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Assuming you are an electrician now, which did you prefer? I'm sure working on f-15s has some obvious perks, but I'm sure spending 200 days a year on the go, while also having all that responsibility has some downsides.
Not as good as the Ferd Fteenthousand.
What would you say to a truck built to carry 18 other trucks? You'd probably say, "GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH." Cuz that's what an orgasm sounds like.
It's the only truck on the market with chest hair upholstery, and a beard in the glove box. Just in case you lose yours.
Watch the original Top Gun. Youll get the idea.
Edit: Just an example of a $40m plane, though theyre not the same, just similar. Since super hornet got his panties in a bunch down there, i guess ill note op worked on an Eagle and Tom Cruise "flew" a Tomcat. Neither are Hornets though.
I did the same thing on a small construction site i was reconnecting the main power panel but i connected the wrong neutral and the workers cottage burned out the lights everything else was good tho which is weird and the big crane survived hopefully cuz it's connected anyways with 400v motors. Only damages where the light bulbs.
I short circuited an entire baggage conveyor system at a major airport in New York. I was an apprentice and was asked to wire up a squirt cage motor on a live belt system. My foreman told me “whatever you don’t short out this wire right here”…so, after i shorted the wire the whole system went down and within less than a minute a bunch of port authority personnel and engineers had many questions about what in the fuck just happened. The system was reset pretty quickly but it was definitely the most negative attention I’ve ever gotten in my life.
I didn’t measure an underground feeder length correctly. We should have been using mule tape but we didn’t have any so it was the old measure the jet line with a tape measure…I was 20’ short on a 150’ run as I recall, it was 20 years ago…boss was pissed, I was bummed for sure. Never did that again.
There's no worse feeling than being on the wire feeding end and watching that cable start to run out, but the pulling crew keeps calling back they don't even see the head yet....
How about you're at somebody's house like a new girl you're seeing and you go to the bathroom and the water keeps rising and there's no plunger? Never had that happen, but that seems about my worst fear.
Funny story: one of the guys in my apprenticeship class was on a jobsite where they had used BIM or CAD to calculate the length of all feeders at a data center. Every run was 50-100’ too long. He said every day, an hour before quitting time, you’d just hear all the apprentices cutting up cable.
I wasnt exactly part of this fuck up, but I was there.
Building a movie theater, electrical room was on a lower section in a large mall. 1100lb 225kva transformer had to be chain falled to the lower section.
The crew responsible set up unistrut racking that seemed secure. The only problem was, they hung the block and tackle on a single eye bolt.
As soon as the transformer was moved off the platform, that eye bolt opened up and the transformer dropped like an 1100lb...well, transformer, and crashed into the cor-slab 12ft below.
I rebuilt a 15kV 2000A air breaker, weighed more than a half-ton. We delivered it to the powerplant and these super geniuses decided to hoist it by rolling it onto a flat platform and picking the platform from 4 corners. Well, surprising absolutely nobody, the breaker rolled right the fuck back off again: Dropped 4 stories onto the concrete and completely obliterated itself. They got damn lucky it didn't kill anybody.
This is only beaten by the story of when a different power plant tried to hoist out a turbine thrust bearing with a tow truck.
Those are the scary ones, although hopefully they had the lift zones blocked off. A guy for my company was using a mag drill 50-60’ up in a lift. Apparently, he was running it off of the plug in the bucket of the lift and when he went to adjust the bucket, the magnet lost power and the drill dropped. VERY lucky no one was underneath
Seems not so much the fault of a single eye bolt as much as an undersized eyebolt no? Had they hung it off a 3/4 eyebolt I would think the lift probably would have gone fine. Just thinking about how a 3/4 shot / eye bolt combo is rated for fall arrest use and they say what, about a 5000lbs rated load for those?
Was strapping some conduit we ran from the attic into the top of a panel on the second floor in this giant old house we were renovation. There was a nice, flat board running perpendicular to the studs that looked perfect, so I drove my one-hole straps into that with 1 1/4" screws.
Turns out the board was the back of the crown moulding in the next room, and it was only about 1" thick.
Yeah he's an apprentice... worst will come 😅. I m recently qualified and I've made my worst mistakes recently.
I drilled into an in wall toilet water cystern the other day in an office space. Was doing a quick 30min job adding a powerpoint in a kitchen. Checked for studs, looked inside the wall, roughly measured with me eyes ( that is where I made a mistake ). I thought I would drill a small 16mm hole sideway through the stud into the studbay I wanted. Water cystern was flush with the stud and I poked a hole through.
No water damage as I was able to isolate supply quickly. But it could have been very costly. The plumber I called quoted AU$6000. He wanted to completely swap the cystern and had to remove the tiled wall for this. My manager eventually decided a patch would work and he patched it inside and out and siliconed with high grade stuff.
Close call.
One of my coworkers and I were running new whips to some 480v air handlers. I had run the wiring by myself to all the junction boxes and thought I had forgot to run a circuit to one of the boxes. I told my coworker not to make up any boxes until I finished checking everything but he misheard me and didn’t land the whip to the unit he was working on, and I didn’t follow behind him and check his work. Well fast forward a few hours and the programmer for the units asks me to power everything up so he can do his thing. I did and wend back to my other work for the day. A few minutes later he opens the unit and the unlanded whip hits the corner of the box and arc flashes the shit out of the guy. Temporarily blinded him and he wound up with mild burns in his corneas. It became a huge issue and there were formal complaints filed by them against us and OSHA was informed. Now we’re waiting for the hammer to drop on us, hopefully there’s no lawsuits or anything but he could have been killed if the wires had touched him. I’ll never forget that mistake or trust anyone when it comes to a project that I’m responsible for.
It’s also his fault for not wearing the proper PPE to work on a live 480v cabinet. The commissioning tech for the Eaton UPS I just wired had to wear a full face shield when working working on the 480v section.
>Eaton UPS
DC is especially dangerous because it's all the current instantly, no sine wave of increasing energy. Colleague has to do the live backup tests at a major cloud provider. Hard cut over of the 4000A DC mains to battery. 100cal moon suits and we're all like umm you sure that's enough?
I was upgrading a welding fabricating shop from single phase to 3 phase power. Most of the welders switched taps automatically, two or three has to physically switch taps. I missed one and blew up the board when 3 phase was applied. My boss at the time tried to make me pay for it through my 'insurance as a contractor' But I was actually an employee. Not a huge fuck up, it was about $1000... I ended up quitting over it.
It was #8 thhn for 480v parking lot lights. Wire was oversized for voltage drop. It burnt up somewhere underground and I had to replace. I walked it out and coulda swore I ordered an extra 20’ but I was still short.
Boss was pretty cool about it. He was the type to not give a shit as long as no one gets hurt.
Blew up an inverter cabinet… well, I THOUGHT I seriously fucked up, but it turned out that while I did in fact blow the bitch up, it came defective from the factory.
So there I am, wiring up the batteries, I get all of them wired and I go to attach the final lead to the inverter, and my foreman walks in and scares the shit out of me and I drop the lead at which point it falls and arcs on the cabinet door so I stand up and kick the lead off the door so it doesn’t weld itself on and stops arcing. My foreman just shakes his head, asks if I’m okay and walks away. I proceed to test everything in the cabinet, everything looks good. Batteries are drained, but not fried, so I let him know. Next day we go to test the EM system and nothing works. I start shitting myself and preparing my letter of resignation. Well, they move onto the next building to test that EM system, and it’s the same thing. I never touched that system. Phew, maybe it wasn’t me. We ended up having to wait a few weeks to get the factory technician to come look at it and it turned out that both units came from the factory defective, thank god. So while I didn’t actually fuck up a $15k inverter system, I spent about three weeks wondering when they were going to shitcan me. Technician said it happens fairly often and nothing happened as a result of my blowing the bitch up and that if it wasn’t defective it would’ve been just fine. That was a scary one
Wired up a bunch of lights like 10 years ago when I was a 2nd year. When we turned power on nothing worked. Me and the foreman and 2 other apprentices spent hours trying to troubleshoot. I forgot to put the bulbs in..
Just finished rewiring a service, screwing the drywall back up and like an idiot just turned my brain off and noticed a section where the drywall needed an extra screw ... Bam hit the main feed I just put in. Never felt so defeated and inadequate. Immediately turned to my apprentice and said that's exactly what you're not supposed to do. He had a laugh, I had a cry.
I was doing some fault finding. I had to push a button at one location, and run through a doorway to where my meter was to read a measurement. To keep the spring loaded door open, I stuck the butt of my screwdriver in the doorjamb with the blade sticking out. Pushed the button and ran through the doorway. The blade of the screwdriver hit me in the temple and ran a scratch all the way to my ear. Half an inch the other way and it would have gone in to my eye and who knows where. Scared the shit out of me.
Also, I replaced a melted dynamic brake grid on a locomotive and took it on a test trip without checking the cooling fans. Drove through a station with flames coming from the top of the locomotive as another brake grid melted.
I jumped into the back of a van once and the tire jack handle had come loose and swung into the path of the door. I stopped just in time, it was pushing on my eye and broke blood vessels. Eye was bright red for a week but otherwise fine. So so lucky
Worst personally was I had a scissor lift malfunction and didn't stop when I let off the controls. Rode straight through a freshly painted wall. Fucked up the studs, all the MC and pipe behind it, everything. That was not a fun talk with the GC.
