On becoming an electrician

Bosses always love having employees come to them telling them a job is unsafe and OSHA wouldn't approve of it being worked. Always.

IMHO it really depends on the individual company.

I mean, Sanrith Descartes isn't wrong in any way at all...but the older I get, and the more sites I walk onto, the more I feel like the places that give you shit for complaining about 'working unsafe' are just the kind of companies I'm not interested in working for, or with.

For Hatorade , that can be a tricky situation, because some employers on that side of the aisle may not want to ruffle the feathers of a customer that is willing to pay but also doesn't care about safety. But if I was quoting that kind of customer, I'd also consider adding in the cost of actually working safe as well...because fuck them.

Like for Borzak if I'm in a refinery, and especially around the Alky shit and hydroflouric acid, I'm super fucking cautious because I don't want to fucking die. But I've literally never had to worry about safety in those kind of places, either, because the people I'm on site to help are 10 times more cautious than I ever could possibly be and they take that fucking shit seriously. Same as if I'm in a power plant and I have to go anywhere near anything over 600V (which RARELY ever happens). I've literally had to stand around for 1-2 hours with my proverbial dick in my hand waiting for 6 levels of supervisors to sign off on LOTO paperwork and go through the incredibly tedious "add your lock to this box and sign here...and here...and here..." just to do 5m of fucking work on a 4-20mA instrumentation loop. That's infinitely better than going on a service call where I'm told that they've got a corner ground B phase system, and "oh BTW we have some grounding issues, so you might get bit when you open the cover to do your work...just don't stand in the puddle of fetid water that has metal slag floating in it while you're working..."

Also also...I've taught some OSHA 3095 courses before, and all it was, was me going through the topics, and having everyone who was taking the class (all with as much experience as I have, if not MORE) laughing and swapping horror stories back and forth, pertinent to each and every topic. It was simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.

Since this detail has caught some legs I will expand on my semi-snarky comment. After decades with AT&T, we really did stress safety for outside forces. Trainings, equipment, hell our guys had FVDs issued (foreign voltage detectors) and our counterparts at Florida Power and Light didn't. And then over time the inevitable happened. On one side the company c-suite kept pushing productivity and the numbers started looking impossible to attain while following all the safety rules and on the other side there were always some section of the union workforce who would always find a "safety issue" when they got assigned a nasty ugly job they didn't want to work.

And stuck in the middle were low and mid level management dealing with both. If a job is "legitimately" unsafe to work then it should be stopped until the issue is rectified. Unfortunately, experience showed me all to often "unsafe" meant "I don't want to work this particular job".

Invariably those same techs would not wear lanyard and/or hardhats while a loft because it got in the way or it was hot. They also were the same guys who failed to tie off their extension ladders with safety straps because "I'm only going up for a minute". After enough years you just become jaded to the whole idea of work place safety.

I’ve been at a large electric utility company for almost 2 years now. Safety is crammed into everything possible. It can be excessive sometimes, especially for us office (remote in my case) people. That said we still have at least a few serious injuries every year and I think 2 people have died. One was struck by a pole that was being replaced and the other was electrocuted.

It was the same in the Air Force, minus the deaths. But there were a couple close calls.

The worst in recent memory, in my 'territory' I guess you could say (I was 0% involved) were the two dudes who got cooked by steam in an elevator shaft.

Shit is already dangerous enough, without ignoring basic safety shit. RIP