I had a big screw up today on a job. I went to one of our jobs and about 5" of drywall needed to be removed about 10 feet long. I thought I'd help my guys hurry up, so I grabbed a Dewalt cordless sawsall and started cutting. I was being carefull not to cut too deep because I didn't want to cut any wires. At the end of the cut, I heard a hiss and then water spraying me in the face. I ran to find a shut off, but couldn't, I went back to the leak area to get some pliers to cut it off at the street and noticed the spray was hot, so I ran the the water heater and turned it off there. As soon as I got it cut off I heard somebody yelling. It turned out the homeowner was in the shower when I turned off the hot water! Ooops!

It took us about 2 hours to mop up all the water and dry out the cabinets. It doesn't look like anything was damaged too bad, although I 'm concerned that the hardwood floors might warp. If they do, I guess I'll be refinishing the floor.

I guess it could've been worse. The pipe was CPVC, so it repaired easily, but if it were copper, I probably wouldn't have cut it because I would've know I hit it and I was using light preasure. I'm also glad it was me that cut it and not one of my employees.

Does anybody else want to confess a screw-up?

[This message has been edited by Electric Eagle (edited 10-16-2003).]

(while looking at the floor and pawing the ground)
"hmm, uhh, well, see, uhh...not me"

I was once doing a minor repair to a sink.

I turned off the water under the sink and then used my pipe cutter to cut the supply line BELOW the valve I had just shut off. Alot of water can come out of an open 1/2" pipe!

I slipped walking in a truss attic and put my size 12 through the ceiling once.

Sawed through a beam once and knew I had cut a wire when my saw stopped working.

Drilled into a wall and melted the tip of my drillbit (lots of fireworks came out of the wall) when I drilled into a wire.

Roofing a house all alone one day and had my ladder blow over. I used to do some rock climbing so I figured I could use my safety rope and harness I was using (with some creative use of other stuff I had in my tool bag) and just rappell down. Got stuck on the roof edge, got my rope tangled up, ended up tied in a knot, dangling helplessly 6 feet off the ground. Cut the rope and landed on my (now completely numb) legs in a pile with my tools scattered all over the ground - unable to stand up. Just then the home owner pulled up.

Maintenanceguy said:


Hmmm...at least it's better than rappelling off the roof successfully.....only to come crashing feet-first through the upper-story windows right below the roof line.

Methinks almost everyone's bulled and jammed at times enough to cause a ruckus, and a tad more damage than necessary

i know i have

~S~

One time I was installing a new circuit for an under cabinet microwave. The kitchen was already finished. Why the homeowner didn't call me before I will never know. Being the consious worker that I am I decided to pull the oven out of the way so as not to damage it while I worked over it. After unplugging it I proceeded to pull it out. I felt some resistance and I assumed that the cord must have gotten caught on something. When I looked in back of the oven I did not see anything. So I gave it another big tug. Finnaly I slid the oven back in place thinking I caught the side on something when I noticed the problem. The front leg of the oven was digging into the brand new kitchen floor and ripped a 3" gash in it. I never felt so sick in my life. Needless to say the job I did was free. The homeowner told me the flooring company fixed it for $50.00 and hardly left a scar. I will never move anything any more. I have the homeowners do it.

Blessings, Mark

Mark,
I know that feeling!.
A few years ago I was asked to go and hook up some speakers in a Home theatre system, in town here.
I had to solder RCA connectors to the ends of the speaker wires, so I set up my soldering iron and stand and plugged the iron into the wall.
Went out to the van to get some bits and pieces and returned to find a smell of burning and looked down, to see my iron burning a hole in the brand-new cut-pile carpet!.
It had fallen out of the stand, because of the cord having a permanent twist in it.
Man, I've never had a sinking feeling like that before, cost heaps to get it repaired too.
Suffice to say, that soldering Iron is at the local rubbish tip, at this point in time!

Last fall I ordered a 1600amp distribution panel full of 200 and 100 amp breakers. Silver plated copper buss...the whole bit. Cost was $4800.00. Forgot to order it with the 1600 amp main breaker. Ooops...cost me another $5200.00 to get one in with a main breaker plus $1600.00 for priority shipping. I triple check my orders now.
Richard

Judging by the fact that there are 2 posts that I have submitted here, I don't really make that many mistakes.
But when I do, I really muck up!.
A few years ago when I was a Line Mechanic, us guys were working out of an EWP to cut the wires from a pole, after the wires had been Undergrounded.
We tested the pole to see if it was decayed, and it tested OK.
BTW, the pole had wires from 3 directions.
cut the first set no worries, moved around the other side of the pole to cut the 2nd set and just cut the last Neutral when the pole snapped and flicked up and destroyed a Glass-house and a few other things as the free end fell.
I am not immune to accidents, like the rest of you guys, my ones happen to be just that much bigger.

