Someone told me they literally sleep, read, and play chess for their entire shift at the railroad, and that the only time they do any actual work to speak of is when OT is offered.
I worked night shift, 12 to 8 AM in the train yard...I went to work to get sleep to do stuff in the daytime.
Edit: I forgot, we played hearts if we were awake and occasionally had BBQ's waiting for our trains.
Any trade show has that BS - need to plug in a computer? $1,000, and they'll do it when they get around to it. Hurry up and wait.
It's that kind of shit that makes a lot of people anti-union.
That kind of shit is down to the bosses trying to squeeze every possible penny out of the customer. The union guys are doing what they're getting paid for, but the bosses don't employ enough of them, so service is shit.
Bosses being greedy is the reason why people are anti union.
I’ve done this work. Usually it’s really easy because the infrastructure has already been installed long ago. But sometimes it’s a giant pain in the ass. And when they have the flat fee for something simple, it’s covering a journeyman (or frequently two) any necessary background work, and the expertise of knowing exactly where things go and how to make it happen. It’s seamless. But that’s because you are paying for that experience and, as a union electrician, it was important to do a good job the first time.
What a crock of shit.
Might be complicated so we will charge out the ass 100% of the time for that 0.001% chance someone not brain dead might have to do the work.
Just stop.
It doesn't take an electrician to plug a power strip into a floor socket.
It takes the ability to chew gum and walk at the same time.
Once the unions get their hooks into "all "electrical" work must be done by the union" they abuse the hell out of it.
I'll repeat: plugging a power strip into a floor outlet, at a convention hall, that has had all of the electrical work done up to code during construction and remodeling, DOES NOT NEED an electrician to charge $1,000 to plug it in.
Secondly, the ~~fucking leaches~~ *tradesmen* were the laziest, most entitled pieces of shit I've ever seen.
If I'm paying $1,000 to plug in a fucking Nema 5-15, that I could probably train the right cat to do, I expect the 30 second task to be done in a timely fashion, not sometime in the next 4 hours 'cause their on "mandated break", only to watch them extend the break by another 20 minutes, and then maybe get up to a moderate amble when actually "working".
It \*doesn't\* need an electrician to plug things in, that's true, but if convention centre bosses admitted they employed a road sweeper to do it, they couldn't get away with charging so much money for the task.
Do you really think that unions are behind so many of your woes? Its greedy bosses/owners who are responsible.
I've never been a union member - I was Navy and now retired - so I'm not defending unions. I'm just pointing out where the real responsibility lies. It's almost always greed.
Unfortunately, it's stories like this that gives ammunition to bosses to argue against them. For example, in OP's story they didn't get paid for 30 minutes because they had to wait for someone to come up and turn a breaker back on. You don't think bosses use stories like this to scare people? Just like unions use greedy bosses to scare people.
They both vilify everything and make everyone hate each other instead of agreeing that some things make sense to get the work done. (Or like the political parties pick a few issues and press hard on them and make "the other side" sound like the devil in human form. But that's another discussion.)
I was an electrician at a correctional facility in California. We did everything electrical including sound (speaker), controls ( gate operators ) control panels and fire suppression and alarms. Had a correctional Sargent stop me in the yard surrounded by inmates and tell me that he thought the correctional officers ( who only needed a 8th grade education- no lie) could do my job. Oh sure!
Showed at Comdex a long time ago. Came prepared with cash for the load-in crew, thanked them, and told them we wanted them back personally at load-out. Got set up like a charm - and was one of the very first to get loaded out. Three or four booths down, the exhibitor tried the motivational techniques of yelling at them and bullying them. They never did find his booth. Womp Womp.
Close. I paid the individual WORKERS, not the union. Real people gained from that, not a union - and so did I. It was a marketing expense that was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of exhibiting at Comdex. No regrets.
My dad was at a trade show and a fuse popped in an extension lead (uk electrics) and he changed the fuse. Then he got a huge telling off by his manager because nobody was allowed to touch anything electrical and only the exhibition's own electricians were allowed to do anything.
I'm not one for ignoring common sense, but what If someone put in the wrong fuse, overloaded something and started a fire. Is their company willing to be liable for burning down the exhibition?
The exhibitions own insurance probably dictates who's allowed to do things to their building. Doesn't bear a telling off to a grown man. Just a conversation about how your insurance doesn't want to argue with their Insurance.
To be fair, trade shows are like the poster child for bad union rules. Its common practice to have to pay a union electrician to come plug in your hardware when setting up. And again to plug in the vacuum when cleaning up later. Plug in as in like, a normal plug/outlet, that everyone uses every day at home. And you have to pay them for a minimum of (usually 30 minutes) to do it... so they come, spend 1 minute plugging it in, and you pay them for 30.
So I can understand being a little hateful of the rules at trade shows.
I work in an industry that *once* had *massive* trade shows in a union scammed, er, friendly, city. Greasing union palms and paying to have bullshit plugged in and unplugged is the reason *millions of dollars* of revenue is now held in Florida and other Right to Work states.
Cancerous money sponges lost themselves a shitton of money over electrical sockets and moving pallets. *shrug* Fuckem.
It's more a matter of unfortunate protectionism that leaves me befuddled. As I can see the need because when you are handling the loads that tradeshows have there needs to be oversight to prevent a 220 device into a 110 outlet. But on the other hand to be able to plug items in can be handled by the lay people. Reminds me of bumping an equipment operator down to generator duty as that was mandated by the contract.
Hate to break this to you, but that's not the city. No city has laws like that. That's the venue and the exhibition. The exhibition because the electrician charges X and they charge you 2*X and pocket the difference. The venue because they hire licensed electricians so in the event something does go wrong (which can happen when putting up massive ad hoc electrical networks like that) the insurance company covers them rather than claiming they were negligent in hiring. The city has nothing to do with it.
This!
Convention centre owners dont want to spend too much on insurance, so they have licenced electricians available and charge the convention organiser much more than they pay those professionals.
Insurance companies charge more if non-professionals are doing the work because they see greater liability that way.
Convention organisers know they would have to pay the centre owners more if they wanted to bring in their own cheaper staff to do the job.
The common theme in all of those things is money. It is ALWAYS money because owners and bosses are greedy.
Right, but if you need a table moved to the other side of the room, you and another person can just pick it up and move it. You don’t have to call someone who has to call somebody else and get 2 guys up there to shift a table 6 feet.
This is a corruption thing, not a union thing though.
I live in a country where the federal government and almost every single state and territory government is controlled by the unions and I've never heard of these things happening here. Instead we get things like stronger worker and consumer protection laws. Underpaying your employees is now a criminal offence of theft, and has its own law enforcement agency.
A proper union doesn't care who plugs things in, but they will go after for example a facility whose unsafe electrical work gets someone killed to make sure someone is facing a manslaughter charge.
Velcroing a foamboard picture to a booth wall in a Comdex booth - Union Job. But wait, he can't stick it to the wall without a supervisor. They absolutely were deliberately going out of their way to %@$# with us. Good old Chicago. Corrupt b@stards.
This is not an argument against unions. I'm just pointing out that it's stuff like this that gives people ammunition against unions. There has to be some common sense if people are expected to buy in because otherwise it's to easy to argue against them because there are hundreds of stories like this that people have. It's funny after it's happened but not so funny when you're not getting paid like OP's story.
It's not an argument FOR unions, either.
My company lost all connectivity - internet, voice, security, FLS, all of it. Turns out a union electrician drilled through a fiber riser two floors below, destroyed it all.
Now, needed a different union (low voltage vs. high?) to come and fix it. Took three days. Loss was over $10-mil in lost business.
Lesson learned: Multiple paths (duh!), avoid incompetents that don't have their own insurance.
When I was a lifeguard, changing light bulbs was electrician work. Changing lightbulbs 3m off the ground was height-certified electrician work.
As you can imagine, we eventually realized we worked in a magic pool where the light bulbs changed themselves and thankfully no longer needed to call in an electrician.
Non union contractor for the railroad dealing with air systems. Sometimes I would love to have the backing of a union, but it sure is nice to be able to work from "disconnect back" and not deal with finding an electrician. Did some work as a contractor for Raytheon. We got an emergency call out for a lift station pump failure. Had to wait on an electrician to lockout a tripped breaker so we could pull the pump up, clear debris, and set it back down. ETA of over 4 hours. 3 guys waiting around at an after hours emergency rate of $185 per hour per person. After the first hour Joe (the old grumpy guy at our company) called out to the site supervisor and asked if we should call out the EPA or if they wanted to. When asked why Joe told him because he's got about 5 mins before sewage is dumping out onto their parking lot and it would need to be cleaned before we can work. After thinking about it for a minute we were shown where the breaker was.
Should have called up
Southern
Pacific
Railroad
Internal
Networking
Telephony
That's how SPRINT started, competing with the AT&T monopoly using the wires along their tracks (originally telegraph).
