Funny story

[Ozzy]

I'm sure she'll never find this post. What are the odds of her finding terraforums anyway? If she ever did she could never find this topic in the archives anyway, So I'm sure I'm safe to tell this story.

Some of you know that I'm an electrician. I've been one since '92. To say the least I've seen a lot of weird and funny things. One of these thing happened last week. I was out of town since Friday (OZZFEST) so this is the first chance I've had to post it.

Here's what happened. I got a call that a woman's window AC unit had stopped working. When I got there I asked what it was doing. She said it's hasn't done anything for about two months. Please remember that she has been without AC pretty much the whole summer and the entire heat wave we've been having. So I turned it on. Nothing happened. Since the woman told me it was the ac that was broken I checked the on/off switch. It was ok. I checked to see if it was plugged in. It was. I looked at the nameplate to see what the voltage and amps were for the unit. It was a 240 volt AC. I unplugged it, and checked the voltage. This will get a little technical So unless you know something about electricity you can just skip to the next paragraph. I stuck the prongs of the tester into the two hot legs of the plug. I got a reading of 73 volts. I should have gotten 220 to 250 volts. So I tested each hot separately. On the first one I got 115 volts, which is what I should have gotten. I tested the second and I got 8 volts. I knew then it was not the ac was not the problem.

I knew that their was a problem with one of the hots wires between the panel box and the plug. The easiest thing to check was the breaker or fuse, so I asked where her panel box was. She took me downstairs to the panel. I lifted the cover and I saw the bright red indicator of a tripped breaker. LOL. I reset it. We walked back upstairs, I plugged the ac in, turned it on. It came right on and I could fell the cool air blowing in my face.

People love getting the bill for me resetting the breaker. On the way out I complimented her on her plants.

Anybody else have any funny work stories? I've got plenty more.

 

[kahnli]

I'm a chef...
And I have this Shrimp BLT (that's the way it is listed on the menu "Shrimp BLT"). I take a slice of New England brown bread and top it with pancetta (italian bacon) few slices of tomato and mesclun greens. Then it is top off with chilled shrimp tossed in a tarragon aioli.
one of my servers came back with a shrimp BLT that has had one bite taken from it and says "The customer doesn't want this." Of course I ask what the problem was and the server tells me "She didn't know it had bacon on it."

 

[PlantAKiss]

You mean you took money just for setting a breaker??  

 Just because this woman was a TOTAL idiot for not checking the breaker panel doesn't mean you should charge her out the ying yang for a simple switch flip.  Ozzy...I'm surprised at you.  

And yeah, if you don't know what "BLT" stands for...don't order one. lol

 

[Capslock]

Ozzy, as an electrician you'll like this one. My good friends are a married couple. They are wonderful people, and talented in their own ways, but they're the sorts of people who need help changing light bulbs. They get that blank look every time you try to explain something mechanical, even when it's something you thought everyone just intuitively knew.

So anyway, they had a problem with a mouse in their house. Finally, they realized it was coming in through an outlet behind the refrigerator that was never finished and didn't have the plastic plate on it, so there were gaps around the plugs where the mice got in. Apparently one of them heard that a good way to plug mice holes is with steel wool... Yep... So, without turning the electricity off, the husband merrily started stuffing steel wool into the ELECTRICAL OUTLET! BOOOMMMM! He was nearly thrown across the room and almost started a fire. Fortunately nobody was hurt (not even the mouse), and from then on, I didn't roll my eyes when they called me to help them with something embarassingly simple.

Capslock

 

[vft guy in SJ]

I have been in construction trades all my life so I have seen and heard my share of stupid things that people do for sure...

A few years ago while working as a cabinet installer I got saddled with about the dumbest partner in existence. I quickly learned that my day went much easier if I just gave him simple tasks to do in a different room from where I was working. Anyway, this particular day we were working in a doctors office that had several tall metal file cabinets that sat back to back. I needed to bolt them together to help make them more stable (San Francisco is earthquake country after all). The task seemed so simple to me.. drill a hole through the backs of the cabinets, slip a bolt through the hole and tighten it down... he should be able to handle that.. right?

