One of the painters I knew was very aggressive about finding work.  He would buy a lot in town, put down a foundation or a basement, go out in the country and buy a farm house that had been abandoned, bring it to town and set it on his foundation/basement.

I never asked how he knew what dimensions to make the foundation.

He would paint the house and hire me to update the electrical wiring, and then he would sell the home for a neat profit.  While I worked for him, I found some very interesting houses on which to work.

I believe I mentioned before how this man would sometimes replace the water heater; from electric to gas.  He allowed me to take home a working electrical water heater that was a niche heater.

A niche water heater is one that has a dry (inside) tube going through the water area.  The electrical water heater was inserted in this dry space and would “room heat” the water from there.  It was different in that the electrical water heating element never came in contact with the water.  This gave the element and thus the water heater a longer life expectancy.

This was the only niche water heater I have ever seen.  I still have it amongst my souvenirs.

A couple other painters I knew were brothers and worked together.  They were pretty sly pranksters.

One day after working on a job with them, I got home and found that the toes of my boots were painted.  It wasn’t that paint had dripped on them.  Nor that I had stepped in something.  The toes of the boots had been painted.  I couldn’t figure out what had happened.  I finally figured it out.

As I stood on a ladder, with my feet being just under head height, they had taken a few unnoticed moments to dob paint on and then paint the toes of my boots.  In fact I recalled that at one point in the day I had my ladder set up very close to the wall they were working on.  I suspect it didn’t take much of an inducement to just kind of reach across and over their shoulders to paint my boot toes in a passing manner.

One of these brothers had a son that moved into the Spokane area.  Years later he became one of my customers.

It used to be that the paint products used by painters exuded a very “criminal” odor.  Over the years the odor from paint has become less invasive or pronounced.

We used to wonder if the strong paint smell was a cause for a disproportionate number of painters that suffered from alcoholism.  If that was actually the case, I would imagine that with the decrease in paint odor, there has also been a decrease in the number of painters afflicted with alcohol dependence.

The ladders used in the construction trades come in all sizes shapes, lengths, and materials:  wood, fiberglass, metal, and even plastic.  In the electrical trade we shy away from anything metal.  You can acquire ladders anywhere from 2 foot to 40 foot high.

(One of the guys I worked with was quite “height challenged.”  We used to kid him about having a 3 foot ladder attached to his tool belt.)

Except for the joke I told early on – where I said I had fallen off of a 40 foot ladder – from the bottom rung, I never fell off of a ladder.

On the other hand, my father was an excellent “ladder faller off of.”  He was able to develop techniques that kept him from getting broken when he fell.  He worked in orchards and fell many times in that vocation.

My father did break his back from a fall, but it wasn’t a ladder he fell from that time.  It was a rolling scaffold – but that’s a different story.  And since my father is now dead, it may not ever be told.

I believe I have climbed just about every type of ladder manufactured; including one time having worked on a ladder-truck.  The ladder-truck I worked with was very clumsy.  Perhaps they are different today.

I had to bring the truck up close to the location I wanted to work on, run the ladder up, and if the location placement is not exactly correct (usually only discovered after having climbed to the top of it), I would have to lower the ladder, adjust it, and re-run the ladder up.

There was one advantage to a ladder truck.  Because of the mechanics at the bottom of the ladder on the truck, and the fact that the ladder was manufactured out of some pretty sturdy material, the top of the ladder never slipped off the top of the building, or whatever.  The truck itself was terrible.  It was hard to steer and had no brakes.  It scared me half to death.  I’m glad there wasn’t a second one just like it at the shop.

Ladders are expensive.  They are required to be built according to stringent specifications.  That is why we have found it to be advantageous to have a bucket van (cherry picker).  A bucket van is safer, faster and more convenient.  It took me a number of years to get a set of ladders, including the bucket van, after I started my own business.

One time I borrowed a ladder from a good friend of mine.  When I got done for the day, I went through the access hole in the roof and pulled the ladder up so it would be safe.  When I came back the next morning it was gone.  We never found it.  It took some time to get the money to pay for it.  Also, we left my son-in law’s ladder on a job and it disappeared.  That one took $300.00 to replace.

The trouble with that is you buy a brand new ladder and you still don’t have one.

That’s what they say.  It takes all kinds.  I think I have worked with them all!  Sometimes they are a little bit difficult to work with and sometimes you have to admire them.

For instance: On one occasion we were remodeling a grocery store.  It involved tearing up the concrete floor to run the wiring and communications to the future locations of the checkout stands.  There were also some walls being moved.  The refrigeration and cooling area was completely changed.  And an addition was being built onto the structure.

With all this construction and remodeling going on, the store had to remain in full operation.  The foreman for that particular job was unflappable.  Nothing “bothered his mind.”

There came the time for us to run a long run of heavy gauge wire in conduit.  There was no room to lay out the wire inside the store, so we laid it out in the parking lot.

About that time a large produce delivery van entered the parking lot.  The driver and his burly helper intended to drop off their load at the back of the store.  If it had been me running the job, I believe I would have (cautiously) approached the driver and asked him to please not run over that wire.  Or maybe I would have said something about letting us move the wire before he drove over it.

Not our foreman.  He walked directly over to the driver and stated: “You run over that wire and you’ve bought it.”

That’s all it took.  We successfully pulled the wire in, and not a bit of it was damaged.  I didn’t see much of that foreman after that project.  He was sent to run jobs all over the country.

Another type of personality I would often run into was the joker/prankster group.  They could keep you laughing for the whole project.

Other personalities were always upset about something.  And they didn’t mind putting their load on your back.

Some personalities needed to be handled with care; as if you were walking on peanut shells when you spoke to them or worked with them.

I have formed many opinions of my own about how employees should be treated.  I was able to put many of them into practical use when I formed my own business.