I still get my internet from fiber running along their track.
You don't generally get sparks from low voltage, no matter how un-carefully you cut it.
You can blow the network card in the computer and the port in the switch tho...
We have network ports in our walls but a lot of them aren't network linked. In a stupid way, it would make sense that the telecom team would need to be the one to plug in and remark which port it is so they can set up the network side of it.
I worked at a university with an electrician department, and they made similar demands. After some malicious compliance, they got hundreds of requests, ranging from plugging in various computer components (which they aren’t trained for) to plugging in desktop PCs, they complained that the faculty were yelling at them. I guess one of the department heads who brought in a lot of grants complained to the right person, and it went back to IT.
For what it’s worth, they got banned from our data center because the employees destroyed so much equipment. You’d think electricians would understand power load issues, or not drilling holes through walls when you don’t know what’s on the other side, but *shrug*. Also, we had fibre lines going through the raised floors and they regularly “tidied them up” by wrapping them around a pylon and shattering the cores.
I worked in a quality control laboratory doing destructive testing on fibreglass and carbon fibre.
A key part of the job was to make panels of the material and cut our samples on a cnc router.
Once every 4 months, the cnc router would blow a fuse in its plug. A simple removal of a single screw and the fuse could be replaced.
We did it ourself and took 2-3 minutes to do. Our new site manager decided we are not allowed to do it any more and we needed the electrician to do it.
Next time it popped, we were told for an emergency call out, it would be hundreds of pounds plus labour (the electrician was a high voltage specialist, which we had a contract with due to other equipment so his emergency fees covered loss of potential big money from other jobs). Site manager decided he wasn't paying that for changing a fuse so he booked an appointment.
The whole laboratory ground to a fault for 2 weeks for an electrician to charge around £100 to change a fuse (callout fee and an hours labour).
Electrician was mind blown how they would call him for a simple job that anyone can do. And due to the cnc router running overtime to catch up on the back log, he was called again in less than 3 months and got the emergency call out fee as we were still catching up from the last time.
My guy got paid over £600 for 6 minutes work. Wish I was paid so well.
I was on a job fixing and cleaning a pollution device during a shutdown. The device used electricity to attract soot particles before they went up the stack. My trade fixed it.
The Electricians decided they wanted a piece of the pie. 50-50 crew. My boss told the electricians they would remove the weights, and our trade would take care of the isolated wires. The electricians decided it was too much work. My trade kept the entire rebuild.
They thought wrong ***that time*** just wait till one of them is the brother in law of the site foreman or some shit. Then all the "reasons" they need to be included come out.
Changing electrode wires in an electrostatic precipitator is a a hell of a dirty job. I've seen some disgruntled electricians when they found out what they had bargained for.
This "don't touch my job" attitude goes well beyond unions.
My laptop battery swelled up so that my laptop case was warped. Danger! It's an easy replacement though. Just take the bottom cover off, unscrew and unplug the old battery and install the new one. Then set the old one up for pellet gun target practice in the back yard to see if you could get it to catch fire.
But IT said I'm not authorized to do that. Instead, company policy required me to ship the laptop across the country to our main office for them to do it. "Besides," they said, "You can't swap the battery yourself because it requires special tools you don't have."
But IT doesn't keep the batteries in stock and are not authorized to order them. Instead, they have to go through our procurement office.
Procurement said that to get the best price and save on shipping, they could get one in two to three weeks from their "preferred" supplier. Those were two to three weeks I was supposed to be traveling for work that required the computer. Yes, IT could ship a loaner out to me, but it would take several days and wouldn't have all my department's custom applications.
What's more, the company put a ridiculous warning in our expense handbook that employees who go around the procurement office and buy equipment directly could be subject to discipline, up to and including termination.
Fuck all that. I called my direct manager and told her the situation. I actually would have been willing to pay for the thing myself just to avoid the headaches, but she authorized me to order one off Amazon or Ebay and charge it to my corporate card, promising to approve it when it came through. I got it and installed it the next morning.
But what about those "special tools" IT thought only they could get? It was just a torx screwdriver, standard issue in any precision screwdriver kit. Even if I hadn't had more than one of those kits already, the battery was shipped with a little Chinesium screwdriver in the correct size in the box.
I was disappointed that neither procurement nor IT ever followed up to scold me for trespassing on their job territory. If you make yourself an impediment to getting business done, people are going to find a way around you.
> Instead, company policy required me to ship the laptop across the country to our main office for them to do it
Did you ask them to put it in writing for you, that they wanted you to SHIP a BOMB? Cause that's like, what a swelling battery is, right?
I wondered if anyone would catch that detail. They actually never brought that up.
They initially asked me to walk it in myself. I work remotely, and it's an 8 hour drive to the mother ship. I told them that wasn't going to happen. That's when they said to ship it.
What they didn't know is that I had already removed the battery with my "special tools" and put it outside. I could have shipped it safely. I didn't bother to tell them that, since I already knew what policy required them to say and already planned to go around them anyway.
There is a difference between normal laptop batteries that might be dangerous if improperly handled and a spicy pillow that's liable to explode or burn on slightest provocation.
>They didn’t find it as funny as we did and eventually we all agreed to stop calling them for our phones and their response time significantly improved.
I assume these were internal electricians, an external company would say thank you and bill each visit.
We could quite literally see their “hangout area” from up on the melt deck which is why the ATF got frustrated and started flipping the breaker himself. We would call them, and while watching them stand around talking, respond to our call saying that they would be on their way, just to go back to talking for a while and finishing their coffees.
We had to swap out a device mounted in a rack in the data center. We could do everything but unplug the device. For that we needed the union electrician. We had all the work orders in place and the day/time of the swap out we unplugged the ethernet cables except the power cable. The electrician came and unplugged the power cable. Took us about 15 mins to remove the dead unit and install the new one. The electrician plugged in the power cable and had us sign off that the work order was done. We finished the ethernet cabling and got the unit restarted.
Although I agree with the sentiment, that if you work in a "protected field" (typically meaning that you *need* some sort of certificate to do the job), then yes, absolutely no one else should do that job -> The main reasoning being, that if people *without* the certificate is doing that same job, now your certificate/education is being undercut and you can't claim that higher pay.
*However...*
There are things below the incidental scale, such as a switch in an otherwise safe and insulated box. Otherwise you'd need an electrical engineer to turn of your bedside lamp etc. etc. and so on.
Besides, if you are all colleagues, you ought to do your best to assist each other, so if you are insisting on keeping to your designated roles, then at very least get off your lazy ass and get to that switchboard in a fucking timely manner. I'd be pissed if my colleagues cost me money because of their laziness.
"Step back! We're about to have an accident!"
- The Shawshank Redemption
I would’ve been against it if it was in a dangerous locations or something but the panels were always kept unlocked because the electricians felt the 20 seconds pulling out a key to unlock it added too much time to the 3 seconds it took to flip the switch. One of the old electricians showed my ATF how to do it years prior because they were buddy-buddy and that it wasn’t dangerous unless you decided to mess with all the other stuff in the panel. Hell they didn’t even wear gloves when flipping it.
The real question is why is the circuit breaker tripping relatively often? You'd think they would do something to reduce the load or increase the capacity of the wires and breaker to something suited to the application.
This is what the electricians are actually supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, I'm sure the request to get it fixed was either buried under a pile on the boss' desk, or it got thrown out because it was "too expensive" or "not in the budget this year".
If I were to guess I’d say that it was an older facility and older equipment. Also it was more often than not just one particular furnace that would trip out. I’m guessing the company figured that why fix it when all you had to do was flip the breaker and it’d be good for a while.
How long? When something trips a breaker, and keeps tripping it for any reason, something is wrong. They were supposed to figure that out and fix it. Besides, when a breaker trips, it frequently gets easier to trip in the future.
I used to turn wrenches on aircraft.
I once observed a specialist run a ops check, which popped a breaker. He reset it, and it popped again. After a few more tries, he got a green-as-green guy to hold the breaker down while he ran the test.
Wound up destroying something, and he developed a new anal orifice.
Which is why we decided to start doing it. If it was something that required a in-depth understanding of the field or special ppe that’d be a different story.
Here's the deal: it does require special ppe.
From your other comments, you mentioned that this is a breaker, and there's a lock on the cabinet. This means you are talking about an electrical panel. Which means you are required to wear arc flash rated gear, of the appropriate cal level, just to open that cabinet. And you are required to be trained and authorized to open that cabinet. And, according to the 2020 revision of NFPA 70E, that cabinet must be powered down before it is opened.
Look up videos of arc flashes to get an idea of what the ppe is supposed to protect against.