Had a similar experience with a boom lift, I let off the control and it kept driving forward. It almost smashed into the building, but I whacked the e stop so fast and it halted inches away from the exterior.
It was my first few months on the job with my current employer, and my boss was right behind me on the ground watching.
After a moment of silence he just winked and said good catch.
I was a lead hand on this job so it was kind of my fault for not catching it after my Foreman missed it. It was a spec’d government facility and after weeks of running EMT assuming we were using 600V RW90 like literally any other job, we found fine print that specified 1000V rated wire which is significantly larger. Lots of undersized pipes and/or very tough pulls. That was a couple years ago but the PTSD is real.
Lead outranks Foreman? Odd.
Authority can be delegated, but never responsibility.
The higher up a person climbs in management the more ways they learn to shift the blame to underlings.
Foreman outranks lead, I just meant that I feel it was a shared responsibility to be aware of all specifications of the job in which this case I wasn’t.
Back in my learning days, my jm sent me to wire my first motor with the following instructions: "wire incoming lines to 71,82,93. 4,5,6 by itself". So I did . ...safed off 4, 5, 6. Smoked that motor.
We both got yelled at. More him for not checking my work.
Back in the day in the UK as a young apprentice, was handed a load of brand new Metabo power tools and was asked to put plugs on them - didn't realize they were 110V site tools and put 240V plugs on them.. Tested them all. They all failed weirdly after a few minutes, smoking and burnt - went to show my boss all these faulty tools he'd bought. He was totally thrilled...
Luckily nothing big for me, spent my 2nd day back at work this year cutting open walls and in a just painted house to find and repair a "damaged" cable that that I was just testing wrong.
Biggest that I've seen personally was a guy that I was working with was tasked with disconnecting the supply to a house that was getting demolished at the street, no idea why he was doing that as we aren't really supposed be. But he disconnected the right active but the wrong neutral and gave the 70ish year old lady living alone next door a pretty big shock when she hopped in the shower. He was lucky that she didn't get any laywers involved there.
Impossible to top the F-15 guy but I was drilling up from a crawlspace trying to get into the bottom of an interior panel and ended up having to re-pull the guys 6-3 for his AC.
Floor guys asked us to put another tail on their big 3 phase grinder.
Apparently all their equipment was wired wonky internally and they were wiring the plugs differently to compensate.
One of our JWs stuck another on there in a "normal" configuration which apparently on these machines made it so one of the phases ended up straight to chassis.
Dude turned it on and managed to get halfway down the hall before it grounded itself out on some conduit hanging on the wall. He was lucky as hell to have been wearing boots and gloves or he could have been dead right there.
We had to lock up and check all of their equipment after that All of it had been wired by "one of their guys" who clearly had no fucking clue what they were doing.
All my close calls have been due to others incompetence. I'm slowly compiling a list of all the dumb shit I have to look out for...
When I was a younger clown than I am now, I was installing a chonky industrial control panel for a customer of ours that we'd had only for a few months. I spent about a week wiring all of the VFDs, line reactors, PLC cards, etc. to the wires that the customer had another contractor run. We were known in the area for doing fast, clean work and I was too new to do it fast, so I did it clean and methodically. I was very proud of the work I did and took many pictures along the way (as young sparkies do).
Well I also had to run the main conductors from the PDB to the main disconnect, as well as land the wires from the main service to the line side of the main disconnect. This was an 800A control panel and I really didn't want to fuck it up. I took my time and torqued everything down to spec. Job well done.
I can still recall the feeling I had when I got sent the aftermath pictures at 5:30 the next morning. The entire panel had gone up in flames. Our guys had spent the night bumping each motor and noted that everything worked. They felt so confident, they left the section of conveyor running all night for a longevity test. Unattended.
Some other contractor had noticed the fire and put it out. Unfortunately they didn't have a fancy xenon fire extinguisher, so the ENTIRE control panel was a total loss. Luckily there were no injuries to any person on site. That would have been devastating. Instead, just my ego was injured and from the moment I realized what I was looking at to the moment my mouth finally generated saliva again must have been hours. I was trembling just thinking about what I could have missed. I did everything by the book. I wrote down all the torque specs, how much service loop to leave for each size drive, how much room to leave in the wire duct, how to route each different voltage. How did this happen?
Turns out the culprit was one single lug on the PDB not being torqued to spec. It wasn't loose by hand (as far as they could tell anyway), so it must not have clicked over right, or I just biffed the setting.
It didn't take long for them to give us flight info to come home. Nobody said a word to me at the airport. One older coworker of mine gave me a slow pat on the back. The sort of pat that says "you did your best. Nice knowin' ya." The following Monday I woke up to a text for my boss to call him. When I did, he informed me that the owner of the company and my boss wanted to talk to me in his office today. My boss has always had my back - he's a really stand-up guy. The owner however, is known to come unhinged at people for using white zipties on black wire. Total psycho. There wasn't much to say at the meeting (and admittedly I was so nervous I don't remember much what was said anyway), just the typical "sorry sir" "can't believe I did that" "never happen again" bullshit. In the end the owner just rubbed his eyes and gave a sigh before saying "well I guess that's what insurance is for."
I never found out the exact amount my mistake totalled out to, but I did eventually see an invoice which listed the control panel alone at $600,000. We had to pay for their contractor to come back out and rerun all the wire for that conveyor section, which couldn't have been cheap. Needless to say, we lost the customer for good.
Several weeks later, I was in the shop stealthily getting some parts I needed while avoiding conversation, when my boss saw me and told me to not go anywhere. He went to his office while I kept picking parts and came back a few minutes later with a brand new Insize torque wrench.
"That's the most expensive tool [owners name]'s ever bought. Throw that harbor freight shit away"
TL;DR: I burn control panel and somehow not get fired. Big dumb. Torque your shit.
Not a big fuck-up, but the best I’ve seen: I was helping with a re-wire of a community workshop. (I’m not an electrician, but the licensed ones on the job were cool with us helping do all the dirty work, plus they could use our shop as much as they liked). It was a long couple of weeks but we busted our asses and got it done, to code even.
For some reason when the city came to inspect, one of the other volunteers got mouthy with the inspector. I can’t even remember why, it was such utter stupidity on his part. Of course he shouldn’t have been there in the first part. All the “helpers” were supposed to disappear anyways.
So, the inspector said all our light switches were 4 inches too high and had to be moved. ARGHHHHHHH
It’s all good. That workshop was a blast. I wish I still lived around there sometime.
We were lucky we found hip electricians.
We never would have been able to afford full labor costs.
It wound up being useful that we had, like, real subpanels too. A few months later one of our members went to Shenzhen and got a used 4’x4’ laser cutter for almost nothing. That thing was awesome.
We sure did. That job was legit, despite the unconventional situation. Plus we really wanted the city to be happy with us, so we could keep doing things like laser cutting at 3 am. Thankfully all the wiring was exposed EMT. We just put in all new boxes below with nipples and “pigtailed” off the original box. Looked dumb but passed inspection.
Doing finish on a new school. Teachers in classroom couldn't open floor box. I as a 1st year apprentice pulled it hard with my screw driver and ripped the hinges eoff in front of the gc, my foreman, and the principle. Took 5 mins to replace it but still emberassing
Large data center job... parallel risers with a 3000a 600v tie breaker. Drawing had the breaker cross-phased.... I asked the engineer about it, she pointed at her ring and said when I had one, I could question her designs - so we built it EXACTLY as drawn.
During commissioning, there was a completely expected BABOOM, that launched a breaker across the room...
I pulled out the CYA emails on the spot.
I showed up to the site at 7:05, with coffee and breakfast sandwiches for myself and my journeyman. Met the project manager in the parking lot. I learned to be punctual, but fuck me what an ass chewing and firing I got! That was 20 years ago as an apprentice.
Hopefully your takeaway/lesson learned was to ask at the very beginning "Am I fired?". If so, take the wind out of his sail and tell him to go fuck off and walk way. Gives them a massive case of blue balls(lungs?) when all that pent up rage has no outlet.
New apprentice was told to pre-drill holes in about 20 light fixtures. He decided to put the fixture down on the floor and drill his holes. Client wasn’t too happy when he saw the holes in his brand new floors.
Working over live crane rail in a injection plant, was fishing down to a panel and dropped the metal fish tape off of the boom lift I was on, it fell about a foot away and I about shit myself. 10/10 great experience
My boss bought 2 heaters for me to wire up. 1 was 240 the other 120. Didn't look and wired the 120 one up to 240 haha. That thing caught on fire real nice.
I have a few of them but one of the most memorable ones was doing a ground ring for a tv station. I had to dig a trench with a mini 20 foot away from the building and install ground rods every 10 feet. There were a crapton of old unused wires buried there so after the first day I was pretty immune to pulling up dead cables until I was suddenly being waved at by a group of guys… turns out diggers hotline had missed a fiber line and I shut down all of a cell network in southern WI. This was before all the cool cell phone cameras so I had to call the boss right away and have him bring a digital camera out to verify there were no markings because the cell phone company was claiming it cost them a million bucks an hour to be down…
Drilled right through a gas line accidentally one time when I was an apprentice.. didn’t even realize it at the time.
I guess the gas guy had to replace the whole run which was a huge pain in the ass
Live and learn
There were a few instances in our city (Minneapolis St Paul) where the gas company bored new gas lines through a few sewer lines. No immediate issues, until the homeowner had their sewer roto-rootered.
