ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Those service calls that.....

Gotta call to a residence i hadn't been to before, so i pull up, do the meet/greet and all. The owner showed me to the 'list' of electrical woes, which i spent the better part of the day fixing

end of the work , i'm filling out the paperwork and ask " Mr. & Mrs. XXXX, P.O. Box XXX ? (there's so many unmarked places , even this long after 911 here) , to which they replied 'No, they're down the road there" <poimting to nieghbors>

turns out i'd ended up at the wrong place.....~S~

Sparky:
Reminds me of the 200 amp resi service installed in the wrong side of a side-by-side duplex. That was quite a few years back...late 70's & it turned out as a free-bee for the neighbor.

A guy where my wife used to work built a house on the wrong lot.

Did they pay the bill?

A GC in our town built a new house that was oriented the wrong way. He hired a house-mover to lift it up, move it into the back yard and turn it 90 degrees so that it could be set on a new foundation that the GC would put in.

They dropped the house while turning it...into the house next store.

It gets better.
The house-mover had not bothered to get a Permit for the work...and had let his insurance lapse.

Sparky:



D'ohh!

That goes in the "Classics" position!

Scott

oh most definitely, but they did pay me , so the filibuster (door to door) ideal of biz might actually have a place in our trade....?

~S~

I do think if you can remove the mystique of calling an electrician, there may be a lot of work out there.
Unfortunately there are so many hacks out there people are scared.

one of the buildings i help take care of was built 180 degrees backward. i think the foundation was oriented backwards on the drawings and no once caught it til the modules came in. still that way today

Ahh yes, the old wrong house trick.
I was once asked to do a TV aerial job for a guy who gave me some directions on how to get there and what the place looked like.
I get to what I thought was the place and the aerial there was in a VERY poor state of repair.
I found it strange that the key he gave me didn't fit the front or back door.

It didn't bother me that much as I had a field-strength meter with me at the time and could do the job pretty much up on the roof.
Anyhow, I'm up on the roof and the people that DID own the place came home, the guy didn't look the same as the guy I had been speaking to.

I really thought I was in trouble at this stage, having installed and aimed a brand new aerial and a mast-head amplifier.

Guy said to me "Crikey, that was a stroke of good luck, I've been trying to get someone out here for ages, everyone is just too busy, we've been putting up with terrible reception since the last big winds blew our old aerial to bits!"

"By the way, the place you're looking for is Dick's place just down the road, it was built by the same builder and it looks identical".
Guy paid the bill the next day, no worries.