Not a good day for a Monday! Joey came on Sunday to take tools to a job about 1 1/2 hours away, unload the tools he needed, then bring back the trailer so I can start a repair today. Well, it all went great until it was time to hook my truck up to the trailer: He forgot to leave the ball, and I do not have an extra. The drop-down hitch is always on my truck, but Joey had to have it to take his truck to the job and just forgot to leave it when he got back. They are on a 2,000-foot sand-and-finish job while I do the repair job. There are two types of people I do not like to work for-doctors and lawyers-and this repair is for a lawyer.
I was thinking about what I do now compared with my days of traveling for a manufacturer and doing on-site demos. One huge difference is that now we have every tool under the sun in the trailer. Looking back, it would make me wonder how guys could get the work done when they would not have the tools they needed. I recall one guy not having the right grits of paper on the truck for the edger. We have a tool box set up with grits from 12-2/0, and it has a divider so we can see when we need to restock the paper. We also have a shelf with the belt sander grits from 12-3/0. (We do go that fine on some of the flooring, we do wax floors and it is much better to get it flat and smooth. The wax will look deep and rich when the floor is slicked off.)
We also have every plug adapter we have come across, 4-wire range, 4-wire dryer, 3-wire range, 3-wire dryer, and breakers for every box we run into in our area. One of my horror stories for power hook-up was on a demo in the Chicago area. The contractor went right to the box for his power, and that is okay if you know how to do it, but he did not use breakers. He took the wire ends and would arc them to the main until they would stick. He would yell to a guy to start and stop the big machine to surge the line and make it arc. It worked, but it had no protection via breakers to the unit or for the person running the unit. I refused to run it; I bought them the breaker and showed them how to hook up with this thing we call "safety" in mind. They said that it never was trouble unless someone would pull the cable too much. Can you see the wires getting pulled off and shorting the main? Not good. (Check out this article on safe electrical hook-up.)
In future posts I plan to share more of what I have done to try to improve on what I have seen over the years. It has only been five years for me as a contractor, but I have seen hundreds of jobs, and I will do my best to recall more stuff like this one. The better we prepare; the more time we save (as long as we don't forget the ball for the truck...).