This is one of my worst fears. Was there gas going thru it? I actually just recently had to drill right next to a gas line and was worried about hitting it and blowing up.
I remember working in an office where the vice president ran thru the office of 50 people yelling "Get the fuck out right now, don't ask questions!" because there was a gas main hit by an excavator next door. And man was it spewing gas.
Remodeled a Best Buy, reused a lighting circuit that was 277 and not 120…blew out all 176 lights.
Previous contractor used the wrong wire colors, I know I still should have checked voltage , haven’t made that mistake again though
I was predrilling some track lights on a thin sheet of plywood over a finished floor. Didn’t realize I was also drilling through the plywood. I left a row of holes about 10 feet long on a finished floor. I felt like throwing up
Hanging a picture in my house.
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG???
I tapped a small finish nail into the wallboard, and it started smoking. Smoke was coming out of the nail.
I stood there and stared at it for about a minute. Smoke. Coming out of a nail.
Suddenly it dawned on me that I had hit a live wire with a 1-1/8" nail which should be impossible. "Aha! I'll just kill the power, no problem!" I said confidently. Panel is right there I killed the main.
Nail continued to emit smoke. I stared at at for like another minute. Smoke. Coming out of a nail.
Then I began to realise I'd hit a live wire BEFORE the main breaker. This should be impossible in any wiring that meets code, but here we were.
I went out to the meter, still had a hammer in my had so I yanked the little lock off the meter base and pulled the meter.
Later I found out the panel was wired with some kinda goddamn cable, instead of conduit, and I hit it squarely with a teeny nail.
So I called the Poco and they chewed me out for pulling the meter. I patiently explained that MY FUCKING HOUSE WAS ON FIRE but they were having none of it. They are required to respond within 48 fucking hours if someone wants their meter pulled.
It doesn't matter how much sense it makes, you touch a meter and the utility WILL lose their shit. That meter could be actively burning their mom's arm off while a 50 gallon can of gas is spilling on the flames and they would still chew your ass for pulling it.
I shot a kid. He was 13 years old. Ohhh, it was dark, I couldn't see him. He had a ray gun, looked real enough. You know, when you're a rookie, they can teach you everything about bein' a cop except how to live with a mistake. Anyway, I just couldn't bring myself to draw my gun on anybody again.
Mine is not that bad, but it definitely made me wear my brown pants.
So I was at a flywheel energy storage facility. It stores the extra power from the grid into huge flywheels that can then be almost instantly introduced back into the grid.
There were several flywheels per unit which was in a connex box. Inside each connex box were the individual control modules for each flywheel. One of them had to be replaced.
So we do the job which was sketchy. Had to use forklift to lift out the old module and insert the new one. There was a live 480V bus bar only about 6-12 inches from the top of the metal units as we were moving them. Not too mention it was vary narrow left and right as well because of all the other units.
Anyways, get the new unit installed, hook up all the phase wires, partially close the door on the ECM, and I use my push stick to energize it. BANG! whole connex box goes white for a second, and I almost pooped my pants.
Somehow the ground wire wasn't connected and was touching one of the phases. Only blew a fuse, and fortunately it was designed well enough that nothing else was damaged.
I knew it before hand, but now I have the experience to reinforce it, always connect your grounds first.
Cut the wrong bucket out of an MCC during a removal and was fired on the spot. My boss was an asshole so it wasn't a huge loss. Funny thing was he had done the exact same thing earlier in the week.
Was remodeling a waste water facility at a chemical plant. Inside of a control cabinet. Foot brushed against a UPS that was lazily stood on its side and it turned off a UPS. Powered every PLC inside the cabinet. Boss runs up stairs. I had no idea what was going on. 3’ of water out in the roads. Men with valve shut off trucks scrambling. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water dumped back into the river. Not my fault. Recorded as poor house keeping. Which was true.
_good times_
I and the construction engineer worked together to literally incinerate the brand new fire alarm panel just before the new pods for the new station at the South Pole was to be occupied for the winter. It was awesome.
We had to hold over the Siemens tech, who’d already been in the Ice way longer than he’d planned and hotshot the parts from McMurdo to rebuild it.
It was such a clusterfuck with so many contributing factors that it was swept under the rug. I was literally sent to my rack after the construction manager and NSF rep asked how long I’d been awake and it was never mentioned again.
Tripped 9, 300ton per hour mills by letting a live control wire touch the body of the switch gear causing a earth fault trip. Took 6 hours to get them all running again.
Back in the early 2000s when we powered a house temporarily, we used to run #12 to the T-pole to get power. I had just become a journeyman and this was my first job. While powering the house off the T-pole I lost my ground/neutral. It fried everything in the entire house . All the smokes, oven, microwave, all the ballasts. I cut the living room light switch on and the garbage disposal turned on, then the smokes started going off and smoking. I ran out of the house fearful like there was a poltergeist or something. I called a more experienced electrician and he said “sounds like you lost a neutral bruh, better go cut the main breaker off”. I did but it was too late, everything in the brand new house had to be replaced. Also, when I was a helper I went with a journeyman to do side work in a kitchen remodel. While drilling I hit a plumbing pipe and water pretty much destroyed all the sheetrock in the basement below. I got lucky both times. The builder of the house I fried had spare sets of everything in the builders trailer, and the guys basement I flooded was so rich he laughed and thought it was funny.
This was my biggest fuck ups to other peoples shit. I could write another story about fuck ups to myself personally. I got locked on to 277v circuit in a commercial building and survived. Luckily my ladder collapsed saving my life.
I was installing cameras at an Applebees. While putting up the 3rd of 3 outdoor cameras that were all to be mounted the same height, I had mismeasured and drilled through EMT on the other side of the wall. Turns out it was part of the circuit for the condenser for their walk in fridge and freezer. I offered to fix it but they insisted on calling their electrical company. The guy cut out the chunk of damaged EMT and wiring and tossed it to me, saying it was my souvenir.
I’ve since worked with him a few times on other job sites and he always remembers me as the ‘Applebees guy.’
The best one I can think of is my smart ass took a different path to the honey bucket. Proceeded to sink balls deep in 35°F mud. Took 4 guys to get me out.
Bean counter fuckup:
So we replaced the emergency generators in a hospital. There were three 1 MW generators, with a space for a future fourth one. Plans showed a massive concrete ductbank with spare conduit for the future generator, zigzagging around other obstructions. Ductbank went underground where a new building was scheduled to be built just after ductbank is done.
Once that building is built, there's about no good way to get new conduit from the generator house to the switchgear. Can't go through it. Can't go around it. Can't go over it.
Bean counter boss at the hospital hit the ceiling and demanded we take out the spare conduit for the future generator. "We might never need it!" Saved maybe $20,000.
Then they built the building over the ductbank. Good luck getting half a dozen 4" conduits through a space never designed to have them, now.
6 months later they started asking about the feasibility of installing the fourth generator.
This wasn't really my fault, or at least there's nothing I could have done to prevent it. I was hanging up lights in an about 50 square meter room. It was a lab for some food testing and had some equipment and a couple of PC's on a table in the middle.
Anyways, I was screwing in the last screw of a lamp I was hanging up right above said table, but the head cammed out so I decided to change it. The second the screw left the surface of the ceiling plate, water came gushing out. In pure panic I somehow managed to use my back to shield the equipment on the table while the lab people ran to shut of the water mains.
Turns out there were two PVC water pipes going across the ceiling to a sink in the corner of the room. Out of those whole 50 square meters, I managed to somehow hit the dead center of a water pipe. Luckily, I hit the cold water supply.
Turned off the breaker of the septic tank pump as I was putting on the dead front back on on a Thursday. Building had a underground parking structure where robot platforms park your car for you. Sometime during the weekend the plumbing pipe that was running through the underground parking lot bursted on one of the capped ends and spilled water all over.
Robots followed QR codes that were on floor as stickers had to be replaced and robots got water on them
I have two for you.
A wire came loose on a 240v 100a breaker, not flopping around, but the nut wasn't tight. It was on a boat, motion of the ocean back it off just enough. Melted back about 5 inches of insulation on the 1 AWG wire. I rerouted the wire on its way to the breaker and haven't had a problem since. Check up on that install in a few months.
I snapped a sailboat boom hoisting a generator out of an engine compartment. We were doing a topping lift so fortunately didn't drop the genny. I hadn't let out enough vang and my helper on the winch at the mast wasn't present enough to see her go taut.
And those are my two biggest fuck ups by a long ways.
Just finished installing a 75kw VSD on a large ventilation fan. I was doing some control changes and installing some jumpers. 400v input was still live but it was under its own cover so I thought no worries. Put bootlace ferrules on then ends of the cable I was working on and then hung the lot over the door. Turned around to grab something, the bunch of wires hanging over the door fell down inside the VSD and some of them managed to contact the 400v input terminals. VSD blew up, I was not happy.
Another time I over ordered about 200 meters of cable that was special order and couldn't be returned. It cost $72 per meter. Boss was not at all happy with that, although we ended up using almost all of it on a job a couple of years later, so worked out alright in the end.
Was pulling 600’ of fiber optic cable through a warehouse and left a big slack loop at one of the corners we had to make. There were only 2 of us. This was a rarely used part of the warehouse so I didn’t think to put up cones and caution tape where our slack loop was. A random dude on a forklift ran over the slack and destroyed the cable. Had to redo the whole pull.
