Working with Rich...

Well, here it is, for some time now Rich is asking me to help him with a light-fixture at a laboratory building in Hayward... o.k. we finally agree to do it today. He said he is gonna call me when he is on his way to his office, then I would meet him there and off we go, It'll take us only an hour to do this job, he says too... ha, there is nothing you get done in a hour says I!!!
I finished breakfast, had my Chai Tea and 9 o'clock has passed, I have not heard from him, and I busied myself getting more details done at my place, plenty to do here thats for sure.
Last night I installed the vertical Blinds, moved stuff into the build-in bookcase, boy what a feeling it is to start getting organized... then also cleaning the floor in a deep way, all is looking real good!!! But still plenty more to do and to figuring out too.
Then it got close to 11 o'clock and so I figured I better call him to get the status of his situation, I'm also getting hungry again and need to figure out the timing for lunch... "Yeah, could you go to Laner Electric and pick-up the fixtures and then meet me at my office, we'll drive to Hayward and I know the perfect lunch place o have a sandwich, I'll take us only about an hour to install that light..." he sais into the phone... Alrighty then, I clean-up here and off to Laner I go. The usual waiting for help and then I finally place the order to have the fixtures for Flower Construction placed on the dock... Next thing I see Jim Laner, the owner of Laner Electric coming down the stairs asking for Rich Flowers... well I say, he is not here, I'm here to pick-up this stuff, already suspecting trouble that Rich is not up-to-date with his payments. Upstairs in the office Jim is explaining to me exactly this and also that he has to cut all the accounts credit line because he can't carry them any longer, things are not looking to rosy and he has to cut down on losses. That also meant that I have to pick-up 2 fixtures Rich ordered, even though we only need one, "sorry" Jim goes on, " Rich has to eat this one". Alright, now he is talking to Rich on the phone, to explain him the scenario and they agree that I can take this order but Rich has to send a check right away... Now that was an interesting thing to be exposed to. I do have an account with them too but I charge it right-away onto my VISA credit card so I get points for REI to get goodies for my next outdoor adventures.
Rich and Oso are already in the van, waiting for my arrival, and off we go. It's already after 1 o'clock... for lunch we go to this place near the job-site, the Pot Pie Paradise & Deli. We went there a few month ago, when I was helping Rich on another project out here, and when we got our food, I recognized Theresa, the owner of the Pot Pie Paradise, who used to work at Mills College when I was an electrician there, what a reunion. I forgot where Theresa is originally from, somewhere in Asia but she used to life in Munich, Germany and speaks pretty good german, with a fine bavarian accent. I remember that she was a doctor of accupunture there and in her home country. At Mills she worked in the kitchen doing who knows what.
So, here we are again, and we gossiped a wee bit more about Mills and who still works there and who not... she also is very proud of the publication in a local magazine and her new website. Lunch was good and I bought 2 Pot Pies for a dinner in the near future. Now lets get serious and get to work.
Rich parked right in front of the door where we had to install this new fixture. It is the entrance to a laboratory and on the other side of that glass front, with the entrance door, is sitting a very attractive young lady, kind of like a receptionist and further back were some more people doing desk work. All looking curiously outside what these two stooges are about ready to do... talking about showcase type of work... O.K. there is this 6 inch recessed light over the front door that does not put out enough light at night and so Rich thought we install this ceiling mount H.P.S. (Hight Pressure Sodium) light that puts out some god-awful light, you know that orange looking light that is used for street lighting. Very bright for little electricity, the idea is to take out the guts from the incandescent recessed light and mount the new one right over the hole.
I get the ladder out of his van, all he had was this 4 ft wooden ladder, he left the 6 ft fiberglass ladder at the other job, alright I guess the 4 ft will do. It works when I'm standing on the top of the ladder, you know the step with the sticker on that says" NO STEP" and the the one above that is the kind of platform. Hope no-one will call OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Authority) because it is "unsafe" to stay on top of ladders, as for me, I don't care, I do it all the time with my ladders no matter how high they are, but not in front of a window, were people are watching with lots of curiosity of what is going on out there... In no time have I taken the guts out of the old fixture and prepare for the installation for the new one. Rich couldn't find the timer nor the circuit breaker to cut the power to the light-fixture and so I had to be a bit more careful and do it "hot", cut the wire, strip it and put some electrical tape on so it won't short out or "bite" me when I feed it through the small hole of the new light. I also had to cut the old wired as far down as possible so I can work with them to splice longer wires onto them. I drill 4 holes in the base of the new fixture for the mounting-screws, then place it over the 6 inch hole and figure out a way to get it up there square with the building. It's hard to see that when your nose is right up on that fixture, so it was Rich's job to guide me, but that was not easy either. Instead I located one corner and set an anchor into the sheet-rock ceiling. Now I have a pivot-point and I use the large framer-square to get it right, mark the other 3 holes, set the anchors for them and finish the mounting of new housing, then complete the wiring, set the inside base, screw in the light-bulb and click-in the vandal-prove cover that took me so long to figure out how to open it once I took the new fixture out of the box. Bingo, we have light... lets clean-up and get the hell out of here before traffic gets out of control on 92 and 880... after all it is Friday afternoon... the worst time to be on these freeways. But Rich wanted to show me something inside, after all he build that lab some years ago and he is all proud of things like that... I can understand, curious myself of what it looks like inside...
He opens the door and "Bang".... yes we heard right, the door does not clear the light we just installed and hits it before the door is halfway open... luckily it is a vandal-proof lens on it otherwise it would have broken the new light as well.
Boy we looked pretty stupid now... all the folks inside were looking too of what is going on, the two of us must have been just looked even stupider than usual... Nice job, it didn't even take us an hour to instal that darn thing, now what???
Well, lets take it down as fast as possible, I guess we get the old fixture back together, and then figure out another way or another fixture to solve this minor little problem of not having enough light by that door. Now comes the tricky part... first, lets find the old parts, they should be all in the box of the new light, then, I cut that one wire so short that you could not easily splice another wire to it, looking for some special crimp, they must be on the other job-site too, to attach a longer wire to connect it to the old one. I'm finagling something with some other wire-splicing thing, but it doesn't work either, then I improve that one and bingo, I got a wire spliced to it, onward with getting the "gut" back into the recessed-can, I had to struggle with it because it was old and dirty and full of spider-web and stuff that made that thing sticking somewhere, bang, it finally went in but I thought I might broken that fragile connection off my special crimp-on wire. Promptly, when I screwed in the light-bulb it did not come on... in the meantime Rich is going nuts over his incapability of getting a simple fixture in place, he is ready to sell his business and and get rid off all the things he has and die quietly somewhere in the south-pacific on a tropical island... well and here I was, I actually installed this fixture and not realizing that the door is clearing the ceiling only by about 4 inches. It must be a nine foot door. It is gone be tricky to find some kind of a fixture to mount there.
Back to the problem of splicing a piece of wire to that socket so I can get that old light to work again, we go inside in a room where we could plug in a soldering-iron and solder a wire to it... that worked and then I finished putting the old fixture back together and screwed in another kind of compact fluorescent lamp that Rich found in his van, this one should be a lot brighter that that lamp that was in there before we took it apart. So at least it looks like we've done something...
FInally, 2 and a half hours later we got the place cleaned-up all tools back in the van and the new light back in its original box, off we go... Rich is frustrated as you could imagine and I requested to get some type of coffee first before we hit the road back to Berkeley... by that time 3 o'clock has long passed and I did forget to bring my camera with me in the morning... to bad, otherwise I could show you what it all looked like out there in these industrial parks of California...