tubs and shower stalls

[Gunny]

And, yes, I do know the difference between voltage and current... I'm lazy and just say 277 and everyone knows what I'm referring to when you get bit by them. It's painful!

I think the biggest mishap I witnessed was again back in my apprentice days and we were building out the Comm Room down in the basement of a brand new Cancer Center at the Providence Hospital Campus in Anchorage.

Across the hall was the main demarc for the electrical, and the sparkies were in there doing their thing. I heard a Journeyman tell his apprentice to take his fish tape and put it in a conduit to see if it went a few rooms down, and the Journeyman walked down to the room and waited to see if the fish tape appeared.

It was a metal fish tape.

I could hear the apprentice working the fish tape, pushing it in. Suddenly there was a lightning bolt and a BOOM and the entire place was plunged into darkness. I had a miner's light on my hardhat, and turned it on so I could see. I ran out of our room to the Electrical room and the apprentice walked calmly out of his room toward my light. I asked him if he was okay, and he nodded.

His fish tape had gone in the conduit and come back into the same room on the other side behind him, and had laid itself across the main bus bars - 5,000 amps worth of 'lectrics!

Then all hell broke loose with foremen and the complex Superintendent along with his entourage of VIP visitors that had been on site taking a tour of the building. They quickly started investigating and we wisely stayed out of the circus & continued building out our comm room and listened in on the proceedings across the hall.

They quickly identified who had done it, questioned his Journeyman (because an apprentice is usually not responsible for doing stupid things because he's directly supervised by his licensed Journeyman) and he threw his apprentice under the bus. I heard him tell the General Foreman that he did NOT tell his apprentice to do that, or to use a metal fish tape. The Foreman told the apprentice to pack his tools and get the hell off his jobsite, and this meant his career was over - an apprentice getting himself fired means he'll be washed out of the program.

I was seething that the POS Journeyman would hang his apprentice out to dry like that and lie about what happened. The apprentice did exactly what he had been told to do by his boss. Sure, he should have known better but he followed orders and trusted that his Journeyman knew what he was doing.

I waited until the bigwigs had wandered away, then went to the General Foreman and told him what had actually happened. He went and found that Journeyman again and fired him, then recalled the apprentice who's career was suddenly back on track. He was grateful to still be alive and still have his career intact.

The Journeyman was blacklisted, with good reason, and I heard he eventually left AK about a year later to find work. No one wants a guy like that around the jobsite.

He should have been canned. Not even a question. Not so much for hanging his apprentice out to dry, but for being stupid. A metal fish tape in a conduit with live wires? Shooting yourself in the head is quicker. EVERY time I've seen an apprentice jacked up it's because the journeyman got lazy and didn't watch them. That was never a problem for me. I was so used to having troops with loaded weapons I was pre-trained to be paranoid. The transition from live weapons to live electricity is not hard to make.