the calf pen every so often.  When the build-up attained a height that would render the pen railing irrelevant, he would nail on another rail.

By the time spring came the calf was standing with his head up to the ceiling of the barn.  (To be sure, though it was many years ago, I don’t believe the barn was one of those tall red ones that we associate with the word “barn.”)  In the spring when the farmer decided to let the calf out, the calf was too frightened to come down off of his manure mountain.

If the calf had decided to jump down, there was a strong possibility that it would have broken a leg.  The calf was too big for the farmer to pick up.  The farmer had to rig up a winch and winch the calf out of the pen and down to the barn floor.

To a farmer this is a very humorous story.  I was surprised that, with his background, my boss wasn’t laughing.  In fact, he seemed a little pale.  He got very quiet.

I never asked him which farm he had grown up on.

Before you tell a story, it is a good idea to weigh the circumstances and possible consequences.

Oh well.  Hwe was rather difficult to get along with anyway.

I have come to a conclusion regarding valuable work.  There are two qualities that are valuable in the electrical trade.  Doing good, safe work makes you a valuable employee.  Doing good, safe work and doing it quickly makes you irreplaceable.  However, since there is an inherent danger to working with electricity sometimes working quickly in one aspect of the job is not always conducive to safety.  Therefore doing poor, unsafe work quickly, takes away an employee’s value.

When you are working for a small shop, yours or another person’s, there is no such thing as steady work.  There are weeks when there is nothing to do.  No calls come in, so you have to go out and hunt for work, and nobody wants or needs you.  The next week you may be running.  Everybody wants you – all at the same time.  This situation can lead to many interesting experiences.

One time I was working on a job way north of Havre, Montana near the Canadian border.  It was one of those times when we were trying to catch up or stay even with all of the calls.  I was hurrying home with just a few tools in the back of the company pick-up.  It was a gravel road and there wasn’t a posted speed limit, but my speed was about “way to fast” miles per hour.

I hit a washboard in the road.  To the un-countrified, a washboard is a ripple in the road.  It’s more than the ripples you will get on some streets at an intersection, where traffic patterns wear a series of rough ridges in pavement or graveled roads.  It is more than driving over a portion of road that makes you and all of your passengers involuntarily go “ddddddrrrrrrrrr.”  This was a washboard that stretched about three feet from crest to crest.

I’m not sure if I grabbed air at all much less how much air I grabbed if I did, but that washboard threw the pick-up all over the road, down a steep bank, and into the ditch.  I managed to stay in control of the pick-up, mostly.  The pick-up stayed wheels down and under power.  But I was still in a hurry, and I didn’t slow down – much, much less stop.

There was a steep bank on the right and a fence on the left.  I continued my way home steadily along that ditch for about ½ of a mile until I came to an approach.  I maneuvered my way out of the ditch and onto the approach and back onto the road.

Yes, I still hurried home but it scared me enough that I slowed down my driving, … somewhat.

When I first started in the electrical trade, I had little regard for the power and danger of electricity.  (I was just a farm boy, remember.)  In fact when someone would come looking for me, one boss would tell people to go into a specific building and look for a shower of sparks.  “You’ll find Adrian in the middle of it.”  Somehow or another, people started calling me Sparky.

I like to find out why and how things work.  It is no different with electricity.  For instance, while working with my brother-in-law (here after known as B.I.L.) we discovered how 3-way and 4-way switches worked, …. by taking them apart and studying the mechanisms. When GFI outlets came out I did the same thing.  However, on my own I was unable to figure out what all the pieces did.

Soon after a GFI salesman came around pushing the use of GFI receptacles.  He offered to teach us how they worked.  Of course I went to the class to learn about GFI receptacles.  It actually turned out to be quite simple.  We already had the principle and the mechanism involved, but they were miniaturized so they could be fit into one receptacle.

I also experimented with interesting phenomena regarding resistance using live wires.  I had wired a home where they used metal lath and plaster and metal ductwork for heating.  And, of course, we used metal boxes at that time since plastic boxes had not yet come into use.  The home was one of the places where we were required to take off our shoes to work in the residence.

As we were trimming out the work I was standing atop a metal floor vent, near a window that had metal casing.  When I touched the window casing I felt a tingle.  I thought to myself: “How could there be current flowing here when there are no electrical outlets or lights nearby?”

I retrieved my voltage tester and discovered that there was current flowing between the metal casing and the heat vent below the window.  I knew the furnace ducting would be grounded so the window sill had to be “charged.”

I went across the room where I had installed a switch by the door.  I took the switch out and discovered that I had inadvertently left a hot wire touching the metal electrical box.  The metal electrical box was touching the metal lath.  The metal lath was touching the metal window frame.  When I touched the metal window frame and then touched the metal ductwork I completed the circuit through my body.

I noticed that the voltage dropped considerably because of all the resistance.  I thought now is the time to experiment with some questions I have wondered about.

(ALERT!  ALERT!  DO NOT ATEMPT THIS!)

Using the voltage tester and the charged metal window frame and the heating vent, I ran the circuit from a finger on one hand, through my arms to a finger on my other hand.  The voltage dropped to 70.  I than ran the circuit the length of one arm (finger to shoulder where I placed the voltage meter).  It still read 70 volts.  Then I ran the circuit the length of one finger.  Still 70 volts.  Then I ran it ¼ inch on one finger.  It still measured 70 volts.

My conclusion was; 1). That is why electricity kills you.  Your body contains so much resistance to the flow that electricity becomes dangerous.  2). There is a reason for all those safety rules.

Never experiment with electricity.

Sometimes they still call me Sparky.