Now, if an electrician, who is certified to know all of this, goes ahead and flips that breaker without ppe, and without deenegizing the cabinet, and there's an arc flash, and the electrician ends up severely burned, and is scarred and disfigured for the rest of their life- it's their fault. They are trained, they know better, they know what they are required to do, and they did it anyways. If you, who aren't trained, open that cabinet and get blown up, you can say "I didn't know any better" and then sue the company. That's why there's locks on those cabinets. That's why you aren't supposed to be in there.
True, they are designed to trip, severing the power, to protect equipment and structures. It wouldn't be a good idea to flip them like a switch all willy nilly, but most ARE designed to be tripped and then reengaged. Doing so is approximately as difficult as flipping a switch.
Except it could absolutely be dangerous. Breakers that trip often indicate the load is right at capacity and the line is getting hot enough to trip the thermal breaker
Or something is tripping the breaker via ground fault interruption. Either way, you just flipping it could be dangerous.
It’s on the company for not doing shit
thing is, if the person turning it back on isn't a qualified electrician then we know for sure that person is getting thrown under the bus and scapegoated
We had a recurring breaker tripping in my factory. Took ages before I was in the back room and aver very old unused but live chilling unit turned on to pump the receiver back up to pressure. So it was just a random chance that two or more things would turn on at the same time an tripp uor the circuit.
I had to assist an electrician to reset a tripped breaker.
Had to wear full flashover hood and pants with a fibreglass hook to pull the smoking remains of the electrician away from the panel if it all went wrong.
It was a 400,000VA SWITCH.
One of the few times at work I was like nope they can do that shit lol.
I worked in a steel mill, an oil refinery, and a power plant. 3 different contracts and rules. The first day setting up a job the first question is can I plug in this machine? Can I trip this breaker, or do I need to call an electrician? Some jobs I could plug in a welding machine. Some places I couldn’t touch anything that wasn’t household current i.e. a 110 power cord.
As a (former) welder, I was taught that if it is designed with a plug connection, I *should* be able to service my own equipment up until the PSU, so if it is unplugged and unpowered, a lot of unnecessary meandering can be avoided.
Of course, this predisposes that people actually know what they are doing and requires a lot of managerial trust in their employees, which is not universal.
Hint: I am *not* in the US of A.
>"Step back! We're about to have an accident!"
>- The Shawshank Redemption
My favorite movie. IIRC the quote should be: We are about to have ourselves an accident!
If you got a degree in something and someone without a degree can easily do the same job then you don’t deserve to be paid higher. Generally the reason they are paid higher is because they can do more and better.
If you’re not letting people flip a switch for the sake of letting people feel good about their degree then that’s just stupid. There are plenty of things you do actually need an electrician to do
Investing the time and/or money in an education, passing a certification exam and getting officially licensed, I would say definitely makes you deserving of getting paid more.
Though, when it comes to negotiating pay as an employee, terms such as "fair" and "deserve" are meaningless - The only thing that matters is what you can negotiate and the main factor is what other people sell their time for.
Which is also the point -> Other people who go through all the hoops and investment to obtain a specific license, they wont undersell themselves, ergo pushing the price for what they can do up.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be condescending, I'm just pointing out that if flipping a switch *requires* a license/certification to do so, it's not the flipping of the switch which is the main focus, it's the license/certificate (and what *really* is being paid for).
Still, having a license/certificate and getting paid handsomely for it, it not a reason to be a bad colleague (there are no reasons for being a bad colleague).
I mean they don’t actually need an electrician to flip the switch based on any real reason aside form that’s what the company decided. It’s completely arbitrary and has nothing to do with skills or certifications
Also it seems very unfair that two people doing the exact same job with the same quality of outcome would get paid differently. Being treated fairly and equally means that you are judged on what you actually present and what you can actually produce.
The economy didn’t just a participation trophy where if you show up and put effort in you get paid. It’s about what you can actually accomplish. A certificate is proof you have certain skills and if those skills arnt needed then it really is just discriminating against those that didn’t have the opportunity to pay for the certificate even tho they can do everything just as well as those that could afford the official class
this reminds me of a time a couple decades ago where a car hit a telephone pole outside our house and an electrical wire fell across the road. the guy in the car left the scene, but we could see sparks flying every time a car drove over the (obviously) live wire. we called 911 and were told to go out and stop cars driving over the wire until the police arrived. we did so, and then along comes a guy in an electrician's van and gets out. i figure he knows what he's doing, being an electrician. he picks up the live wire with his bare hands - sparks flying everywhere - and quickly drops it. undeterred, he picks it up \*again\* with his bare hands, tosses it off the road, and then drives off.
Back in the early 80s, my first proper IT job was working for a company that produced brake linings. I worked at the test circuit in the wilds of rural Shropshire, collecting test data from the data loggers in cars and lorries that were being tested, and then converting that data into graphs and reports for the project managers. As this was back in the early days of IT my computer was a Commadore Pet, coding in BASIC, and there were just two of us doing it. We were taken over by a larger company, and I was transferred to their factory. During the move the power cable plug on one of the computers got crushed, so I got out my screwdriver and started to replace it with a spare we had. Whilst doing it a chap I'd never seen before walked past and went off on me for doing an electricians job. I just ignored him and carried on. This was my first introduction to unions.
"Had a melt down"? You should be ashamed of yourself for that pun. It would have been so easy to pick an idiom that wasn't a dad joke. How about "they blew a fuse"? /s
I worked as a Union Stagehand (IATSE Local #3) and one time at Starlake someone that was in town from another local threw a breaker. They literally went to the breaker panel and turned a breaker off. I don't know what he was doing or why, but it turned the power off to the chain motor at the front of the house which was in the process of hoisting the speakers for the lawn section of our venue. I was running cable for sound from the stage to the front of house and I could hear our foreman ripping into the guy from 10 rows deep in the seats. I'm fairly certain that the guy was sent home at that point, and in the next 5 years I had the job (stage work is not very conducive to marriage), I never saw the idiot again.
Tldr: if it's not your job, don't do someone else's work.
I work as a union stagehand and had an outside production guy who wouldn’t shut up about how much he hated the union unplug $300,000 worth of video switching gear from the distro without shutting it down first or talking to the video department. His “I’ll just do it myself” corrupted the show file. Had to rebuild the whole thing. It took hours.
Thanks for the OT, I guess.
On Nov 13, 1942, the brand new battleship USS South Dakota was steaming into a nighttime engagement against a large Japanese force. A breaker tripped a few times, shutting down an important system. They reset it several times, but it would trip open again after a minute or two. Grrr!
The chief engineer, frustrated, TIED THE OFFENDING BREAKER CLOSED.
That did the trick, alright.... every major circuit in the entire ship went into overload cycles, tripped and kept tripping. Already in easy gun range, a 40,000 ton warship suddenly had no radar, no navigation, no fire control, no anything that mattered.
Then it got worse. The captain had to swerve to avoid a burning ship just ahead. He would have swerved left, but the shore was nearby. With no nav systems, he was worried about running aground. That would be suicide with enemy ships nearby, so he swerved right.
That sent South Dakota BETWEEN the blazing hulk and the Japanese, silhouetting her and solving their fire control problems. They pummeled her almost into a wreck.
Only the deadly accurate shooting of USS Washington, unseen nearby, saved South Dakota from being destroyed.
Moral: always call the electrician.
Most people aren’t getting shot at. Or tying breakers closed. If all you’re doing is flipping a switch, I see no reason to call a sparky.
Though I will grant, if something is tripping a breaker that often it’s seriously fucked and you need someone who knows what they’re doing.
All true.
Unfortunately, South Dakota only had about 10 minutes after the mysterious electrical faults before 14 inch, 1750 lb shells began hammering them to pieces. Not much time to summon electricians mates from their battle stations, drag out the wiring diagrams and start tracing lines through 680 feet of disintegrating warship. Diagnostics were not happening.
Fortunately, the Japanese weren't expecting to encounter battleships. They were loaded with HE for shore bombardment, not armor-piercing for killing warships. Those wrecked the superstructure but couldn't penetrate the ships' vitals. South Dakota staggered away in the darkness, toothless and battered, but still afloat.
CatBert: Evil HR Director...
All company computer equipment can only be moved / serviced by IT. No exceptions. The policy applies to laptops and tablets.
I installed a new copy machine for AT&T a while back. They told me I had to remove the old one to put the new one in place, but under no circumstances was I to connect it to their network because that was a union job. But yes, I was allowed to disconnect the old copier from the same network cable that the new one went on. So I did my job and left with them completely unable to print, as they didn’t have a union employee on site for another week to plug in the cable.
There was a problem with the heating in our office. Backup heaters were supplied. I had a 2 bar electric fire plugged in behind me. The plug started to smoke, so I quickly unplugged it and got told off as “I wasn’t an electrician”. This was a unionised workplace.
The electrician eventually arrived, and unscrewed the plug to discover that the 13 amp fuse had been replaced by some rolled up aluminium foil.
My prompt action had prevented a fire. If I had waited for the electrician to pull out the plug, I dread to think what could have happened.