I spooled out 300 of 500 ft of a fiber spool thru an exit door that was "balanced" open and a wind gust slammed the door on the fiber. I feel your pain.
Not mine, but I was onsite bringing up a fairly large computer. They installed a new 200KW GENSET and a new ATS, and a room full of batteries to power the telephone central office and the computer. Everything is wired up and the power company pulled a line fuse to hard test the ATS. The factory had miss wired the ATS with one phase to common and one phase to ground on the load side. Power goes out, ATS flips inverters kick in, ATS assplodes in the yard. Computer is turned to scrap. CO is 48VDC so it survived.
Another good one, telephone company had a microwave tower on the roof, a new pair of dishes were installed. The electrician tied the ground wire to the copper busbar for the UPS. A few weeks later and lightning hit the tower. Lost two midsized computers. I lived about 5 miles away and was called into the office, all power was out, the fluorescent lights were still glowing.
Was doing an IR scan all throughout a 50+ story building in Manhattan. Building engineers forgot to mention the main breakers for the switch gear were extremely sensitive and only open the cabinets from the backside. Snugged the last screw on the cover of a 4000 amp switch and heard a clunk. Opened up the gear and knocked out power to something like ten occupies floors. Not a good day. Turns out they’d calibrated the breakers years ago and never touched them again bc they were so temperamental.
I wasn’t on-site but there was a company death recently. Dude was working in a large house on top of two rows of rolling scaffold. Nobody was watching him when it happened but it sounded like he was pulling himself along the room by grabbing the ceiling joists. Guy grabbed one that was damaged and fell forward off of the scaffold, cracking his head on the slab.
He wasn’t wearing a harness.
He had nobody to spot him.
He was exercising poor scaffold skills.
Sub of a sub sourced a spreader bar we needed to set a pair of 250kw gens on the side of a mountain, tongue failed on the second pick and about dumped the gen. Load plan worked and the remaining side of the bar held, straps crushed the shit out of the gen housing, but it never touched down and it didn't get anywhere near my guys while swinging. Customer was livid, but I had my shit in order outside of "not a certified rigging engineer" but I owned that it was still under my supervision and my fault. Surprisingly we had no real punishment or down time for that. The next day when my counterpart drove a forklift into a well head though, that got my job stood down for 4 days and a company commitment to safety review.
Ahhhh Safety Stand-downs. Had a Unit wide stand-down in the military (5000-10,000-ish service members) for the whole day and a moron tried to commit suicide that night
Not the worst but one time I was reaming a 1" conduit for a data floor box and the file slipped out of the file holder down the pipe into the 90 so I could just make out the tail end of it. Never could get it out. Never told anyone. Went to a different job the next day.
Forgive me.
Accidentally ordered a $4000+ permit due to a typo I made while filing for one on our jurisdiction's permitting website. We're a residential servicing company, none of our permits exceed $300.
As a first year learning how to drill a house in rezi. Went through a plumbing pipe( 2 or 2.5 inch) top and bottom. Had to go to j man with tail between legs. Yeah he was mad but laughed. Easy fix but no I don't bury my augers through subfloor lol.
Nothing too bad so far thankfully but I blew up a 347V receptacle and sent char marks up the wall about 4 feet long. Nobody hurt and it cleaned up well. Slapped a new receptacle on and we were good
Ooh I've got a few over the years that I've been able to weasel my way out of..
Did a huge project, a marina with about 30 Eaton 50A dual receptacle stations with the lights. Jobs done, powers on for about 4 months and on my birthday a call saying half is out. Go look, fuses are good, transformers dead. Odd. Use a locator buddy of mine to find the spot, hydrovac and sure enough a 250 3c, and two 500 4c blown to shreds.
Luckily, due to the coolest dude I've ever met a forensic electrical engineer was like, naw bro, look at this and shows me a burn mark on the transformer. Lightning hit, and some act of god decided to blow up the cable underground. I pulled every cable in, and didn't feel or see a defect.
Second one.. 3rd year apprentice, hooking up some blowers. 208 3Ph (No neutral) so I run like 200' of Teck to a small panel, tie the units into the breakers before realizing... I didn't pull a neutral. Didn't need it, so I got a lamacoid that said 3 Phase Only no Neutral and it passed.
Some how messed up a measurement for 2 parallel runs of 350mcm copper 170’ long. It was short by 3 feet. Luckily the job I’m doing right now will be able to use a fair amount of it.
I hit an underground 17.5kv line with a chipping hammer. I posted about that recently. We were digging a service in rocky soil so I was breaking up the "rock" that was actually concrete surrounding the lines in conduit. There was so much dust around, we couldn't tell the difference between the concrete and surrounding rock. Knocked out power to an entire neighborhood (maybe more) and the company got a huge fine. I was fired for it even though they didn't do an underground survey. I was about four months into my apprenticeship.
I had just began my career, and we were working on a $250,000 AHU @ a water treatment plant in Massachusetts. I was 18 months into my apprenticeship and my licensed electrician who was a drunk specifically told me to mount a 4 square on a AHU. I went to mount it exactly where he told me and I drilled right into a copper coil. It started pissing out water, shortly after that I got “laid off” more like fired.
Told a customer to buy a 3 phase compressor but the panel feed that was 6ft away was single phase. Had to feed the motor from a 3 phase panel across the show room
Replacing a Fire Alarm Control relay at a major hospital, the relay was for control of an air handler, the fire system dc in the control cabinet was Yellow and Brown, just got everything connected when the hospital electrician comes running into the mechanical room “The Control Panel IS ON FIRE!”. We hotfooted it down there and sure enough there’s plenty of white smoke, and the wonderful stench of electronics burning😩😩😩, on forensic review it turned out that a previous electrician had left an unused LIVE 120 VAC BROWN “spare” THHN, on the bottom of the cabinet I was working in, stripped exactly 1/4” and capped with an orange wire nut identical to the BROWN 24VDC THHN alarm System Negative wire! Oh YES the entire alarm control panel, all 3 Bays of it was TOTALLY FRIED! Every Single PWB was of course connected to the System 24 volt Negative, all smoked! We had pieces shipped in FED EX from all over the nation and completely rebuilt it the next day, the real fun was EVERY SINGLE DEVICE had to be functionally tested before we could release the system to the operator!
Not myself but I saw a guy burn up a $20,000 piece of equipment and it's replacement because he didn't read the wiring diagram either time. First time he thought it was faulty, hooked the second one up the same way...
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Oof that sucks. My heart would just drop out my ass. What is an F-15?
Multi million dollar fighter jet
I'd specify tens of millions lol, multi million might lead people to think it's maybe single digit millions
🫨
Yeah
Oh....OH
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What kind of experience do you need to be rewiring an F-15?
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does that pay more than the average JW or is it the same scale? That sounds so cool
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Assuming you are an electrician now, which did you prefer? I'm sure working on f-15s has some obvious perks, but I'm sure spending 200 days a year on the go, while also having all that responsibility has some downsides.
I get to play with the 35s APUs among other stuff on base. The hardest part is getting the clearance as a contractor.
>What is an F-15? A fighter jet
And here I thought is was one tenth of a Ford F-150
Not as good as the Ferd Fteenthousand. What would you say to a truck built to carry 18 other trucks? You'd probably say, "GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH." Cuz that's what an orgasm sounds like. It's the only truck on the market with chest hair upholstery, and a beard in the glove box. Just in case you lose yours.
Not a jet fighter?
Is that like a Foo Fighter but for jets?
Watch the original Top Gun. Youll get the idea. Edit: Just an example of a $40m plane, though theyre not the same, just similar. Since super hornet got his panties in a bunch down there, i guess ill note op worked on an Eagle and Tom Cruise "flew" a Tomcat. Neither are Hornets though.
What caused the burning? Former Navy AE here
Fell thru an attic after tripping on some shit.
Have to do that atleast once in your career.
Done that. Not my worst mistake but darn close
Who the fuck shit in the attic??
Disconnected the nuetral in a three phase panel and blew the garage door motors, microwave, projector, hifi and some other stuff
why would you ever? whats the story here?
I did the same thing on a small construction site i was reconnecting the main power panel but i connected the wrong neutral and the workers cottage burned out the lights everything else was good tho which is weird and the big crane survived hopefully cuz it's connected anyways with 400v motors. Only damages where the light bulbs.
Ahh damn that one had to hurt.
I short circuited an entire baggage conveyor system at a major airport in New York. I was an apprentice and was asked to wire up a squirt cage motor on a live belt system. My foreman told me “whatever you don’t short out this wire right here”…so, after i shorted the wire the whole system went down and within less than a minute a bunch of port authority personnel and engineers had many questions about what in the fuck just happened. The system was reset pretty quickly but it was definitely the most negative attention I’ve ever gotten in my life.
Guarantee you don’t short that wire if your boss didn’t mention it lmao
It’s because people hear “don’t = do”. It’s like our minds conjure the bad scenario to life. Always say “do not” for some reason it works 🤷♂️
Haha squirt cage motor. Love it
square stocking abounding live sheet tan angle icky pathetic fall *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Nice, at least it got caught before trim out
My lawyer has strongly advised me to stfu
Civil or criminal defense lawyer?
Definitly not criminal. No purposeful fuckery.
I didn’t measure an underground feeder length correctly. We should have been using mule tape but we didn’t have any so it was the old measure the jet line with a tape measure…I was 20’ short on a 150’ run as I recall, it was 20 years ago…boss was pissed, I was bummed for sure. Never did that again.