I set him up with a drill, bag of bolts, socket wrench and pointed him to the room where I needed him to work confident in the fact that even he couldnt mess that up... Well he goes off on his way I hear him get the drill running and get to work so I go on about my merry way. About 5 minutes later he comes over and says that he needs a center punch to start the hole because the drill bit is wandering when he tries to cut the metal. OK I give him my punch and he goes off again... a few minutes later he is back and rummaging through my tool box.. he says he needs a smaller hammer cause he cant swing his hammer inside the opening of the file cabinet.. I give him my tack hammer and send him off again. He comes back again about 5 minutes later begging me to come help him cause he just cant get this to work for him.. Well now I have pretty much lost my patience with this kid.. I come down from my ladder and follow him to the other room to see what the heck his problem is. First thing I do is grab the drill, line the bit up to a clean section of the metal (he made a REAL mess out of the corner where I told him to drill) and then start the drill. Right away I see the problem. I flip the switch on the bottom of the drill and set it to turn forward instead of reverse and blast the hole right out.

He spent the rest of the day cleaning garbage out of my truck.

Quote[/b] ]You mean you took money just for setting a breaker?? Just because this woman was a TOTAL idiot for not checking the breaker panel doesn't mean you should charge her out the ying yang for a simple switch flip.

Absolutely. We charge $80 JUST to show up at a home appointment. Any parts and labor cost extra.

Cheers
Steve

BTW Ozzy, are you Union? If so, what is journeyman scale out there?

 

[Ozzy]

Steel wool? Now that's funny. Steel wool will even catch on fire if you touch it with a 9volt battery. They are lucky that it didn't start a fire.
Well if it had started burning, it would have been very easy to put out. Since they were already in the kitchen they could have just grabbed the sprayer from the kitchen sink and sprayed it.
LOL

PAK let me ask you a question, Why should I have to pay for her ignorance? With the fuel prices now, it's expensive just to show up at somebodies house. By the time I pull into her drive, I could have already spent $10 or $15 in fuel, wear and tear on my vehicle. I have to put a lot of money into my tools. Would she had helped me replaced my multi meter if something had happened and her plug fried my meter? It retails for about $150. Would she had helped with my hospital bills and lost income if I had gotten hurt on her property? Did she help me invest all of the money I have spent on my tools, and the 14 years I've spent in learning to fix her AC?

I didn't charge her to flip her breaker, I charged her for me knowing to flip her breaker.

 

[Ozzy]

Quote[/b] ]BTW Ozzy, are you Union? If so, what is journeyman scale out there?

NO, I don't believe in unions.

 

[PlantAKiss]

Quote[/b] ]Steel wool will even catch on fire if you touch it with a 9volt battery.

Ooooooooo...potential science experiment! lol

Quote[/b] ]I didn't charge her to flip her breaker

So how much did you charge her for your service? $15,293 for all your experience, tools, gas and medical insurance?

 

[Ozzy]

Who said anything about money?

 

[PlantAKiss]

Yeah, I've heard beads and pelts are just as good money.

 

[PlantAKiss]

We have a real estate agent here who is originally from Austria. Although she's lived here for a long time, she still has a heavy Austrian accent. She is an older lady, very excitable, flighty and totally DINGY. She is basically very nice but difficult to deal with sometimes with her inability to grasp some very simple concepts which I think is somewhat related to language.

Well, real estate agents live and die by their pagers. They get paged constantly all day with messages, phone numbers and clients names. One day she was in huge tizzy because she said someone kept paging her over and over but they wouldn't leave a call back number. She was very upset...frantic...going around saying "WHO keeps paging me?! Lowsell! Lowsell! WHO is Lowsell? They don't leave me a number!" She finally went in to my supervisor and handed her the pager and said "WHO is this! They keep paging me! Do you know who this is?!"

My supervisor looked at it and started laughing. She said "Ilse...it says "low cell"...its just letting you know that the pager needs a new battery."

 

[JB_OrchidGuy]

ROFTLMAO Those storied are funny. Well I am a surgical tech, and I can't tell you how many times someone has come in with an object stuck where the sun doesn't shine. I was in Macon and someone lost a muscle massager. The kind you can get from spencers. Just last month someone lost a Baseball. The string broke.