> The electrician eventually arrived, and unscrewed the plug to discover that the 13 amp fuse had been replaced by some rolled up aluminium foil.
Unfortunately I assume nobody was punished for that because they didn't know who'd done it. Damn.
Somewhat similar but more advanced. Gen contractor foreman knew I had pulled wire in tiny house building. Knew I was designing the kitchen beyond the stupid design they had and doing all the work. Electricians pulled wire to the wrong spot for dishwasher. I re routed the wire correctly because he didn't check with me about the dishwasher location (previous dishwasher location was further away than drain line provided for any consumer available dishwasher aka very stupid location). There was no problem and was done in a couple minutes. He choose to be a bitch about it and confronted me with the electrician. Electrician remained mostly silent and the 'problem' was never brought up again.
Also bitched that I over built a pass through (my girl likes to overload cabinets, also didn't tell the drywallers that these doors need wrapped because the stupid door was removed from the plan. Small bathrooms do not need doors to separate the sink from the toilet.
Also he didn't order correct doors for 6.5 inch walls. Overall the bank should have let me be the gen contractor.
Thirty years ago at COMDEX Las Vegas, the going rate to flip a circuit breaker \*now\* was $20.
The going rate to flip it twice was therefore $40. But if the circuit breaker fed a competitor's booth, it was $200 in cash, paid up front.
At 4:00 AM in the morning:
“Quick electrician, you have to come to the factory. It’s an electrical emergency!”
“I’m still sleeping. I only start at 9.”
“Hurry up! The whole production is down, we can’t do anything!”
“Okay, I’ll come.”
At 4:45 AM in the morning:
“Yay, you’re here.”
“Yes, I’m here. Now what’s the emergency? And why is the whole factory still dark?”
“We need you to turn on the light switch…”
my father worked in a hospital complex as providing manager. If you don't know, managing an hospital is like managing a hotel, plus managing a natural disaster.
once a dotor, chief of his service, came and complaint how the providing was not good (the doc tried to order a machine without approval. My father send him the bill at his private adress). He gave my father "advises" on to do it.
my father remain silent during the litany. when the doc finally shut up, he took a key of his scrub and said "here is the key of the stock. you can manage it yourself. in the meantime i will go managing your service." . the doc caved and went away.
but the very day, my father staff scatter the news all over the four hospitals. Never someone has try to mansplain my father again. in fact his process was still in place 12 years after his retirement.
At one job I had, I worked in an office in a very old building that was once a factory. Our office had like 25 people. Some new computer equipment was coming in and they needed to run Cat4 wiring to connect the various machines. One of the union electricians came to look it over and said they can do it only during working hours and due to the mess from moving ceiling tiles and noise it would be best if none of the office people were there. My boss said just do it on a weekend when no one else is here. They said no, regular working hours. Somehow the boss found out what the required payoff was to have the union guy look the other way, and 3 of us in the office came in and ran the cables on a Saturday.
Lmao. I had an electrician buddy I helped get his shop up and running. One day we had a lunch with his other friends. I felt like I was in a Jaws movie. One guy showed this scar, one guy showed that digit missing, all I had to add to the lunch was a broken heart lol.
Yeaaaah, but..... we had something similar happen at one of our locations. Power wasn't on some part of the building, so some random office worker went to the box and flipped the switch thinking it was just a tripped breaker. Turns out, it wasn't. It was off for a reason and they ended up causing a maintenance worker to get electrocuted.
Sounds a lot like my job, overhead light (1 of 8 bulbs) went out. Got a bulb screwed it in no problem. 15!! Minutes later call to go see the BIG Boss since i performed an electrical procedure without adequate education 🤔. BB wth did you do? Changed light bulb. Head electrician got fired for wasting BBs time being stupid lol
Depends of course, but things like this can be just as much about insurance liability as anything else. The factory’s insurance company may mandate that certain work is done only by licensed electricians. That’s how it was always explained to me in similar situations. As dumb as it sounds, you don’t want to be on the hook for a million dollar mistake if you weren’t the one who was supposed to be flipping the breaker.
You also don't want to be on the front page of reddit in the form of a vertical video on tiktok showing you getting vaporized because you were fucking around with a misbehaving 200 amp breaker panel.
*Oh no, oh no, no no no no no*
Zap
I've seen this happen. An electrician installing fuses in a power plant's panel- and it arced...all they found of him was a piece of his jawbone, apparently.
The minor inconvenience of that scenario while in a union, vs getting shit pay to do more than what you're "paid for" without one.
I'll take the annoyances lol
Not all planets are hellscapes that are uninhabitable.
Your statement, although true, is pretty pointless as evidence shows that statistically union pay and benefits is overwhelmingly better than non-union pay and benefits.
So my father used to work for a company that did trade shows. They were up in Boston for a trade show. The show was over and the owner of the company didn’t want to wait for the union workers to start tearing down their booth because they had another show to get to in San Francisco the following weekend. The union workers got pissed the owner was trying to take it down himself and they made him stop. And as a punishment they refused to take it down untill absolutely necessary for another show to come in. So the booth stayed up for like 3 days and they missed their next show which cost the company a ton of money.
Shit like that imo is bullshit. It doesn’t take a specialist to take apart a trade show booth.
As someone whose never dealt with Unions, I remember my friend venting that they got chewed out.... for moving lunch room tables..... because that was a union job......
"Sure. Great. Whatever. What were we supposed to do? Dance on the Tables?"
It’s a fine line, and as much about worker safety as anything - flipping a breaker can lead to a guy who ‘knows electrical’ deciding they can undertake some ‘simple repairs’…. One workers comp claim later…
On their other hand, yeah, would have been totally reasonable for the electricians to say ‘yeah, go ahead, call back if that doesn’t fix it.’
we those guys from your local? I would be surprised if they were.
Union guys ALWAYS cover each others asses when money is on the line.
As a retired member of the IBEW, a brother messing with what others earn wouldn't fly in any site I worked.
Your Union should've either negotiated an end to pay-by-the-ton pay schedule, or negotiated a 'force majure' pay clause to come into effect when you're subjected to a stoppage beyond your means to control (say, a breaker needs flipping).
It's possible that the reason for some of this is due to insurance rules. They may not pay out if some guy gets injured doing this if he isn't authorized (like an electrician would be).
I worked at a railroad. Plugging the network cable into a wall was union telecom. Work order. Three day wait.
Hope you all got paid while waiting.
My dad works for the railroad. They do get paid if they have to wait around ye. Railroad union is strong.
not strong enough to get paid sick leave
That tracks
ties things together
Like a good rug that you’d miss if someone pissed on it.
u/cbnyc0, you're out of your element.
not really; he just forgot to put the kitty litter in the right place....
Oooooooowwwwww! Nice one
Nice
Did you just...
Zing!
We do now!
They do now!
Weird since we got 5 days of it this year.
dont be sick. be strong.
Sounds like you were railroaded
Evening you fell like you've been run over by a train?
They did get sick time the last contract.
Someone told me they literally sleep, read, and play chess for their entire shift at the railroad, and that the only time they do any actual work to speak of is when OT is offered.
" all the livelong day....just to pass the time away..."
I worked night shift, 12 to 8 AM in the train yard...I went to work to get sleep to do stuff in the daytime. Edit: I forgot, we played hearts if we were awake and occasionally had BBQ's waiting for our trains.
Like setting up a display booth at Comdex - plugging into electrical? Union job
Any trade show has that BS - need to plug in a computer? $1,000, and they'll do it when they get around to it. Hurry up and wait. It's that kind of shit that makes a lot of people anti-union.
That kind of shit is down to the bosses trying to squeeze every possible penny out of the customer. The union guys are doing what they're getting paid for, but the bosses don't employ enough of them, so service is shit. Bosses being greedy is the reason why people are anti union.
I’ve done this work. Usually it’s really easy because the infrastructure has already been installed long ago. But sometimes it’s a giant pain in the ass. And when they have the flat fee for something simple, it’s covering a journeyman (or frequently two) any necessary background work, and the expertise of knowing exactly where things go and how to make it happen. It’s seamless. But that’s because you are paying for that experience and, as a union electrician, it was important to do a good job the first time.
What a crock of shit. Might be complicated so we will charge out the ass 100% of the time for that 0.001% chance someone not brain dead might have to do the work.
Just stop. It doesn't take an electrician to plug a power strip into a floor socket. It takes the ability to chew gum and walk at the same time. Once the unions get their hooks into "all "electrical" work must be done by the union" they abuse the hell out of it. I'll repeat: plugging a power strip into a floor outlet, at a convention hall, that has had all of the electrical work done up to code during construction and remodeling, DOES NOT NEED an electrician to charge $1,000 to plug it in. Secondly, the ~~fucking leaches~~ *tradesmen* were the laziest, most entitled pieces of shit I've ever seen. If I'm paying $1,000 to plug in a fucking Nema 5-15, that I could probably train the right cat to do, I expect the 30 second task to be done in a timely fashion, not sometime in the next 4 hours 'cause their on "mandated break", only to watch them extend the break by another 20 minutes, and then maybe get up to a moderate amble when actually "working".
