Christmas Lights

I want to catch up a little bit on all things electrical. I didn't have much time this week to post on here, so I'll do a day by day special.

Monday: Light calls. On Friday morning every week I get to go through a building downtown and change bad light bulbs on all the floors a certain company rents out. It's about 8 floors and can take as little as 45 minutes, or up to 4 hours to go through and change all things bad. This week it got done on Monday because we didn't work last Friday due to the holiday. Changing lights this week was quick (possibly related to all the lights being off for most of the last week). After I went back to Dixie Terminal, that's the building our office is, to hang up some Christmas Wreaths. To do this I had to drive this big scissor lift from down on 3rd street around the block and up the hill to 4th street to the entrance . For those of you who have never moved a scissor lift before, it is a slow adventure to say the least, exceedingly slow when moving uphill. So I drove the lift a total distance of maybe 3 blocks between 8:00 and 9:00. As a side note to moving the lift I want to talk a little bit about the people in life who are afraid to walk on street vents or lids in the sidewalk. I had to drive something which I would say weighs at least 2000 pounds over those bad boys...They aren't going to cave in and kill you. After break I started hanging said wreaths. As I hung them I had to splice into the existing lighting, wire in an outlet, and plug in the wreaths so that the lights would work. There were 21 wreaths out of which only 16 were strung with functional lights. I say that because the other 5 were going to be a big part of my next day. I finished up at about 2 when I went up to the 7th floors to wire in an outlet for a new flat screen in the lobby of a recently remodeled floor. We installed an outlet on both sides of the wall with a data connection for the TV. Then we wired the outlets to a breaker panel and tied the data port to the data center. That was it for Monday, but little did I know that the Christmas light project was far from being finished.

Tuesday: When I got to work I was assigned the task of "fixing" the lights on the wreaths that weren't working. I took the lift around and methodically started to go through replacing burnt out bulbs and fuses on the strands that weren't working. One at a time I was making slow progress, but progress still. I was working on the last wreath around 11 when my boss came and found me. This was our conversation.

Chris: "Are you still working on these f***ing wreaths"

Me: "Yes" (with frustration)

Chris: "You can stop now, we just wanted to see how long you would do it before you gave up. We'll just call the company that brought them and have them come back and replace the ones that don't work...Good job on fixing those other ones though...apprentice"

When I came back from lunch we had a new wreath with new lights that worked, and my coworkers had a nice laugh at my expense. To be honest it was pretty funny.

Wednesday: This was the first day so far that I had to work outside. All day I got to change bulbs and ballasts in the garage lights of the Olympic Parking Garage. It wasn't a cold day so it was actually kind of nice to be outside. It was also nice because after the first few everyone kind of left me alone to sort it out. I don't know if it's normal or not, but it was kind of nice to be trusted as the new guy to just take care of a job.

Thursday: Thursday turned out to be a complete waste of time. Mostly because of "management". Anthony and I got assigned this data job entailing setting up a new security swipe pad in this remodel site. This would have taken 2 or 3 hours if we would have been allowed to just run new cable from the data center and hook it up. Unfortunately we had to find some unused cable already running through the building, fish it out of its current location and then re-run it to the new location. All because "management" didn't want to absorb the cost of running new cable. Keep in mind the cost of this kind of cable is int he neighborhood of 20 cents per foot. We need about 100' of cable or $20 worth to do our job. The day ended with us still trying to fish this wire out of the building. Silly, silly, silly...

Friday: Friday I helped finish up this job Torrey had been working on for 2 weeks. I went through all the 2'x4' lights he had put in changing all the bulbs and ballasts that weren't working. It took almost the whole day. The best part of the day was Anthony getting the ok to just give up and run new cable from for the job we started the previous day. The highlight had to be this new piece of gear we had to move over at the 5/3rd Tower. We were supposed to meet some guys at 9:30 to install this new switch gear in the basement. 7 people showed up and we had to flip this big metal box from its side to a standing position. It was maybe 7' tall and 4' wide and weighed 3500lbs. I thought we were going to die. At first I didn't think we were going to be able to move it, but then I realized we could only that if just one person bailed out while setting it up, everyone was going to be crushed. It was amazingly heavy, but it went by without incident.

Saturday: This week we had a special project on Saturday so I had to go to work. My job was to make sure everything went smoothly while we took down a bunch of old lights and put in some new fixtures over a bunch of cubicles. Mostly I just cleaned up and got materials for people, but I did get to wire in a few lights near the end of the day. I have a few thoughts on works weekends. First they pay me a lot of money to come in. And second, I don't actually miss anything because I don't normally do anything in the morning on the weekends anyways. I mean let's be honest the only thing I am missing out on by being at work until 12 or even 1 on Saturday is sleep. I'm not saying I am going to work every chance I get, but unless I have a legit reason for staying home, I probably should.

So that was my work week. 48 1/2 hours of my life gone forever. Yesterday afternoon I finished 2 of the 3 outstanding papers I have left this quarter. By outstanding I mean unfinished, not necessarily exceptional, although hopefully... I have to take an exam tomorrow night at 5:30 and turn all three remaining papers in by Friday this week to officially be done with the quarter. Hurray!

Other than all things obligated I had an interesting conversation last night with a 15 year old kid named Jake who was hanging out down at my house. The conversation revolved around the idea that Christianity seems narrow. That was his contention after I explained to him that Christians believe the only way to salvation is by confessing faith in Jesus and living life in relationship with Him. He asked what happens to people who don't do that, but live good lives anyways. I told him that everyone goes to Hell without Jesus. He said that was very naive and narrow minded.

The whole situation was difficult for me because on the one hand I love the kid and don't want to turn him off towards Christ, but on the other hand I feel like I need to tell him the truth. So as well as I could I explained that Christianity is narrow, in fact it couldn't be narrower. There is only ONE way, and that's with Him. On the one hand, how can a loving God condemn anyone to Hell, and on the other, how can a just God do anything else. He didn't like it, but I have to trust that God will sort it out in his life.