And this was a man in his 60's or 70's too. Umm Hear a story where a guy took 4 viagra, He claimed they were muscle relaxers and ended up getting shunted to drain off the blood from his privates. Um had a guy try to use a metle shower ring for a member ring and at age of 19 had to get it amputated. I'm sure I have had more funny stories I could think of, but those come to ming at the moment.

Mods feel free to edit or delete this if I didn't make things vague enough for the minors. I think I kept it G rated.

 

[seedjar]

Aaaagh! That last story isn't funny at all! You've scarred my fragile, innocent mind! That's exactly why I didn't want to work in medicine.
~Joe

 

[JB_OrchidGuy]

LMAO Sorry Joe! I guess I have a sick sence of humor.

 

[schloaty]

Quote[/b] ]You mean you took money just for setting a breaker?? Just because this woman was a TOTAL idiot for not checking the breaker panel doesn't mean you should charge her out the ying yang for a simple switch flip.

Pak, actually he should have charged her double for being an idiot. I'm a firm beleive that people should pay to be stupid. After all, they make more work for the smart people.

I have two from a job from LONG ago (back in the day of 5.25" floppy disks).

I was working at my father's software publishing company doing stress testing on new programs. My desk was right next to the customer service guys. Two calls stand out to me:

1) Guy calls in saying his disk doesn't work. The CSR went through the regular drills, and finally told him to send in a copy of the disk - if there was something wrong with it, it would be replaced for free. Couple of days later the envelope came with a PHOTOcopy of the disk.....

2) The CSR was talking a customer through starting up a new program.

"Ok, take the disk by the label, and insert it into the drive, label side up."
"Ok, I did that."
"Now close the door."
"Just a sec." clump clump clup *SLAM* clump clump clump "ok, I closed the door, now what?" (for any who didn't get that, he closed the office door....for you kids out there, disk drives used to have doors you had to close manually)

 

[Clint]

we just got out CPU back from the computer guy, the microphone wouldn't work.

turns out it was on mute, 30 bucks down the drain lmao

 

[Est]

Quote[/b] ]we just got out CPU back from the computer guy, the microphone wouldn't work.

Mics are funny. I wasn't paying attention a while back and I was setting up my headset so I could talk to a friend over the net... I ended up switching the mic and headphones jacks (two empty ports, so 50:50 chance, I figured.) So when I tried out the chat, I could hear myself coming out of the speakers, and he could hear everything coming out of my computer. I figure that could be a useful thing to know in the future, useful for what- I have no idea.

Another interesting story: My friends were in spanish class and some funny noises started to come from the computer. My friend Alex gets up and as he approaches it he says "theres a ball bearing off in the fan..." Jason gets up, calls Alex an idiot, and says "It might be the fan... But somehow it doesn't sound like it." Now both of these guys are fairly knowledgable about computers.

Random computer illiterate girl gets up, walks over... Listens... And turns off the vaccum cleaner. Sound stops. Looks like everybody is too quick to blame the machine and discount human carelessness- folks, remember to turn off your vaccuum cleaner or you'll blame the noises on someone you love.

 

[PlantAKiss]

Quote[/b] ]Pak, actually he should have charged her double for being an idiot.  I'm a firm beleive that people should pay to be stupid.  After all, they make more work for the smart people.

Yeah?  Well, I know this guy who drove all the way from New York to New Jersey to the Pine Barrens with his baby who missed everybody and had to drive all the way back after only being there for a few minutes.

 

I also know a guy who wrecked a TRAIN. And I don't believe he had to pay for the train he wrecked.

Hey...I just have to stick up for my kind...all the idiots of the world.  

 

[seedjar]

Quote[/b] (JB_OrchidGuy @ Aug. 08 2006,5:35)]LMAO Sorry Joe!  I guess I have a sick sence of humor.  

Hehe, no worries. I've heard and seen worse (my dad is a doctor and I sometimes help him sort through his case photos) but that one was particularly... distressing. I'd guess that after you've been in that line of work for a while, you have to get a sense of humor about those things.
~Joe

 

[Ozzy]

Wrecked a train? LOL what a dumb_ _ _ .