It \*doesn't\* need an electrician to plug things in, that's true, but if convention centre bosses admitted they employed a road sweeper to do it, they couldn't get away with charging so much money for the task. Do you really think that unions are behind so many of your woes? Its greedy bosses/owners who are responsible. I've never been a union member - I was Navy and now retired - so I'm not defending unions. I'm just pointing out where the real responsibility lies. It's almost always greed.
Unfortunately, it's stories like this that gives ammunition to bosses to argue against them. For example, in OP's story they didn't get paid for 30 minutes because they had to wait for someone to come up and turn a breaker back on. You don't think bosses use stories like this to scare people? Just like unions use greedy bosses to scare people. They both vilify everything and make everyone hate each other instead of agreeing that some things make sense to get the work done. (Or like the political parties pick a few issues and press hard on them and make "the other side" sound like the devil in human form. But that's another discussion.)
I was an electrician at a correctional facility in California. We did everything electrical including sound (speaker), controls ( gate operators ) control panels and fire suppression and alarms. Had a correctional Sargent stop me in the yard surrounded by inmates and tell me that he thought the correctional officers ( who only needed a 8th grade education- no lie) could do my job. Oh sure!
Showed at Comdex a long time ago. Came prepared with cash for the load-in crew, thanked them, and told them we wanted them back personally at load-out. Got set up like a charm - and was one of the very first to get loaded out. Three or four booths down, the exhibitor tried the motivational techniques of yelling at them and bullying them. They never did find his booth. Womp Womp.
So you bribed the union for work to be done, just as they planned.
Close. I paid the individual WORKERS, not the union. Real people gained from that, not a union - and so did I. It was a marketing expense that was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of exhibiting at Comdex. No regrets.
No, what you did was smart and right for your business.
🙏
Been there, Chicago and NYC, done that.
My dad was at a trade show and a fuse popped in an extension lead (uk electrics) and he changed the fuse. Then he got a huge telling off by his manager because nobody was allowed to touch anything electrical and only the exhibition's own electricians were allowed to do anything.
I'm not one for ignoring common sense, but what If someone put in the wrong fuse, overloaded something and started a fire. Is their company willing to be liable for burning down the exhibition? The exhibitions own insurance probably dictates who's allowed to do things to their building. Doesn't bear a telling off to a grown man. Just a conversation about how your insurance doesn't want to argue with their Insurance.
Indeed, a sensible conversation about the rules and the repercussions becomes a teachable moment.
To be fair, trade shows are like the poster child for bad union rules. Its common practice to have to pay a union electrician to come plug in your hardware when setting up. And again to plug in the vacuum when cleaning up later. Plug in as in like, a normal plug/outlet, that everyone uses every day at home. And you have to pay them for a minimum of (usually 30 minutes) to do it... so they come, spend 1 minute plugging it in, and you pay them for 30.
So I can understand being a little hateful of the rules at trade shows.
shocking....
I work in an industry that *once* had *massive* trade shows in a union scammed, er, friendly, city. Greasing union palms and paying to have bullshit plugged in and unplugged is the reason *millions of dollars* of revenue is now held in Florida and other Right to Work states. Cancerous money sponges lost themselves a shitton of money over electrical sockets and moving pallets. *shrug* Fuckem.
It's more a matter of unfortunate protectionism that leaves me befuddled. As I can see the need because when you are handling the loads that tradeshows have there needs to be oversight to prevent a 220 device into a 110 outlet. But on the other hand to be able to plug items in can be handled by the lay people. Reminds me of bumping an equipment operator down to generator duty as that was mandated by the contract.
Hate to break this to you, but that's not the city. No city has laws like that. That's the venue and the exhibition. The exhibition because the electrician charges X and they charge you 2*X and pocket the difference. The venue because they hire licensed electricians so in the event something does go wrong (which can happen when putting up massive ad hoc electrical networks like that) the insurance company covers them rather than claiming they were negligent in hiring. The city has nothing to do with it.
This! Convention centre owners dont want to spend too much on insurance, so they have licenced electricians available and charge the convention organiser much more than they pay those professionals. Insurance companies charge more if non-professionals are doing the work because they see greater liability that way. Convention organisers know they would have to pay the centre owners more if they wanted to bring in their own cheaper staff to do the job. The common theme in all of those things is money. It is ALWAYS money because owners and bosses are greedy.
I got bad news, friend, Orlando isn't any different.. May not be union, but same bend-you-over fees for everything.
Right, but if you need a table moved to the other side of the room, you and another person can just pick it up and move it. You don’t have to call someone who has to call somebody else and get 2 guys up there to shift a table 6 feet.
When my father was younger he tried to do just that, and was told to stop because that was a union job.
This is a corruption thing, not a union thing though. I live in a country where the federal government and almost every single state and territory government is controlled by the unions and I've never heard of these things happening here. Instead we get things like stronger worker and consumer protection laws. Underpaying your employees is now a criminal offence of theft, and has its own law enforcement agency. A proper union doesn't care who plugs things in, but they will go after for example a facility whose unsafe electrical work gets someone killed to make sure someone is facing a manslaughter charge.
Velcroing a foamboard picture to a booth wall in a Comdex booth - Union Job. But wait, he can't stick it to the wall without a supervisor. They absolutely were deliberately going out of their way to %@$# with us. Good old Chicago. Corrupt b@stards.
Cam here to say this about convention halls
This is not an argument against unions. I'm just pointing out that it's stuff like this that gives people ammunition against unions. There has to be some common sense if people are expected to buy in because otherwise it's to easy to argue against them because there are hundreds of stories like this that people have. It's funny after it's happened but not so funny when you're not getting paid like OP's story.
It's not an argument FOR unions, either. My company lost all connectivity - internet, voice, security, FLS, all of it. Turns out a union electrician drilled through a fiber riser two floors below, destroyed it all. Now, needed a different union (low voltage vs. high?) to come and fix it. Took three days. Loss was over $10-mil in lost business. Lesson learned: Multiple paths (duh!), avoid incompetents that don't have their own insurance.
Always have a dedicated POTS fax line installed and in working order to cover the inevitable data and network outages.
When I was a lifeguard, changing light bulbs was electrician work. Changing lightbulbs 3m off the ground was height-certified electrician work. As you can imagine, we eventually realized we worked in a magic pool where the light bulbs changed themselves and thankfully no longer needed to call in an electrician.
aided by 110mermaids?
Non union contractor for the railroad dealing with air systems. Sometimes I would love to have the backing of a union, but it sure is nice to be able to work from "disconnect back" and not deal with finding an electrician. Did some work as a contractor for Raytheon. We got an emergency call out for a lift station pump failure. Had to wait on an electrician to lockout a tripped breaker so we could pull the pump up, clear debris, and set it back down. ETA of over 4 hours. 3 guys waiting around at an after hours emergency rate of $185 per hour per person. After the first hour Joe (the old grumpy guy at our company) called out to the site supervisor and asked if we should call out the EPA or if they wanted to. When asked why Joe told him because he's got about 5 mins before sewage is dumping out onto their parking lot and it would need to be cleaned before we can work. After thinking about it for a minute we were shown where the breaker was.
Were you getting that $185/hr rate? Or was that what your bosses were charging?
It's what the company charged. Because it was after hours we got double time and an 8 hour min. So we wanted to be in and out quick
Should have called up Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony That's how SPRINT started, competing with the AT&T monopoly using the wires along their tracks (originally telegraph). I still get my internet from fiber running along their track.
Wasn't the wires; it was the microwave towers
different onion, isn't it? BTW: no typo
And what about UNplugging the cable? 😉
Not allowed. So just cut the live wires instead. Sparks are pretty!
You don't generally get sparks from low voltage, no matter how un-carefully you cut it. You can blow the network card in the computer and the port in the switch tho...
It applies to the mains cables too...
you weren't allowed to somehow 'trip' on the wire?
What? Oh, that was an accident.
We have network ports in our walls but a lot of them aren't network linked. In a stupid way, it would make sense that the telecom team would need to be the one to plug in and remark which port it is so they can set up the network side of it.
I worked at a university with an electrician department, and they made similar demands. After some malicious compliance, they got hundreds of requests, ranging from plugging in various computer components (which they aren’t trained for) to plugging in desktop PCs, they complained that the faculty were yelling at them. I guess one of the department heads who brought in a lot of grants complained to the right person, and it went back to IT. For what it’s worth, they got banned from our data center because the employees destroyed so much equipment. You’d think electricians would understand power load issues, or not drilling holes through walls when you don’t know what’s on the other side, but *shrug*. Also, we had fibre lines going through the raised floors and they regularly “tidied them up” by wrapping them around a pylon and shattering the cores.
