By RACHEL JACKSON
Staff Writer
It ain’t all about the wires, man.
Being an electrician involves way more than just connecting wires and hoping the building doesn’t burn down in the process. I kind of knew that, but I didn’t really know that until I tried being an electrician on The Daily Record’s time. That was an experience.
McClintock Electric was an easy choice — they’d done much of the electrical work when the newspaper’s downtown office was remodeled. In trying to schedule a shift through electrical operations manager Tony D’Intino, I learned McClintock people may find themselves traveling as far as Gnadenhutten in Tuscarawas County or Shiloh in Richland County to work on new or remodeled school buildings.
I ended up in Medina, at Buehler’s River Styx, where the store was undergoing a light remodel. Because Buehler Food Markets keeps its stores open during remodeling, much of the work is done on the third shift, when the store is closed to customers.
I figured one night of third shift wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Sleep a little before and a lot after, and really it’s no different from playing computer games all night in college, right? Wrong. I had no idea how thoroughly this would screw my sleep schedule. Days later, I still would be lying awake at 3 or 4 a.m., thinking about the electricians and painters working truly lousy schedules just so people’s shopping patterns wouldn’t be disrupted. Not to mention the store employees — bakers, stockers — who work that schedule year-round.
I met the foreman, Curt Holmes, at the Henry Street shop at 9 p.m. We drove nearly an hour on the freeway as he told me about being an electrician. Third shift isn’t the norm, he said, and the constantly changing schedule (first shift one month, third shift the next) has a way of disrupting family life.
The hardest part about remodeling a business that remains open — other than the hours — may be the amount of setup and teardown required. The store must be fully operational during the day, so no tools or ladders or equipment can be left out after a shift ends. And the workers can tear out only as many old fixtures as they are able to replace in the course of their shift. There’s no such thing as removing all the old fixtures at one time at the start of the job and then placing new ones as it’s convenient.
It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it, Holmes said. Buehler’s is a good company to work with, and doing well complying with their maintenance requests helps ensure future contracts.
The first surprise of the evening was the blueprints. A whole roll of them. I had no idea wiring and hanging lighting required a separate set of blueprints all of its own. Most of the wiring projects I’ve been involved in never got to paper — they were simple home jobs, or else Habitat projects for which I never saw the blueprints. Ya run some wire, ya hang some lights, then cross yer fingers and flip the switch and hope nothing catches fire.
This was a whole separate ballgame. These guys were talking numbers I didn’t understand, using terms I couldn’t comprehend. And it became obvious I wouldn’t learn it all in one night. Holmes said even seasoned electricians shouldn’t think they’ve learned it all, because there’s always something new in the business.
He showed me the produce area, where they recently finished hanging track lighting through decorative trellises that hang from the ceiling. That required a lot of measuring, to make sure the lighting fixtures would line up with the open spaces in the trellises, Holmes said.
Then he and several other electricians gathered to look over the blueprints and develop a plan for the evening. We were to continue hanging pendant lighting over restaurant booths.
We pulled about a dozen lighting fixtures and related equipment from the trailer behind the building, tossed them on a cart and wheeled it to the restaurant.
It never occurred to me lighting fixtures for large-scale jobs such as this would come in individual boxes and would require assembly. We had lots of boxes to open, lots of plastic wrapping to remove, and lots of little parts to track.
It was a struggle to thread the wires through the long pole — they kept catching somewhere inside the lamp assembly. I had to disassemble the first one several times before I got the knack.
Once the lamps were assembled, we set them aside and brought out the ladders. I was surprised to learn that placing lamps requires considerable measuring and lots of thought.
Each lamp was to be centered over one booth in the restaurant. Electrician Mike McGuire would measure the floor to find the center of a booth — most of which weren’t in place yet — then use a fancy laser gadget to project a mark onto the ceiling tile.
That mark would be the center of the lighting fixture. We would trace an electrical box onto the back of the ceiling tile and then cut a hole in the tile.
Unfortunately, we didn’t realize immediately the tile was direction-specific, nor that we didn’t have enough electrical boxes to place all the lamps we assembled. That put a serious crimp in the evening.
As the shift wore on and we became pressed for time, the electricians took over the actual connecting of wires and the measuring. I became quite adept at cutting through the thick ceiling tile, as well as placing light bulbs and the globes that go over the bulbs.
They joked I soon would be cutting octagons in my sleep.
Then, when we were about ready to start cleaning up, someone flipped a switch … and one of the lights didn’t come on.
I ran over to check it out.
Turns out it was my error.
The bulbs are a special kind of halogen bulb that burn so hot they’ll burst if you get any body oils on them. To screw them in we used the small piece of foam they were wrapped in for shipping. I found it an incredibly awkward task.
It had taken me several tries to get each bulb screwed in, and one bulb wasn’t even screwed in all the way. That’s why it didn’t light up.
I fixed it and screwed the globe back on quickly, hoping no one noticed. But before I could walk away, electrician Scott Lloyd asked me why the light hadn’t come on.
Before I knew it, they were all teasing me about making a mistake my first night on the job. Even the painters were teasing me.
Their teasing made me feel better, but it didn’t last long. We had barely an hour to get supplies packed up, get the floor swept and get tables put back so the store would be ready to open again.
For one night, the world was my oyster. I could have tried any job I wanted, and not care whether I failed. This writing job was waiting for me, regardless. I chose the electrician job because it’s something I’ve been wanting to try for years.
I remember learning about circuitry in junior high science. And I remember running wire through the basement of a Habitat house while fire ants nibbled at my knees. And I remember helping to run wire in the family homestead — where we had such notable accidents as blue arcs of lightning that went shooting round the house and melted plastic vents.
I was never sure I was cut out for manual labor. I often wondered whether I could be doing something more than tapping computer keys all day.
I became an electrician for a day to find out whether I could, in reality, become an electrician. Do I have what it takes? I don’t think I have any better an answer now than I did before. But I do know this — third shift is the worst shift ever.
Reporter Rachel Jackson can be reached at (330) 287-1632 or rjackson@the-daily-record.com.