People keep all kinds of pets these days.  When you work in their homes you have to be prepared for just about any kind of pet.  I have seen rats, birds, dogs, cats, reptiles, and I have heard of others.

The wildest one I ever saw was a pig.

One of the jobs I was on was at the home of a lady who lived alone but had a pig for a pet.  The pig had its own room.  It was not a little pig, but a full sized pig.  The room was not just a little place, but a full sized bedroom.

The lady had a garden gate attached to the door of the bedroom and a crib sized bed with a mattress for the pig to sleep on.  I wondered why the place didn’t smell like a barn.

Twice a day she would take the pig out in the back yard to eliminate waste.  Pigs can be quite clean animals.  Part of my work was in the pig’s bedroom.  I was pretty cautious as I knew that pigs’ appetites could include human flesh and bone.

The lady had to go downtown for something while we were there.  When she came back she stepped in the door and said; “Oh my goodness!  Has he been a naughty boy?”  She immediately sent the pig outside and began to clean the pigsty (whoops – pig’s bedroom).

I have had pets myself, but usually I kept them outside, except for one cat.  When my wife and I were first married we bought a small mobile home.  Since we had mice in the home we kept a cat inside.  It was a two room mobile home – a bedroom and a kitchen/living room area.  No bathroom.

In the middle of the night I heard a ruckus.  I told my wife; “Oh boy!  He caught it.”  I jumped up and ran into the living area.  A mouse ran across the floor in front of me.  The front door was wide open and the cat was gone.

Apparently he had been so frightened at the sight of the mouse that he opened the door and scrammed.

Now we keep our pets outside in a doghouse or barn.

More difficult than working under a mobile home, in muddy and wet conditions, in the cold, on rocky ground, is working in a hot attic.  I have never taken the temperature of an attic I was working in, but I know they are always several degrees hotter than the outside ambient air temperature, and in the summer that means Extremely Hot.  The sun bakes down on the roof, there is no air movement, and (usually) no insulation under the roof.

On top of that (literally), attic insulation is blown in.  Some are blown in insulation is very bad.  And all of the various kinds of insulation stick to you when you are working in an attic.

One job I had to do in an attic, in warm weather, involved a building where the access hole to the attic was about 60 feet (as the electrician crawls) from the panel.  The access (or “scuttle”) hole was located in a new addition that I was wiring.  The panel was located in the original building structure.  To get to the area above the panel I had to crawl about 15 feet through the addition attic, then take a 90 degree left turn and go another (approximately) 30 feet through the gable structure of the original building, and finally take a 90 degree right turn for another 15 feet to get over the panel.

Both attics (old and new) had blown in insulation all the way, and blown in insulation packs when you put weight on it.  Packed blown in insulation loses insulating value.

I crawled into the scuttle hole with a hammer, staples, the end of a long run of NMB 10/3 wire, one end of an extension cord, an electric drill (battery powered drills were still in the future) with a wood bit, a light, and a wooden paddle.  I believe I added 50% to my body weight.  I crawled through the attic moving insulation out of my way as I went.  My helper (this time it was my wife Becky) fed the cord and cable through the scuttle hole to me.

When I got to the place above the panel I hung the light near me, cleaned the insulation off the top plate of the wall, and drilled a hole through the plate.  I dropped a fish chain through the hole.  It was attached to the 10/3 NMB and the NMB had a cable connector on it.  Becky caught the fish chain and pulled it and the cable connector into the panel.

As I backed my way out of the attics, I stapled the 10/3 to the exposed trusses and covered it up with the insulation, using the paddle to make a proper “blown in” effect.  By the time I exited the scuttle hole with my tools, light, drill, extension cord, etc., I was covered with sweat, insulation, and dust.

I drove home, took a shower, changed into clean clothes and then went back to the job.

Attics are inconvenient, uncomfortable, difficult, … and HOT!

After several years in numerous other occupations, my oldest son came to work with me as an electrician.  I was teaching him the trade.  Sometimes it wasn’t the lesson I intended.

One day the job involved wiring in a club house.  This club house had been constructed from an old school house with an added section.  In time another addition was built to house a walk in cooler.  The walk in cooler was built with heavy insulation and heavy doors.  The actual refrigerating power unit sat atop the walk in cooler.

As it turned out the most critical information that we needed was not immediately observable.

The refrigerating unit, sitting atop the walk in cooler, was sitting free.  Not fastened down.

In order to facilitate getting power to the refrigerating unit, sitting free atop the walk in cooler, we had to move (slide) the walk in cooler a short distance.  In the course of sliding the cooler, with the refrigerating unit atop it, sitting free, the refrigerating unit came into contact with a low sitting roof beam.  Consequently it (the refrigerating unit sitting free atop the walk in cooler) slid on the roof of the walk in cooler until it overbalanced and came down.

On my son’s head.

It was not a light-weight piece of equipment, and for a moment I thought I had killed him.

He was alright except for a nasty bump on the head.  I still sometimes wonder if I damaged his health more than we thought at the time.

Such accidents are not unusual.

I know a carpenter that was working with his father.  He accidently severed his father’s finger with a skill saw.

One contractor I worked for was building shelving with one of his employees.  The boss was standing behind a large piece of pegboard.  He held up a small piece of wood.  The employee thought he saw the white wood through one of the peg holes.  Using an electric screw gun the employee drove a screw into the boss’ wrist.  The boss told him to back it out.  The employee did so and the boss drove himself to the ER at the hospital.

I am sure that it was occurrences like these that brought about the safety laws that we review, depending on the scope of a job, each week or each job.

Today one of our guiding principles is “safety first.”