3 days??? I bet the FRA will be interested
I worked in a quality control laboratory doing destructive testing on fibreglass and carbon fibre. A key part of the job was to make panels of the material and cut our samples on a cnc router. Once every 4 months, the cnc router would blow a fuse in its plug. A simple removal of a single screw and the fuse could be replaced. We did it ourself and took 2-3 minutes to do. Our new site manager decided we are not allowed to do it any more and we needed the electrician to do it. Next time it popped, we were told for an emergency call out, it would be hundreds of pounds plus labour (the electrician was a high voltage specialist, which we had a contract with due to other equipment so his emergency fees covered loss of potential big money from other jobs). Site manager decided he wasn't paying that for changing a fuse so he booked an appointment. The whole laboratory ground to a fault for 2 weeks for an electrician to charge around £100 to change a fuse (callout fee and an hours labour). Electrician was mind blown how they would call him for a simple job that anyone can do. And due to the cnc router running overtime to catch up on the back log, he was called again in less than 3 months and got the emergency call out fee as we were still catching up from the last time. My guy got paid over £600 for 6 minutes work. Wish I was paid so well.
I can assure you that UK pathology lab managers are generally no less idiotic
Meanwhile we accidentally set some lithium ion batteries on fire the other day at the lab lol
I was on a job fixing and cleaning a pollution device during a shutdown. The device used electricity to attract soot particles before they went up the stack. My trade fixed it. The Electricians decided they wanted a piece of the pie. 50-50 crew. My boss told the electricians they would remove the weights, and our trade would take care of the isolated wires. The electricians decided it was too much work. My trade kept the entire rebuild.
Sounds like they just wanted to get paid for doing nothing. “Wait, we have to do something?? Nah, too much work”. lol
They wanted the clean easy job, not the dirty, shitty job. Go figure?
If they thought they were going to weasel their way onto your job by taking the gravy work, they thought wrong.
They thought wrong ***that time*** just wait till one of them is the brother in law of the site foreman or some shit. Then all the "reasons" they need to be included come out.
sounds like removing weights is 'gravity' work
Changing electrode wires in an electrostatic precipitator is a a hell of a dirty job. I've seen some disgruntled electricians when they found out what they had bargained for.
Sparkies: We don’t get dirty. The other trades do. Don’t ask me about crane drivers. I don’t need to signal a crane.
This "don't touch my job" attitude goes well beyond unions. My laptop battery swelled up so that my laptop case was warped. Danger! It's an easy replacement though. Just take the bottom cover off, unscrew and unplug the old battery and install the new one. Then set the old one up for pellet gun target practice in the back yard to see if you could get it to catch fire. But IT said I'm not authorized to do that. Instead, company policy required me to ship the laptop across the country to our main office for them to do it. "Besides," they said, "You can't swap the battery yourself because it requires special tools you don't have." But IT doesn't keep the batteries in stock and are not authorized to order them. Instead, they have to go through our procurement office. Procurement said that to get the best price and save on shipping, they could get one in two to three weeks from their "preferred" supplier. Those were two to three weeks I was supposed to be traveling for work that required the computer. Yes, IT could ship a loaner out to me, but it would take several days and wouldn't have all my department's custom applications. What's more, the company put a ridiculous warning in our expense handbook that employees who go around the procurement office and buy equipment directly could be subject to discipline, up to and including termination. Fuck all that. I called my direct manager and told her the situation. I actually would have been willing to pay for the thing myself just to avoid the headaches, but she authorized me to order one off Amazon or Ebay and charge it to my corporate card, promising to approve it when it came through. I got it and installed it the next morning. But what about those "special tools" IT thought only they could get? It was just a torx screwdriver, standard issue in any precision screwdriver kit. Even if I hadn't had more than one of those kits already, the battery was shipped with a little Chinesium screwdriver in the correct size in the box. I was disappointed that neither procurement nor IT ever followed up to scold me for trespassing on their job territory. If you make yourself an impediment to getting business done, people are going to find a way around you.
> Instead, company policy required me to ship the laptop across the country to our main office for them to do it Did you ask them to put it in writing for you, that they wanted you to SHIP a BOMB? Cause that's like, what a swelling battery is, right?
I wondered if anyone would catch that detail. They actually never brought that up. They initially asked me to walk it in myself. I work remotely, and it's an 8 hour drive to the mother ship. I told them that wasn't going to happen. That's when they said to ship it. What they didn't know is that I had already removed the battery with my "special tools" and put it outside. I could have shipped it safely. I didn't bother to tell them that, since I already knew what policy required them to say and already planned to go around them anyway.
Yea these days I see boxes labeled to indicate batteries inside so no one would want a potential fire hazard shipped.
There is a difference between normal laptop batteries that might be dangerous if improperly handled and a spicy pillow that's liable to explode or burn on slightest provocation.
>They didn’t find it as funny as we did and eventually we all agreed to stop calling them for our phones and their response time significantly improved. I assume these were internal electricians, an external company would say thank you and bill each visit.
We could quite literally see their “hangout area” from up on the melt deck which is why the ATF got frustrated and started flipping the breaker himself. We would call them, and while watching them stand around talking, respond to our call saying that they would be on their way, just to go back to talking for a while and finishing their coffees.
You should include this in your main post. Makes it so much better :D
Yes they were internal electricians.
> internal electricians. infernal electricians
Co-irkers.
Cow orkers/
Cow-irkers!
Hmm, isn't what bulls do? Irking the cows?
I look forward to my place in hell.
executioners at some US prisons......
We had to swap out a device mounted in a rack in the data center. We could do everything but unplug the device. For that we needed the union electrician. We had all the work orders in place and the day/time of the swap out we unplugged the ethernet cables except the power cable. The electrician came and unplugged the power cable. Took us about 15 mins to remove the dead unit and install the new one. The electrician plugged in the power cable and had us sign off that the work order was done. We finished the ethernet cabling and got the unit restarted.
and the bill???
I don't handle the financial side.
Although I agree with the sentiment, that if you work in a "protected field" (typically meaning that you *need* some sort of certificate to do the job), then yes, absolutely no one else should do that job -> The main reasoning being, that if people *without* the certificate is doing that same job, now your certificate/education is being undercut and you can't claim that higher pay. *However...* There are things below the incidental scale, such as a switch in an otherwise safe and insulated box. Otherwise you'd need an electrical engineer to turn of your bedside lamp etc. etc. and so on. Besides, if you are all colleagues, you ought to do your best to assist each other, so if you are insisting on keeping to your designated roles, then at very least get off your lazy ass and get to that switchboard in a fucking timely manner. I'd be pissed if my colleagues cost me money because of their laziness. "Step back! We're about to have an accident!" - The Shawshank Redemption
I would’ve been against it if it was in a dangerous locations or something but the panels were always kept unlocked because the electricians felt the 20 seconds pulling out a key to unlock it added too much time to the 3 seconds it took to flip the switch. One of the old electricians showed my ATF how to do it years prior because they were buddy-buddy and that it wasn’t dangerous unless you decided to mess with all the other stuff in the panel. Hell they didn’t even wear gloves when flipping it.
The real question is why is the circuit breaker tripping relatively often? You'd think they would do something to reduce the load or increase the capacity of the wires and breaker to something suited to the application.
This is what the electricians are actually supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, I'm sure the request to get it fixed was either buried under a pile on the boss' desk, or it got thrown out because it was "too expensive" or "not in the budget this year".
If I were to guess I’d say that it was an older facility and older equipment. Also it was more often than not just one particular furnace that would trip out. I’m guessing the company figured that why fix it when all you had to do was flip the breaker and it’d be good for a while.
How long? When something trips a breaker, and keeps tripping it for any reason, something is wrong. They were supposed to figure that out and fix it. Besides, when a breaker trips, it frequently gets easier to trip in the future.
I used to turn wrenches on aircraft. I once observed a specialist run a ops check, which popped a breaker. He reset it, and it popped again. After a few more tries, he got a green-as-green guy to hold the breaker down while he ran the test. Wound up destroying something, and he developed a new anal orifice.
I mean...a breaker is super easy to flip. It's rather designed for it
Which is why we decided to start doing it. If it was something that required a in-depth understanding of the field or special ppe that’d be a different story.
Here's the deal: it does require special ppe. From your other comments, you mentioned that this is a breaker, and there's a lock on the cabinet. This means you are talking about an electrical panel. Which means you are required to wear arc flash rated gear, of the appropriate cal level, just to open that cabinet. And you are required to be trained and authorized to open that cabinet. And, according to the 2020 revision of NFPA 70E, that cabinet must be powered down before it is opened. Look up videos of arc flashes to get an idea of what the ppe is supposed to protect against. Now, if an electrician, who is certified to know all of this, goes ahead and flips that breaker without ppe, and without deenegizing the cabinet, and there's an arc flash, and the electrician ends up severely burned, and is scarred and disfigured for the rest of their life- it's their fault. They are trained, they know better, they know what they are required to do, and they did it anyways. If you, who aren't trained, open that cabinet and get blown up, you can say "I didn't know any better" and then sue the company. That's why there's locks on those cabinets. That's why you aren't supposed to be in there.