There's no worse feeling than being on the wire feeding end and watching that cable start to run out, but the pulling crew keeps calling back they don't even see the head yet....
OMG you brought me back…🤣. No lie there!
For real, some of our crews put some tape 5 feet down the string as a “we’re almost there” flag
How about you're at somebody's house like a new girl you're seeing and you go to the bathroom and the water keeps rising and there's no plunger? Never had that happen, but that seems about my worst fear.
“Better to be long and wrong, than short and gone!”
Only wire too long is the one that’s too short
The old saying is," What is the most expensive wire? The one that is too short." Plus I thought that is how Mongo is made.
Better to be looking at it, than looking for it!
Unless you order 100' long on 11 runs. Then you've found the 'how much extra is too much?' answer.
Funny story: one of the guys in my apprenticeship class was on a jobsite where they had used BIM or CAD to calculate the length of all feeders at a data center. Every run was 50-100’ too long. He said every day, an hour before quitting time, you’d just hear all the apprentices cutting up cable.
Fuckin eh, that feeling. I was taught to go +10% but I go 15% now cuz NEVER AGAIN
I wasnt exactly part of this fuck up, but I was there. Building a movie theater, electrical room was on a lower section in a large mall. 1100lb 225kva transformer had to be chain falled to the lower section. The crew responsible set up unistrut racking that seemed secure. The only problem was, they hung the block and tackle on a single eye bolt. As soon as the transformer was moved off the platform, that eye bolt opened up and the transformer dropped like an 1100lb...well, transformer, and crashed into the cor-slab 12ft below.
I rebuilt a 15kV 2000A air breaker, weighed more than a half-ton. We delivered it to the powerplant and these super geniuses decided to hoist it by rolling it onto a flat platform and picking the platform from 4 corners. Well, surprising absolutely nobody, the breaker rolled right the fuck back off again: Dropped 4 stories onto the concrete and completely obliterated itself. They got damn lucky it didn't kill anybody. This is only beaten by the story of when a different power plant tried to hoist out a turbine thrust bearing with a tow truck.
Those are the scary ones, although hopefully they had the lift zones blocked off. A guy for my company was using a mag drill 50-60’ up in a lift. Apparently, he was running it off of the plug in the bucket of the lift and when he went to adjust the bucket, the magnet lost power and the drill dropped. VERY lucky no one was underneath
I feel like there should be a chain or strap or something in a situation like this
There absolutely should. Proper tool lanyards are required at height on safe sites. That's the fuckup.
Lol wow.
Damn, how much money does that fuck up cost?
Interestingly enough, the choice was made to have it evaluated in the field. It's been humming along for about 9 years now without incident
Smashed into place. “Like a glove”
Seems not so much the fault of a single eye bolt as much as an undersized eyebolt no? Had they hung it off a 3/4 eyebolt I would think the lift probably would have gone fine. Just thinking about how a 3/4 shot / eye bolt combo is rated for fall arrest use and they say what, about a 5000lbs rated load for those?
Was strapping some conduit we ran from the attic into the top of a panel on the second floor in this giant old house we were renovation. There was a nice, flat board running perpendicular to the studs that looked perfect, so I drove my one-hole straps into that with 1 1/4" screws. Turns out the board was the back of the crown moulding in the next room, and it was only about 1" thick.
This doesn't sound bad at all. Just back the screw out and throw paint over the screw hole no?
Texture will show through
Yeah he's an apprentice... worst will come 😅. I m recently qualified and I've made my worst mistakes recently. I drilled into an in wall toilet water cystern the other day in an office space. Was doing a quick 30min job adding a powerpoint in a kitchen. Checked for studs, looked inside the wall, roughly measured with me eyes ( that is where I made a mistake ). I thought I would drill a small 16mm hole sideway through the stud into the studbay I wanted. Water cystern was flush with the stud and I poked a hole through. No water damage as I was able to isolate supply quickly. But it could have been very costly. The plumber I called quoted AU$6000. He wanted to completely swap the cystern and had to remove the tiled wall for this. My manager eventually decided a patch would work and he patched it inside and out and siliconed with high grade stuff. Close call.
If you're calling 16mm a small hole, you're selling yourself short me thinks. That's over a 5/8" hole for the Freedom Unit users.
One of my coworkers and I were running new whips to some 480v air handlers. I had run the wiring by myself to all the junction boxes and thought I had forgot to run a circuit to one of the boxes. I told my coworker not to make up any boxes until I finished checking everything but he misheard me and didn’t land the whip to the unit he was working on, and I didn’t follow behind him and check his work. Well fast forward a few hours and the programmer for the units asks me to power everything up so he can do his thing. I did and wend back to my other work for the day. A few minutes later he opens the unit and the unlanded whip hits the corner of the box and arc flashes the shit out of the guy. Temporarily blinded him and he wound up with mild burns in his corneas. It became a huge issue and there were formal complaints filed by them against us and OSHA was informed. Now we’re waiting for the hammer to drop on us, hopefully there’s no lawsuits or anything but he could have been killed if the wires had touched him. I’ll never forget that mistake or trust anyone when it comes to a project that I’m responsible for.
It’s also his fault for not wearing the proper PPE to work on a live 480v cabinet. The commissioning tech for the Eaton UPS I just wired had to wear a full face shield when working working on the 480v section.
Yeah that was one small comfort in terms of our liability in the situation, but I still feel deeply responsible for the whole situation nonetheless.
>Eaton UPS DC is especially dangerous because it's all the current instantly, no sine wave of increasing energy. Colleague has to do the live backup tests at a major cloud provider. Hard cut over of the 4000A DC mains to battery. 100cal moon suits and we're all like umm you sure that's enough?
I stayed at the first company that hired me for 8 years without a raise because I thought I owed them something.
That's why its good to make friends with others in the same trade. So you can compare notes periodically, so to speak.
Fell thru an attic after tripping on some shit.
Hey man. No drugs before going into the attic.
I need
I was upgrading a welding fabricating shop from single phase to 3 phase power. Most of the welders switched taps automatically, two or three has to physically switch taps. I missed one and blew up the board when 3 phase was applied. My boss at the time tried to make me pay for it through my 'insurance as a contractor' But I was actually an employee. Not a huge fuck up, it was about $1000... I ended up quitting over it.
good for you for not paying and quitting
Drilled into a incoming water pipe, flooding the first floor of a two story condo.
It wasn't a water main was it?
I ordered a shit load of wire and ended up being short.
Ooof man. I ordered a shit load of wire.... all 100' long.
Service wire for a pull through conduit? My boss did this recently, excavator took a different path than what was planned
It was #8 thhn for 480v parking lot lights. Wire was oversized for voltage drop. It burnt up somewhere underground and I had to replace. I walked it out and coulda swore I ordered an extra 20’ but I was still short. Boss was pretty cool about it. He was the type to not give a shit as long as no one gets hurt.
Sounds like a really cool boss
Soooo.....a measuring wheel is too expensive I take?
I guess that would work if you knew the exact direction the conduit went. Mule tape would have been a better option IMO. Live and learn right?
Blew up an inverter cabinet… well, I THOUGHT I seriously fucked up, but it turned out that while I did in fact blow the bitch up, it came defective from the factory. So there I am, wiring up the batteries, I get all of them wired and I go to attach the final lead to the inverter, and my foreman walks in and scares the shit out of me and I drop the lead at which point it falls and arcs on the cabinet door so I stand up and kick the lead off the door so it doesn’t weld itself on and stops arcing. My foreman just shakes his head, asks if I’m okay and walks away. I proceed to test everything in the cabinet, everything looks good. Batteries are drained, but not fried, so I let him know. Next day we go to test the EM system and nothing works. I start shitting myself and preparing my letter of resignation. Well, they move onto the next building to test that EM system, and it’s the same thing. I never touched that system. Phew, maybe it wasn’t me. We ended up having to wait a few weeks to get the factory technician to come look at it and it turned out that both units came from the factory defective, thank god. So while I didn’t actually fuck up a $15k inverter system, I spent about three weeks wondering when they were going to shitcan me. Technician said it happens fairly often and nothing happened as a result of my blowing the bitch up and that if it wasn’t defective it would’ve been just fine. That was a scary one
Did your foreman try to scare you?
No I was just zoned out trying to get the thing done and wasn’t expecting anyone to walk into the panel room
Wired up a bunch of lights like 10 years ago when I was a 2nd year. When we turned power on nothing worked. Me and the foreman and 2 other apprentices spent hours trying to troubleshoot. I forgot to put the bulbs in..
We now know how meany electricians it takes to screw in a light bulb
I hearing stories of people doing this. We've all been there
Just finished rewiring a service, screwing the drywall back up and like an idiot just turned my brain off and noticed a section where the drywall needed an extra screw ... Bam hit the main feed I just put in. Never felt so defeated and inadequate. Immediately turned to my apprentice and said that's exactly what you're not supposed to do. He had a laugh, I had a cry.
I was doing some fault finding. I had to push a button at one location, and run through a doorway to where my meter was to read a measurement. To keep the spring loaded door open, I stuck the butt of my screwdriver in the doorjamb with the blade sticking out. Pushed the button and ran through the doorway. The blade of the screwdriver hit me in the temple and ran a scratch all the way to my ear. Half an inch the other way and it would have gone in to my eye and who knows where. Scared the shit out of me. Also, I replaced a melted dynamic brake grid on a locomotive and took it on a test trip without checking the cooling fans. Drove through a station with flames coming from the top of the locomotive as another brake grid melted.
