Hey All - with all the different threads lately I thought we could start one that tells about the stranger things that have happened to us during our workday - lets keep it clean and share some good stories - here's mine.
I do new residential construction in an upscale senior citizen complex. A while back we had a batch of smokes that kept giving nuisance alarms - you can imagine the scene that causes in a senior complex. Anyway, my company decided we would just exchange out the brand that was causing the problem, which was a couple hundred of them. One day I went to an old ladies home and started the change out, first thing I do is kill the breaker for the smokes, then test the line to make sure it's dead, then start the change-out. While I am changing out the first smoke I unplug the tail from the smoke and the hall lights go out, (hmmm, what's going on I'm thinking?). I proceed to wire up a new tail and when I connected the replacement smoke up the hall lights went back on. (At this point I'm waiting for the guys from candid camera to pop around the corner). The old lady was sitting on her couch in the living room recovering from a recent surgery - I asked her if she turned the lights in the hall off, she said no, I can't move too well - and I could tell she was kind of worried and upset - while I am talking to her I can see all the LED clocks in her home flashing - I can tell she's worried about my ability to do electrical work - I still can't figure out what happened - what caused her whole unit to lose power from me disco'ing one smoke detector - I changed the rest out, set all of her clocks for her and went and threw the breaker back on - still wondering what happened, I leave and go back and tell the other guys on the jobsite about the problem, turns out the POCO was doing line work in the area and disco'd the power for about a minute - at the exact time I unplugged the first smoke and reconnected it with the new one - what are the odds of that exact timing?!!!!!! - Long story - but is kinda funny !!