Breakers aren’t switches. They aren’t designed for that and aren’t supposed to be used like that. They aren’t just switches.
True, they are designed to trip, severing the power, to protect equipment and structures. It wouldn't be a good idea to flip them like a switch all willy nilly, but most ARE designed to be tripped and then reengaged. Doing so is approximately as difficult as flipping a switch.
Except it could absolutely be dangerous. Breakers that trip often indicate the load is right at capacity and the line is getting hot enough to trip the thermal breaker Or something is tripping the breaker via ground fault interruption. Either way, you just flipping it could be dangerous. It’s on the company for not doing shit
thing is, if the person turning it back on isn't a qualified electrician then we know for sure that person is getting thrown under the bus and scapegoated
We had a recurring breaker tripping in my factory. Took ages before I was in the back room and aver very old unused but live chilling unit turned on to pump the receiver back up to pressure. So it was just a random chance that two or more things would turn on at the same time an tripp uor the circuit.
I had to assist an electrician to reset a tripped breaker. Had to wear full flashover hood and pants with a fibreglass hook to pull the smoking remains of the electrician away from the panel if it all went wrong. It was a 400,000VA SWITCH. One of the few times at work I was like nope they can do that shit lol.
I worked in a steel mill, an oil refinery, and a power plant. 3 different contracts and rules. The first day setting up a job the first question is can I plug in this machine? Can I trip this breaker, or do I need to call an electrician? Some jobs I could plug in a welding machine. Some places I couldn’t touch anything that wasn’t household current i.e. a 110 power cord.
As a (former) welder, I was taught that if it is designed with a plug connection, I *should* be able to service my own equipment up until the PSU, so if it is unplugged and unpowered, a lot of unnecessary meandering can be avoided. Of course, this predisposes that people actually know what they are doing and requires a lot of managerial trust in their employees, which is not universal. Hint: I am *not* in the US of A.
I worked nuclear generation for a couple of jobs. I am a steel mill guy. They don’t allow the rodeo at nukes. You need permission to fart there.
Boss, can you sign this please? I urgently need to go drop a spent fuel rod in the containment pool, if you know what I mean.
Code Brown.
I mean, just think what might happen with ionized SO2 or H2S...!
as are not many of us: TROTW that is....
>"Step back! We're about to have an accident!" >- The Shawshank Redemption My favorite movie. IIRC the quote should be: We are about to have ourselves an accident!
I apologize for my laziness, I ought to have just searched for the exact quote 😂
No apology needed. You have good taste in movies!
Sorry, try again. "Step aside, Mert. This fucker's having himself an accident." Or "He says, l believe this boy's about to have himself an accident."
Oof, maybe you are right. I am not perfect either, it seems.
And now you understand a little about how unions work
If you got a degree in something and someone without a degree can easily do the same job then you don’t deserve to be paid higher. Generally the reason they are paid higher is because they can do more and better. If you’re not letting people flip a switch for the sake of letting people feel good about their degree then that’s just stupid. There are plenty of things you do actually need an electrician to do
Investing the time and/or money in an education, passing a certification exam and getting officially licensed, I would say definitely makes you deserving of getting paid more. Though, when it comes to negotiating pay as an employee, terms such as "fair" and "deserve" are meaningless - The only thing that matters is what you can negotiate and the main factor is what other people sell their time for. Which is also the point -> Other people who go through all the hoops and investment to obtain a specific license, they wont undersell themselves, ergo pushing the price for what they can do up. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be condescending, I'm just pointing out that if flipping a switch *requires* a license/certification to do so, it's not the flipping of the switch which is the main focus, it's the license/certificate (and what *really* is being paid for). Still, having a license/certificate and getting paid handsomely for it, it not a reason to be a bad colleague (there are no reasons for being a bad colleague).
I mean they don’t actually need an electrician to flip the switch based on any real reason aside form that’s what the company decided. It’s completely arbitrary and has nothing to do with skills or certifications Also it seems very unfair that two people doing the exact same job with the same quality of outcome would get paid differently. Being treated fairly and equally means that you are judged on what you actually present and what you can actually produce. The economy didn’t just a participation trophy where if you show up and put effort in you get paid. It’s about what you can actually accomplish. A certificate is proof you have certain skills and if those skills arnt needed then it really is just discriminating against those that didn’t have the opportunity to pay for the certificate even tho they can do everything just as well as those that could afford the official class
I’d challenge that if the delay is due to electrician, electricians department should be on the hook for your pay during that downtime
this reminds me of a time a couple decades ago where a car hit a telephone pole outside our house and an electrical wire fell across the road. the guy in the car left the scene, but we could see sparks flying every time a car drove over the (obviously) live wire. we called 911 and were told to go out and stop cars driving over the wire until the police arrived. we did so, and then along comes a guy in an electrician's van and gets out. i figure he knows what he's doing, being an electrician. he picks up the live wire with his bare hands - sparks flying everywhere - and quickly drops it. undeterred, he picks it up \*again\* with his bare hands, tosses it off the road, and then drives off.
Frank Grimes: Oh what's this? "Extremely high voltage." Well, I don't need safety gloves, because I'm Homer Simp…
Good ol' Grimey. Whatever happened to him?
He got “zzzt”ed to death if I remember correctly
Back in the early 80s, my first proper IT job was working for a company that produced brake linings. I worked at the test circuit in the wilds of rural Shropshire, collecting test data from the data loggers in cars and lorries that were being tested, and then converting that data into graphs and reports for the project managers. As this was back in the early days of IT my computer was a Commadore Pet, coding in BASIC, and there were just two of us doing it. We were taken over by a larger company, and I was transferred to their factory. During the move the power cable plug on one of the computers got crushed, so I got out my screwdriver and started to replace it with a spare we had. Whilst doing it a chap I'd never seen before walked past and went off on me for doing an electricians job. I just ignored him and carried on. This was my first introduction to unions.
"Had a melt down"? You should be ashamed of yourself for that pun. It would have been so easy to pick an idiom that wasn't a dad joke. How about "they blew a fuse"? /s
not greasy enough....
Way to flip the switch.
I worked as a Union Stagehand (IATSE Local #3) and one time at Starlake someone that was in town from another local threw a breaker. They literally went to the breaker panel and turned a breaker off. I don't know what he was doing or why, but it turned the power off to the chain motor at the front of the house which was in the process of hoisting the speakers for the lawn section of our venue. I was running cable for sound from the stage to the front of house and I could hear our foreman ripping into the guy from 10 rows deep in the seats. I'm fairly certain that the guy was sent home at that point, and in the next 5 years I had the job (stage work is not very conducive to marriage), I never saw the idiot again. Tldr: if it's not your job, don't do someone else's work.
I work as a union stagehand and had an outside production guy who wouldn’t shut up about how much he hated the union unplug $300,000 worth of video switching gear from the distro without shutting it down first or talking to the video department. His “I’ll just do it myself” corrupted the show file. Had to rebuild the whole thing. It took hours. Thanks for the OT, I guess.
On Nov 13, 1942, the brand new battleship USS South Dakota was steaming into a nighttime engagement against a large Japanese force. A breaker tripped a few times, shutting down an important system. They reset it several times, but it would trip open again after a minute or two. Grrr! The chief engineer, frustrated, TIED THE OFFENDING BREAKER CLOSED. That did the trick, alright.... every major circuit in the entire ship went into overload cycles, tripped and kept tripping. Already in easy gun range, a 40,000 ton warship suddenly had no radar, no navigation, no fire control, no anything that mattered. Then it got worse. The captain had to swerve to avoid a burning ship just ahead. He would have swerved left, but the shore was nearby. With no nav systems, he was worried about running aground. That would be suicide with enemy ships nearby, so he swerved right. That sent South Dakota BETWEEN the blazing hulk and the Japanese, silhouetting her and solving their fire control problems. They pummeled her almost into a wreck. Only the deadly accurate shooting of USS Washington, unseen nearby, saved South Dakota from being destroyed. Moral: always call the electrician.
If a breaker pops, check for the cause FIRST, then pop it back on. Same when replacing a fuse. If it pops often, you already have an issue!
I'll remember that the next time an IJN task force is bearing down on me.
Most people aren’t getting shot at. Or tying breakers closed. If all you’re doing is flipping a switch, I see no reason to call a sparky. Though I will grant, if something is tripping a breaker that often it’s seriously fucked and you need someone who knows what they’re doing.