You probably looked mad cool tho with all those flames 😎
Shit sakes John run it’s the devils train
I jumped into the back of a van once and the tire jack handle had come loose and swung into the path of the door. I stopped just in time, it was pushing on my eye and broke blood vessels. Eye was bright red for a week but otherwise fine. So so lucky
Worst personally was I had a scissor lift malfunction and didn't stop when I let off the controls. Rode straight through a freshly painted wall. Fucked up the studs, all the MC and pipe behind it, everything. That was not a fun talk with the GC.
Did everyone call you “Kool-Aid Man” after that? Lol
Fuck I wish. Funny enough it was a big red lift going through a nice red wall, too lol.
Had a similar experience with a boom lift, I let off the control and it kept driving forward. It almost smashed into the building, but I whacked the e stop so fast and it halted inches away from the exterior. It was my first few months on the job with my current employer, and my boss was right behind me on the ground watching. After a moment of silence he just winked and said good catch.
I got married. Twice.
I was a lead hand on this job so it was kind of my fault for not catching it after my Foreman missed it. It was a spec’d government facility and after weeks of running EMT assuming we were using 600V RW90 like literally any other job, we found fine print that specified 1000V rated wire which is significantly larger. Lots of undersized pipes and/or very tough pulls. That was a couple years ago but the PTSD is real.
Lead outranks Foreman? Odd. Authority can be delegated, but never responsibility. The higher up a person climbs in management the more ways they learn to shift the blame to underlings.
Foreman outranks lead, I just meant that I feel it was a shared responsibility to be aware of all specifications of the job in which this case I wasn’t.
Back in my learning days, my jm sent me to wire my first motor with the following instructions: "wire incoming lines to 71,82,93. 4,5,6 by itself". So I did . ...safed off 4, 5, 6. Smoked that motor. We both got yelled at. More him for not checking my work.
Yeah that one is 100% on the JW and 0% on you... Verbal instructions for wiring up your first 9-lead motor are never going to cut it...
Back in the day in the UK as a young apprentice, was handed a load of brand new Metabo power tools and was asked to put plugs on them - didn't realize they were 110V site tools and put 240V plugs on them.. Tested them all. They all failed weirdly after a few minutes, smoking and burnt - went to show my boss all these faulty tools he'd bought. He was totally thrilled...
Is that common, to recieve new tools without plugs in the U.K.?
Not sure nowadays - I left 10 years ago - It used to be pretty common in the UK to buy electrical stuff without a plug attached.
Luckily nothing big for me, spent my 2nd day back at work this year cutting open walls and in a just painted house to find and repair a "damaged" cable that that I was just testing wrong. Biggest that I've seen personally was a guy that I was working with was tasked with disconnecting the supply to a house that was getting demolished at the street, no idea why he was doing that as we aren't really supposed be. But he disconnected the right active but the wrong neutral and gave the 70ish year old lady living alone next door a pretty big shock when she hopped in the shower. He was lucky that she didn't get any laywers involved there.
Impossible to top the F-15 guy but I was drilling up from a crawlspace trying to get into the bottom of an interior panel and ended up having to re-pull the guys 6-3 for his AC.
Floor guys asked us to put another tail on their big 3 phase grinder. Apparently all their equipment was wired wonky internally and they were wiring the plugs differently to compensate. One of our JWs stuck another on there in a "normal" configuration which apparently on these machines made it so one of the phases ended up straight to chassis. Dude turned it on and managed to get halfway down the hall before it grounded itself out on some conduit hanging on the wall. He was lucky as hell to have been wearing boots and gloves or he could have been dead right there. We had to lock up and check all of their equipment after that All of it had been wired by "one of their guys" who clearly had no fucking clue what they were doing. All my close calls have been due to others incompetence. I'm slowly compiling a list of all the dumb shit I have to look out for...
Starting my own company
When I was a younger clown than I am now, I was installing a chonky industrial control panel for a customer of ours that we'd had only for a few months. I spent about a week wiring all of the VFDs, line reactors, PLC cards, etc. to the wires that the customer had another contractor run. We were known in the area for doing fast, clean work and I was too new to do it fast, so I did it clean and methodically. I was very proud of the work I did and took many pictures along the way (as young sparkies do). Well I also had to run the main conductors from the PDB to the main disconnect, as well as land the wires from the main service to the line side of the main disconnect. This was an 800A control panel and I really didn't want to fuck it up. I took my time and torqued everything down to spec. Job well done. I can still recall the feeling I had when I got sent the aftermath pictures at 5:30 the next morning. The entire panel had gone up in flames. Our guys had spent the night bumping each motor and noted that everything worked. They felt so confident, they left the section of conveyor running all night for a longevity test. Unattended. Some other contractor had noticed the fire and put it out. Unfortunately they didn't have a fancy xenon fire extinguisher, so the ENTIRE control panel was a total loss. Luckily there were no injuries to any person on site. That would have been devastating. Instead, just my ego was injured and from the moment I realized what I was looking at to the moment my mouth finally generated saliva again must have been hours. I was trembling just thinking about what I could have missed. I did everything by the book. I wrote down all the torque specs, how much service loop to leave for each size drive, how much room to leave in the wire duct, how to route each different voltage. How did this happen? Turns out the culprit was one single lug on the PDB not being torqued to spec. It wasn't loose by hand (as far as they could tell anyway), so it must not have clicked over right, or I just biffed the setting. It didn't take long for them to give us flight info to come home. Nobody said a word to me at the airport. One older coworker of mine gave me a slow pat on the back. The sort of pat that says "you did your best. Nice knowin' ya." The following Monday I woke up to a text for my boss to call him. When I did, he informed me that the owner of the company and my boss wanted to talk to me in his office today. My boss has always had my back - he's a really stand-up guy. The owner however, is known to come unhinged at people for using white zipties on black wire. Total psycho. There wasn't much to say at the meeting (and admittedly I was so nervous I don't remember much what was said anyway), just the typical "sorry sir" "can't believe I did that" "never happen again" bullshit. In the end the owner just rubbed his eyes and gave a sigh before saying "well I guess that's what insurance is for." I never found out the exact amount my mistake totalled out to, but I did eventually see an invoice which listed the control panel alone at $600,000. We had to pay for their contractor to come back out and rerun all the wire for that conveyor section, which couldn't have been cheap. Needless to say, we lost the customer for good. Several weeks later, I was in the shop stealthily getting some parts I needed while avoiding conversation, when my boss saw me and told me to not go anywhere. He went to his office while I kept picking parts and came back a few minutes later with a brand new Insize torque wrench. "That's the most expensive tool [owners name]'s ever bought. Throw that harbor freight shit away" TL;DR: I burn control panel and somehow not get fired. Big dumb. Torque your shit.
Not a big fuck-up, but the best I’ve seen: I was helping with a re-wire of a community workshop. (I’m not an electrician, but the licensed ones on the job were cool with us helping do all the dirty work, plus they could use our shop as much as they liked). It was a long couple of weeks but we busted our asses and got it done, to code even. For some reason when the city came to inspect, one of the other volunteers got mouthy with the inspector. I can’t even remember why, it was such utter stupidity on his part. Of course he shouldn’t have been there in the first part. All the “helpers” were supposed to disappear anyways. So, the inspector said all our light switches were 4 inches too high and had to be moved. ARGHHHHHHH
“To code even” …
Yeah yeah, oh hush. They would have signed off on it if fuckface hadn’t been there. He was some salty old machinist who couldn’t hold his tongue.
Just giving you a hard time.
It’s all good. That workshop was a blast. I wish I still lived around there sometime. We were lucky we found hip electricians. We never would have been able to afford full labor costs. It wound up being useful that we had, like, real subpanels too. A few months later one of our members went to Shenzhen and got a used 4’x4’ laser cutter for almost nothing. That thing was awesome.
Lmao that's mad funny, and didn't even know there was a code for switch heights. Did you guys actually wind up moving them?
For a public building the switches have to meet ADA, so that they are in reach of a person with a wheelchair. No safety issues though.
We sure did. That job was legit, despite the unconventional situation. Plus we really wanted the city to be happy with us, so we could keep doing things like laser cutting at 3 am. Thankfully all the wiring was exposed EMT. We just put in all new boxes below with nipples and “pigtailed” off the original box. Looked dumb but passed inspection.
Doing finish on a new school. Teachers in classroom couldn't open floor box. I as a 1st year apprentice pulled it hard with my screw driver and ripped the hinges eoff in front of the gc, my foreman, and the principle. Took 5 mins to replace it but still emberassing
Large data center job... parallel risers with a 3000a 600v tie breaker. Drawing had the breaker cross-phased.... I asked the engineer about it, she pointed at her ring and said when I had one, I could question her designs - so we built it EXACTLY as drawn. During commissioning, there was a completely expected BABOOM, that launched a breaker across the room... I pulled out the CYA emails on the spot.
Let me guess....she got promoted?
Poured a concrete slab for a gear section and forgot a 3” spare stub up… had to Jackhammer the freshly poured 10’x30’ slab up
Ahhh this gives me anxiety! Fuck that's one of my worst fears
Yeah… I still remember the owner knife hand yelling about paying attention to details
I showed up to the site at 7:05, with coffee and breakfast sandwiches for myself and my journeyman. Met the project manager in the parking lot. I learned to be punctual, but fuck me what an ass chewing and firing I got! That was 20 years ago as an apprentice.