OK, so I've maid a cuppl of misteaks:
Ordered 50,000ft of #8 Green instead of 500ft.
Switchgear with mirror image layouts, or NEMA 1 instead of 3R (More than once).
Failed to specify Aluminum conductor on an 4500ft order of 750MCM, after telling the supplier less than a month earlier to always send us copper unless instructed otherwise.
Sent guys to the wrong side of an empty multi-tenant building and had them "demo/make safe for remodel" about 1500 sq ft of office area.
Had the wrong colt (horse) gelded (castrated)
Drove into a utility pole while staring nervously into the rearwiew mirror at the Sheriff's car that was behind me.

...just to name a couple...S

Whoa!

I'm almost afraid to post next to you!

I don't really have anything big to add here, ... knocking wood (unless I'm blocking it out ), but I was using long (6 foot) drill bits to drill across joists in a finished ceiling for recessed lights and went through the floor above. Lucky for me it was in the open area below the Bathtub above and not the middle of the Master Suite.


Bill

[This message has been edited by Bill Addiss (edited 10-18-2003).]

Bill: Iv'e been there. I was using a six foot bit in an office building and drilled through the ceiling in the stair enclosure

Of course it was a rated ceiling and about 25 feet high to boot. That was a nice little back-charge

I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone in the mistake department. If done a few others, luckily not too many and far appart.

I think any of us that use D'versibits (6 foot long drill bits) have have a mishap, or 2, or 3....

A couple of summers ago I drilled up through the floor above, it turned out to be 100 year old heart pine!

About 15 years ago I stepped through a ceiling from the attic after being in the 150 degree+ heat too long.

Was subbed out to a company that had about a 300 foot run of parallel 750mcm alum. The wire arrived on the job on a couple of spools that had to be rolled out and cut. The foreman said to roll it out in the street. Trouble was, it was right before noon and after it was rolled out and cut, about ten guys from other trades got in trucks and backed over it. The engineers said "no way". We then rolled it up and rolled out a new set another place. They were using nylon string as their measuring tape. Got the run ready and pulled it in when one of the guys on the radio said "hope your there cause that's all I can give you". It was about thirty feet short, someone had cut off a piece of the string.

Gunther...I was close to that scenario.....250 foot run of 500's and stripped both ends to put in the lugs. I have no idea how many times I told the guys "Please be a little longer....Puhlease".

Eagle,

I have a friend that used to do a lot of Alarm installations. He was in the Basement drilling up through a wall to get to the attic (I think) and he wasn't counting his extensions right and ended up going through the roof.


Bill

As an apprentice i had the simple job of running light stringers once, but they all turned on dim.

myself and a fellow apprentice worked out all sorts of quantum theories, had fems fact finder & the ugly's out, etc....

turns out , (after quite the him-haw session) that the bulbs were all 277V

Related to the long drill bits department...

I was once drilling a hole for a telephone cable. I wanted to run it inside of a closet, through the floor into another closet, and then down to the basement; I was going to staple the cable to the molding inside--should have been really easy and out of sight. I went downstairs to see how well I did...and saw the bit coming out of the living room ceiling.

Just as I was looking at the bit sticking out of the ceiling, making plans to clean it up quickly, my wife came home. You know, a metal d'versabit looks much, much worse up against white paint.

I really can't take credit for this screwup, but it's a beaut. I was called to service a two stage rooftop air conditioning unit that would not cool. The unit was old, and had had the primary compressor replaced. The AC guy swore up and down that his lines and the unit charge was perfect. The unit had a 240 volt 1Ø supply run through a capacitor bank Add-A-Phase convertor. The compressor just hummed loudly when the disconnect was turned on.

I went through the capacitors and found half of them blown. Replaced the electrolytics, turned on the disco. . .no joy, just humm.

I went through the relay ladder for the start / run capacitor bank switching. . .all good.

Finally I crawled into the compressor housing to get over behind and to the bottom of the compressor to get the model number off the black on black ID plate.

The last character of the 14 char. long ID should have been an E, not an F. . .F was for 480 volts.

I think that this thread jinxed me!

The past two weeks have been the worst run of bad luck I have ever experienced!

We smoked three band new Hobart dishwashers because a helper connected the wrong power. (my fault, I should have checked his work closer).

