15 Jan
2010
15 Jan
'10
6:56 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Doc Shipley <doc at vaxen.net> wrote:
jim s wrote:
> I never work on anything w/o a cutoff that I completely control (know who
> is in a house for instance, and where they are, and cut the power with
> knowledge that they won't turn it back on on me) or where I can padlock the
> ?mains off. ?Same goes for gas. ?A fellow I know was ?working on a furnace
> and someone turned on the gas on him because he had not padlocked it. ?Not
> fun.
I was doing plumbing work in my condo about 20 years ago. I took
apart the shower valve (one of these push/pull turn for temperature
thingies) so that i could fix a leak. After getting it apart, my
neighbor turned the water back on. I had a powerful jet of water
shooting across the shower and hitting the tile above the foot of the
tub, then spraying everywhere. After much discussion and yelling at
each other, we determined that a plumber had fixed a slab leak by
tying the water supply from both our units together to a single valve.
Her valve wasn't hooked up to anything anymore. It was only water.
But there's all kinds of crazy tradesmen out there.
As a side note, the reason she was mad at me was because she assumed
that I couldn't tell which one was mine, so I just turned them all
off. Thanks for the vote of confidence. :-/
I'm also reminded of the time I was working at IBM. The power went
out for our entire office building. We looked out the window and
could follow the line of orange flags a couple hundred feet to a
backhoe. I guess even when you mark where the wires are, that's no
guarantee.
brian