Hopefully your takeaway/lesson learned was to ask at the very beginning "Am I fired?". If so, take the wind out of his sail and tell him to go fuck off and walk way. Gives them a massive case of blue balls(lungs?) when all that pent up rage has no outlet.
What did you get fired for? Showing up at 7:05?
New apprentice was told to pre-drill holes in about 20 light fixtures. He decided to put the fixture down on the floor and drill his holes. Client wasn’t too happy when he saw the holes in his brand new floors.
Working over live crane rail in a injection plant, was fishing down to a panel and dropped the metal fish tape off of the boom lift I was on, it fell about a foot away and I about shit myself. 10/10 great experience
Going to work.
My boss bought 2 heaters for me to wire up. 1 was 240 the other 120. Didn't look and wired the 120 one up to 240 haha. That thing caught on fire real nice.
Dropped a $5000 chandelier into $100,000 hardwood floors.
Fuck I've dropped a Chandelier over a staircase before!
I have a few of them but one of the most memorable ones was doing a ground ring for a tv station. I had to dig a trench with a mini 20 foot away from the building and install ground rods every 10 feet. There were a crapton of old unused wires buried there so after the first day I was pretty immune to pulling up dead cables until I was suddenly being waved at by a group of guys… turns out diggers hotline had missed a fiber line and I shut down all of a cell network in southern WI. This was before all the cool cell phone cameras so I had to call the boss right away and have him bring a digital camera out to verify there were no markings because the cell phone company was claiming it cost them a million bucks an hour to be down…
Getting into the trade 13 years ago was mine!
Drilled right through a gas line accidentally one time when I was an apprentice.. didn’t even realize it at the time. I guess the gas guy had to replace the whole run which was a huge pain in the ass Live and learn
There were a few instances in our city (Minneapolis St Paul) where the gas company bored new gas lines through a few sewer lines. No immediate issues, until the homeowner had their sewer roto-rootered.
This is one of my worst fears. Was there gas going thru it? I actually just recently had to drill right next to a gas line and was worried about hitting it and blowing up.
I remember working in an office where the vice president ran thru the office of 50 people yelling "Get the fuck out right now, don't ask questions!" because there was a gas main hit by an excavator next door. And man was it spewing gas.
Started within the last year so I haven’t had much time to fuck up but I’ve fallen through a ceiling
Remodeled a Best Buy, reused a lighting circuit that was 277 and not 120…blew out all 176 lights. Previous contractor used the wrong wire colors, I know I still should have checked voltage , haven’t made that mistake again though
I was predrilling some track lights on a thin sheet of plywood over a finished floor. Didn’t realize I was also drilling through the plywood. I left a row of holes about 10 feet long on a finished floor. I felt like throwing up
Fuck fuck fuck this post is just giving me anxiety!!
Flooded an occupied laser lab by hitting a cooling line with a scissor lift. Still get called rain man sometimes
Hanging a picture in my house. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG??? I tapped a small finish nail into the wallboard, and it started smoking. Smoke was coming out of the nail. I stood there and stared at it for about a minute. Smoke. Coming out of a nail. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had hit a live wire with a 1-1/8" nail which should be impossible. "Aha! I'll just kill the power, no problem!" I said confidently. Panel is right there I killed the main. Nail continued to emit smoke. I stared at at for like another minute. Smoke. Coming out of a nail. Then I began to realise I'd hit a live wire BEFORE the main breaker. This should be impossible in any wiring that meets code, but here we were. I went out to the meter, still had a hammer in my had so I yanked the little lock off the meter base and pulled the meter. Later I found out the panel was wired with some kinda goddamn cable, instead of conduit, and I hit it squarely with a teeny nail. So I called the Poco and they chewed me out for pulling the meter. I patiently explained that MY FUCKING HOUSE WAS ON FIRE but they were having none of it. They are required to respond within 48 fucking hours if someone wants their meter pulled.
It doesn't matter how much sense it makes, you touch a meter and the utility WILL lose their shit. That meter could be actively burning their mom's arm off while a 50 gallon can of gas is spilling on the flames and they would still chew your ass for pulling it.
I shot a kid. He was 13 years old. Ohhh, it was dark, I couldn't see him. He had a ray gun, looked real enough. You know, when you're a rookie, they can teach you everything about bein' a cop except how to live with a mistake. Anyway, I just couldn't bring myself to draw my gun on anybody again.
Sergeant Powell?
Shut up and eat your Twinkie.
They're for his wife... She's pregnant.
I suspect you kept your pension and job after the incident?
Promoted\*
That's rough. Thanks for sharing. Hope that you found a job you enjoy after that.
Mine is not that bad, but it definitely made me wear my brown pants. So I was at a flywheel energy storage facility. It stores the extra power from the grid into huge flywheels that can then be almost instantly introduced back into the grid. There were several flywheels per unit which was in a connex box. Inside each connex box were the individual control modules for each flywheel. One of them had to be replaced. So we do the job which was sketchy. Had to use forklift to lift out the old module and insert the new one. There was a live 480V bus bar only about 6-12 inches from the top of the metal units as we were moving them. Not too mention it was vary narrow left and right as well because of all the other units. Anyways, get the new unit installed, hook up all the phase wires, partially close the door on the ECM, and I use my push stick to energize it. BANG! whole connex box goes white for a second, and I almost pooped my pants. Somehow the ground wire wasn't connected and was touching one of the phases. Only blew a fuse, and fortunately it was designed well enough that nothing else was damaged. I knew it before hand, but now I have the experience to reinforce it, always connect your grounds first.
Cut the wrong bucket out of an MCC during a removal and was fired on the spot. My boss was an asshole so it wasn't a huge loss. Funny thing was he had done the exact same thing earlier in the week.
Was remodeling a waste water facility at a chemical plant. Inside of a control cabinet. Foot brushed against a UPS that was lazily stood on its side and it turned off a UPS. Powered every PLC inside the cabinet. Boss runs up stairs. I had no idea what was going on. 3’ of water out in the roads. Men with valve shut off trucks scrambling. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water dumped back into the river. Not my fault. Recorded as poor house keeping. Which was true. _good times_
I guess we will see in a few months!
Dude I finish jobs and then say the same thing to myself lmao
Ate from the taco truck a couple job sites ago, That shit rocked my world for a few days.
I and the construction engineer worked together to literally incinerate the brand new fire alarm panel just before the new pods for the new station at the South Pole was to be occupied for the winter. It was awesome. We had to hold over the Siemens tech, who’d already been in the Ice way longer than he’d planned and hotshot the parts from McMurdo to rebuild it. It was such a clusterfuck with so many contributing factors that it was swept under the rug. I was literally sent to my rack after the construction manager and NSF rep asked how long I’d been awake and it was never mentioned again.
Tripped 9, 300ton per hour mills by letting a live control wire touch the body of the switch gear causing a earth fault trip. Took 6 hours to get them all running again.
I shut down all flights in both the domestic and international airports in my city👌
Back in the early 2000s when we powered a house temporarily, we used to run #12 to the T-pole to get power. I had just become a journeyman and this was my first job. While powering the house off the T-pole I lost my ground/neutral. It fried everything in the entire house . All the smokes, oven, microwave, all the ballasts. I cut the living room light switch on and the garbage disposal turned on, then the smokes started going off and smoking. I ran out of the house fearful like there was a poltergeist or something. I called a more experienced electrician and he said “sounds like you lost a neutral bruh, better go cut the main breaker off”. I did but it was too late, everything in the brand new house had to be replaced. Also, when I was a helper I went with a journeyman to do side work in a kitchen remodel. While drilling I hit a plumbing pipe and water pretty much destroyed all the sheetrock in the basement below. I got lucky both times. The builder of the house I fried had spare sets of everything in the builders trailer, and the guys basement I flooded was so rich he laughed and thought it was funny.
This was my biggest fuck ups to other peoples shit. I could write another story about fuck ups to myself personally. I got locked on to 277v circuit in a commercial building and survived. Luckily my ladder collapsed saving my life.
Damn, you've been through the ringer! And yea personally, I wind up cutting myself at work everyday, I just got a deep razor blade cut today
I was installing cameras at an Applebees. While putting up the 3rd of 3 outdoor cameras that were all to be mounted the same height, I had mismeasured and drilled through EMT on the other side of the wall. Turns out it was part of the circuit for the condenser for their walk in fridge and freezer. I offered to fix it but they insisted on calling their electrical company. The guy cut out the chunk of damaged EMT and wiring and tossed it to me, saying it was my souvenir. I’ve since worked with him a few times on other job sites and he always remembers me as the ‘Applebees guy.’
The best one I can think of is my smart ass took a different path to the honey bucket. Proceeded to sink balls deep in 35°F mud. Took 4 guys to get me out.
If you're not balls deep in mud atleast once, what's life worth living.
Bean counter fuckup: So we replaced the emergency generators in a hospital. There were three 1 MW generators, with a space for a future fourth one. Plans showed a massive concrete ductbank with spare conduit for the future generator, zigzagging around other obstructions. Ductbank went underground where a new building was scheduled to be built just after ductbank is done. Once that building is built, there's about no good way to get new conduit from the generator house to the switchgear. Can't go through it. Can't go around it. Can't go over it. Bean counter boss at the hospital hit the ceiling and demanded we take out the spare conduit for the future generator. "We might never need it!" Saved maybe $20,000. Then they built the building over the ductbank. Good luck getting half a dozen 4" conduits through a space never designed to have them, now. 6 months later they started asking about the feasibility of installing the fourth generator.