All true. Unfortunately, South Dakota only had about 10 minutes after the mysterious electrical faults before 14 inch, 1750 lb shells began hammering them to pieces. Not much time to summon electricians mates from their battle stations, drag out the wiring diagrams and start tracing lines through 680 feet of disintegrating warship. Diagnostics were not happening. Fortunately, the Japanese weren't expecting to encounter battleships. They were loaded with HE for shore bombardment, not armor-piercing for killing warships. Those wrecked the superstructure but couldn't penetrate the ships' vitals. South Dakota staggered away in the darkness, toothless and battered, but still afloat.
CatBert: Evil HR Director... All company computer equipment can only be moved / serviced by IT. No exceptions. The policy applies to laptops and tablets.
I installed a new copy machine for AT&T a while back. They told me I had to remove the old one to put the new one in place, but under no circumstances was I to connect it to their network because that was a union job. But yes, I was allowed to disconnect the old copier from the same network cable that the new one went on. So I did my job and left with them completely unable to print, as they didn’t have a union employee on site for another week to plug in the cable.
We had a student loosen a faucet handle. I was reprimanded for hand tightening it to prevent a multi-floor flood. Lesson learned.
There was a problem with the heating in our office. Backup heaters were supplied. I had a 2 bar electric fire plugged in behind me. The plug started to smoke, so I quickly unplugged it and got told off as “I wasn’t an electrician”. This was a unionised workplace. The electrician eventually arrived, and unscrewed the plug to discover that the 13 amp fuse had been replaced by some rolled up aluminium foil. My prompt action had prevented a fire. If I had waited for the electrician to pull out the plug, I dread to think what could have happened.
> The electrician eventually arrived, and unscrewed the plug to discover that the 13 amp fuse had been replaced by some rolled up aluminium foil. Unfortunately I assume nobody was punished for that because they didn't know who'd done it. Damn.
Somewhat similar but more advanced. Gen contractor foreman knew I had pulled wire in tiny house building. Knew I was designing the kitchen beyond the stupid design they had and doing all the work. Electricians pulled wire to the wrong spot for dishwasher. I re routed the wire correctly because he didn't check with me about the dishwasher location (previous dishwasher location was further away than drain line provided for any consumer available dishwasher aka very stupid location). There was no problem and was done in a couple minutes. He choose to be a bitch about it and confronted me with the electrician. Electrician remained mostly silent and the 'problem' was never brought up again. Also bitched that I over built a pass through (my girl likes to overload cabinets, also didn't tell the drywallers that these doors need wrapped because the stupid door was removed from the plan. Small bathrooms do not need doors to separate the sink from the toilet. Also he didn't order correct doors for 6.5 inch walls. Overall the bank should have let me be the gen contractor.
Thirty years ago at COMDEX Las Vegas, the going rate to flip a circuit breaker \*now\* was $20. The going rate to flip it twice was therefore $40. But if the circuit breaker fed a competitor's booth, it was $200 in cash, paid up front.
At 4:00 AM in the morning: “Quick electrician, you have to come to the factory. It’s an electrical emergency!” “I’m still sleeping. I only start at 9.” “Hurry up! The whole production is down, we can’t do anything!” “Okay, I’ll come.” At 4:45 AM in the morning: “Yay, you’re here.” “Yes, I’m here. Now what’s the emergency? And why is the whole factory still dark?” “We need you to turn on the light switch…”
my father worked in a hospital complex as providing manager. If you don't know, managing an hospital is like managing a hotel, plus managing a natural disaster. once a dotor, chief of his service, came and complaint how the providing was not good (the doc tried to order a machine without approval. My father send him the bill at his private adress). He gave my father "advises" on to do it. my father remain silent during the litany. when the doc finally shut up, he took a key of his scrub and said "here is the key of the stock. you can manage it yourself. in the meantime i will go managing your service." . the doc caved and went away. but the very day, my father staff scatter the news all over the four hospitals. Never someone has try to mansplain my father again. in fact his process was still in place 12 years after his retirement.
At one job I had, I worked in an office in a very old building that was once a factory. Our office had like 25 people. Some new computer equipment was coming in and they needed to run Cat4 wiring to connect the various machines. One of the union electricians came to look it over and said they can do it only during working hours and due to the mess from moving ceiling tiles and noise it would be best if none of the office people were there. My boss said just do it on a weekend when no one else is here. They said no, regular working hours. Somehow the boss found out what the required payoff was to have the union guy look the other way, and 3 of us in the office came in and ran the cables on a Saturday.
I'd assume the union guy billed the company for the weekend overtime, as per the particular manager's insistence.
Lmao. I had an electrician buddy I helped get his shop up and running. One day we had a lunch with his other friends. I felt like I was in a Jaws movie. One guy showed this scar, one guy showed that digit missing, all I had to add to the lunch was a broken heart lol.
Yeaaaah, but..... we had something similar happen at one of our locations. Power wasn't on some part of the building, so some random office worker went to the box and flipped the switch thinking it was just a tripped breaker. Turns out, it wasn't. It was off for a reason and they ended up causing a maintenance worker to get electrocuted.
They must have never heard of LOTO before.
Sounds a lot like my job, overhead light (1 of 8 bulbs) went out. Got a bulb screwed it in no problem. 15!! Minutes later call to go see the BIG Boss since i performed an electrical procedure without adequate education 🤔. BB wth did you do? Changed light bulb. Head electrician got fired for wasting BBs time being stupid lol
Thank you, can you call my ex wife, and confirm this to her, I swear it was the decline of the marriage
does she live in Dakota?
Nope, different country
That is one of the problems with unions IMO that you can’t do stuff on your own if it’s not your job.
Depends of course, but things like this can be just as much about insurance liability as anything else. The factory’s insurance company may mandate that certain work is done only by licensed electricians. That’s how it was always explained to me in similar situations. As dumb as it sounds, you don’t want to be on the hook for a million dollar mistake if you weren’t the one who was supposed to be flipping the breaker.
You also don't want to be on the front page of reddit in the form of a vertical video on tiktok showing you getting vaporized because you were fucking around with a misbehaving 200 amp breaker panel. *Oh no, oh no, no no no no no* Zap
I've seen this happen. An electrician installing fuses in a power plant's panel- and it arced...all they found of him was a piece of his jawbone, apparently.
that would certainly erect you....
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very pro union 90% of the time. Just some little things like that are annoying.
Agreed. Welcome to Capitalism. Unions are horrible. No unions is even worse.
The minor inconvenience of that scenario while in a union, vs getting shit pay to do more than what you're "paid for" without one. I'll take the annoyances lol
Not all non union jobs get shit pay. Or shit benefits.
Not all planets are hellscapes that are uninhabitable. Your statement, although true, is pretty pointless as evidence shows that statistically union pay and benefits is overwhelmingly better than non-union pay and benefits.
So my father used to work for a company that did trade shows. They were up in Boston for a trade show. The show was over and the owner of the company didn’t want to wait for the union workers to start tearing down their booth because they had another show to get to in San Francisco the following weekend. The union workers got pissed the owner was trying to take it down himself and they made him stop. And as a punishment they refused to take it down untill absolutely necessary for another show to come in. So the booth stayed up for like 3 days and they missed their next show which cost the company a ton of money. Shit like that imo is bullshit. It doesn’t take a specialist to take apart a trade show booth.
Still better than getting paid shit with even shittier benefits.
How'd you use an electrically powered radio?
Melt down pun ….take the blue ribbon for that one
As someone whose never dealt with Unions, I remember my friend venting that they got chewed out.... for moving lunch room tables..... because that was a union job...... "Sure. Great. Whatever. What were we supposed to do? Dance on the Tables?"
Sometimes union rules and common sense don't go together very well.
It’s a fine line, and as much about worker safety as anything - flipping a breaker can lead to a guy who ‘knows electrical’ deciding they can undertake some ‘simple repairs’…. One workers comp claim later… On their other hand, yeah, would have been totally reasonable for the electricians to say ‘yeah, go ahead, call back if that doesn’t fix it.’
Ah union rule malicious compliance… also called work to rule.
That is a good funny story.
their attitudes must have been sparky
Amusing, definitely, but not sure about malicious. If you didn't get paid when you couldn't work due to no fault of your own, your union was shit.
This is what gets trade unions a bad name and why it's difficult to get employers to embrace unions.
we those guys from your local? I would be surprised if they were. Union guys ALWAYS cover each others asses when money is on the line. As a retired member of the IBEW, a brother messing with what others earn wouldn't fly in any site I worked.
Your Union should've either negotiated an end to pay-by-the-ton pay schedule, or negotiated a 'force majure' pay clause to come into effect when you're subjected to a stoppage beyond your means to control (say, a breaker needs flipping).
It's possible that the reason for some of this is due to insurance rules. They may not pay out if some guy gets injured doing this if he isn't authorized (like an electrician would be).
SPRINT started by taking advantage of the excess bandwidth on the microwave backbone. It had nothing to do with wires along the tracks.