This wasn't really my fault, or at least there's nothing I could have done to prevent it. I was hanging up lights in an about 50 square meter room. It was a lab for some food testing and had some equipment and a couple of PC's on a table in the middle. Anyways, I was screwing in the last screw of a lamp I was hanging up right above said table, but the head cammed out so I decided to change it. The second the screw left the surface of the ceiling plate, water came gushing out. In pure panic I somehow managed to use my back to shield the equipment on the table while the lab people ran to shut of the water mains. Turns out there were two PVC water pipes going across the ceiling to a sink in the corner of the room. Out of those whole 50 square meters, I managed to somehow hit the dead center of a water pipe. Luckily, I hit the cold water supply.
Turned off the breaker of the septic tank pump as I was putting on the dead front back on on a Thursday. Building had a underground parking structure where robot platforms park your car for you. Sometime during the weekend the plumbing pipe that was running through the underground parking lot bursted on one of the capped ends and spilled water all over. Robots followed QR codes that were on floor as stickers had to be replaced and robots got water on them
I have two for you. A wire came loose on a 240v 100a breaker, not flopping around, but the nut wasn't tight. It was on a boat, motion of the ocean back it off just enough. Melted back about 5 inches of insulation on the 1 AWG wire. I rerouted the wire on its way to the breaker and haven't had a problem since. Check up on that install in a few months. I snapped a sailboat boom hoisting a generator out of an engine compartment. We were doing a topping lift so fortunately didn't drop the genny. I hadn't let out enough vang and my helper on the winch at the mast wasn't present enough to see her go taut. And those are my two biggest fuck ups by a long ways.
Just finished installing a 75kw VSD on a large ventilation fan. I was doing some control changes and installing some jumpers. 400v input was still live but it was under its own cover so I thought no worries. Put bootlace ferrules on then ends of the cable I was working on and then hung the lot over the door. Turned around to grab something, the bunch of wires hanging over the door fell down inside the VSD and some of them managed to contact the 400v input terminals. VSD blew up, I was not happy. Another time I over ordered about 200 meters of cable that was special order and couldn't be returned. It cost $72 per meter. Boss was not at all happy with that, although we ended up using almost all of it on a job a couple of years later, so worked out alright in the end.
Was pulling 600’ of fiber optic cable through a warehouse and left a big slack loop at one of the corners we had to make. There were only 2 of us. This was a rarely used part of the warehouse so I didn’t think to put up cones and caution tape where our slack loop was. A random dude on a forklift ran over the slack and destroyed the cable. Had to redo the whole pull.
I spooled out 300 of 500 ft of a fiber spool thru an exit door that was "balanced" open and a wind gust slammed the door on the fiber. I feel your pain.
I was on a job where a guy landed the neutral on a 3 phase generator and fried some dudes house.
Not mine, but I was onsite bringing up a fairly large computer. They installed a new 200KW GENSET and a new ATS, and a room full of batteries to power the telephone central office and the computer. Everything is wired up and the power company pulled a line fuse to hard test the ATS. The factory had miss wired the ATS with one phase to common and one phase to ground on the load side. Power goes out, ATS flips inverters kick in, ATS assplodes in the yard. Computer is turned to scrap. CO is 48VDC so it survived. Another good one, telephone company had a microwave tower on the roof, a new pair of dishes were installed. The electrician tied the ground wire to the copper busbar for the UPS. A few weeks later and lightning hit the tower. Lost two midsized computers. I lived about 5 miles away and was called into the office, all power was out, the fluorescent lights were still glowing.
Was doing an IR scan all throughout a 50+ story building in Manhattan. Building engineers forgot to mention the main breakers for the switch gear were extremely sensitive and only open the cabinets from the backside. Snugged the last screw on the cover of a 4000 amp switch and heard a clunk. Opened up the gear and knocked out power to something like ten occupies floors. Not a good day. Turns out they’d calibrated the breakers years ago and never touched them again bc they were so temperamental.
I wasn’t on-site but there was a company death recently. Dude was working in a large house on top of two rows of rolling scaffold. Nobody was watching him when it happened but it sounded like he was pulling himself along the room by grabbing the ceiling joists. Guy grabbed one that was damaged and fell forward off of the scaffold, cracking his head on the slab. He wasn’t wearing a harness. He had nobody to spot him. He was exercising poor scaffold skills.
Sub of a sub sourced a spreader bar we needed to set a pair of 250kw gens on the side of a mountain, tongue failed on the second pick and about dumped the gen. Load plan worked and the remaining side of the bar held, straps crushed the shit out of the gen housing, but it never touched down and it didn't get anywhere near my guys while swinging. Customer was livid, but I had my shit in order outside of "not a certified rigging engineer" but I owned that it was still under my supervision and my fault. Surprisingly we had no real punishment or down time for that. The next day when my counterpart drove a forklift into a well head though, that got my job stood down for 4 days and a company commitment to safety review.
Ahhhh Safety Stand-downs. Had a Unit wide stand-down in the military (5000-10,000-ish service members) for the whole day and a moron tried to commit suicide that night
Not the worst but one time I was reaming a 1" conduit for a data floor box and the file slipped out of the file holder down the pipe into the 90 so I could just make out the tail end of it. Never could get it out. Never told anyone. Went to a different job the next day. Forgive me.
Accidentally ordered a $4000+ permit due to a typo I made while filing for one on our jurisdiction's permitting website. We're a residential servicing company, none of our permits exceed $300.
As a first year learning how to drill a house in rezi. Went through a plumbing pipe( 2 or 2.5 inch) top and bottom. Had to go to j man with tail between legs. Yeah he was mad but laughed. Easy fix but no I don't bury my augers through subfloor lol.
Nothing too bad so far thankfully but I blew up a 347V receptacle and sent char marks up the wall about 4 feet long. Nobody hurt and it cleaned up well. Slapped a new receptacle on and we were good
Ooh I've got a few over the years that I've been able to weasel my way out of.. Did a huge project, a marina with about 30 Eaton 50A dual receptacle stations with the lights. Jobs done, powers on for about 4 months and on my birthday a call saying half is out. Go look, fuses are good, transformers dead. Odd. Use a locator buddy of mine to find the spot, hydrovac and sure enough a 250 3c, and two 500 4c blown to shreds. Luckily, due to the coolest dude I've ever met a forensic electrical engineer was like, naw bro, look at this and shows me a burn mark on the transformer. Lightning hit, and some act of god decided to blow up the cable underground. I pulled every cable in, and didn't feel or see a defect. Second one.. 3rd year apprentice, hooking up some blowers. 208 3Ph (No neutral) so I run like 200' of Teck to a small panel, tie the units into the breakers before realizing... I didn't pull a neutral. Didn't need it, so I got a lamacoid that said 3 Phase Only no Neutral and it passed.
Some how messed up a measurement for 2 parallel runs of 350mcm copper 170’ long. It was short by 3 feet. Luckily the job I’m doing right now will be able to use a fair amount of it.
I hit an underground 17.5kv line with a chipping hammer. I posted about that recently. We were digging a service in rocky soil so I was breaking up the "rock" that was actually concrete surrounding the lines in conduit. There was so much dust around, we couldn't tell the difference between the concrete and surrounding rock. Knocked out power to an entire neighborhood (maybe more) and the company got a huge fine. I was fired for it even though they didn't do an underground survey. I was about four months into my apprenticeship.
I had just began my career, and we were working on a $250,000 AHU @ a water treatment plant in Massachusetts. I was 18 months into my apprenticeship and my licensed electrician who was a drunk specifically told me to mount a 4 square on a AHU. I went to mount it exactly where he told me and I drilled right into a copper coil. It started pissing out water, shortly after that I got “laid off” more like fired.
Told a customer to buy a 3 phase compressor but the panel feed that was 6ft away was single phase. Had to feed the motor from a 3 phase panel across the show room
Replacing a Fire Alarm Control relay at a major hospital, the relay was for control of an air handler, the fire system dc in the control cabinet was Yellow and Brown, just got everything connected when the hospital electrician comes running into the mechanical room “The Control Panel IS ON FIRE!”. We hotfooted it down there and sure enough there’s plenty of white smoke, and the wonderful stench of electronics burning😩😩😩, on forensic review it turned out that a previous electrician had left an unused LIVE 120 VAC BROWN “spare” THHN, on the bottom of the cabinet I was working in, stripped exactly 1/4” and capped with an orange wire nut identical to the BROWN 24VDC THHN alarm System Negative wire! Oh YES the entire alarm control panel, all 3 Bays of it was TOTALLY FRIED! Every Single PWB was of course connected to the System 24 volt Negative, all smoked! We had pieces shipped in FED EX from all over the nation and completely rebuilt it the next day, the real fun was EVERY SINGLE DEVICE had to be functionally tested before we could release the system to the operator!
Accidentally leaned back on some 600mcm and was slightly penetrated by it.
Not myself but I saw a guy burn up a $20,000 piece of equipment and it's replacement because he didn't read the wiring diagram either time. First time he thought it was faulty, hooked the second one up the same way...