We were pouring light pole bases last week, the next morning I looked at one of the bases and realized that there should be 3 conduits stubbed up, NOT 2!

A few months back we bored a 4" PVC line under a drive. This week we completed the conduit run and attempt to pull wire. The line is crushed in an area that is now paved over!

We get to rebore the 4" line, just finished that repair this morning. In the process of boring the new 4" we destroyed a 1" conduit. We have another raceway we can use for a workaround, but it will mean more digging.

We lost a 500K contract for phase 2 of this job after being told we had the low bid because the owner didn't want to work with us. Found out later that it was because of delays caused by the engineer and lighting manufacturer regarding approval of the finish on the parking lot poles. The owner blamed us for the delay, although it was outside our control and we were unaware of the situation.

Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed!

GJ

One project last year I remember dropping a nearly-full reel of cable (Romex-type) between the ceiling joists. It went clean through leaving about a 2 ft. jagged hole, plaster dust over everything below.

Fortunately, the ceiling was old and crumbling and was going to be renewed anyway. Phew!

I've drilled through into the wrong place a few times and had a bit emerging the wrong side of a wall (into new paint and paper usually).

One of the perils of the very old buildings here in England is that brickwork and plaster can be very weak and crumbly! I've often been trying to make a nice neat job, only to have a ton of plaster fall off an old wall as I've drilled into it.

We should have an ECN motto:
We do not make mistakes. We create opportunities for amendments!



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 11-01-2003).]

Paul:
Sometimes you can avoid problems with plaster by putting a piece of tape (the "invisible" kind of "Scotch" tape is usually OK) over the area where you will drill. It helps to prevent cracking. Sometimes not

And here I was gonna be embarrassed about my couplings that came loose after the finish work had been done...

Boss: "Hear that? The wire's in the wall..."

Wound up having to contort myself in an attic and reverse-grip my stubby screwdriver while my super helped push the sticks together. This was, of course, in the middle of one of my more "creative" 359 1/2 degree worth of bends between boxes runs, due to decorative framing, and last minute run changes, thanks to the AHJ.

Had a few more that loosened that job. The boss said "Don't worry about it...we all mess up. Just slow down, do it right, and remember it so it doesn't happen next time."

At least I didn't have to explain short cut lengths of 750 mcm AL !

I went to view and take pics of a big job gone bad last week.

A 4000 amp 480v service (one of 4 services to this building). When they tried to energize the main switch, there was a second or two and than the show began. They tried to open the switch, but it welded closed and finally a cable burned clear. There was still power to the switch and the POCO had to kill their end to deenergize the service.
It all happened because they transposed the neutral for phase A.
It destroyed all kinds of equipment in the building, including Asco switches and other 'juicy' $$$$$ equipment and wiring. They are estimating $500,000.00 in damage.
OUCH!!
There are so many things that were wired incorrectly, I do not have the time or space to explain.
The big question being asked though is; how did they energize the service switch without any prior testing?

Pierre

Pierre,
Could you send a pic or two to Bill to post in the "Photos for Discussion" area?...S

PCBelarge and Golf Junkie,

I thought life was tough enough, but if I had to deal with those problems, life would be RUINED! How in the world do you come back from that? They person financially responsible has to be ripping his hair out!

I think I'll stay in the house and not take any chances ever again!

I've got a couple of stories to relate in this post.
Not my fault but, I was there when it happened, like:
I was working in a Dairy shed (where cows are milked) and I was servicing a Motor Starter, a few years back and there was an Apprentice from a competitor company working on the Main Switchboard(PSCC 2500A)
replacing all of the Contactor coils that burned out, because of a Lightning Strike the night before, I finished what I had to do and went to see why there was no power at my motor starter.
Corey, (the Apprentice) had shut the whole Installation down, to make sure that he wouldn't get a shock on the 400V control circuits.
But, when he pulled the lever back up to re-energise the Installation, there were sparks and flames and a really nasty sound coming out of the panel.
We finally put the fire out and discovered he had installed 24VDC coils to all of the contactors.
Like I said, imagine that sinking feeling!.
This other story was related to me by a guy that worked on the West Coast of the South Island here in NZ, during his Apprenticeship.
He had just bought a brand new Brace and Bit (the Armstrong version of the now common Power Drill).
Him and his employer were working in a brand new shop in Greymouth and the owners were very proud of thier new Scrim wall coverings and wall-paper.
They required a new power point on the opposite side of the wall to another (Called back-to-back, over here), that had been left out during the original alterations.
So Pete get's in there with the new B'n'B and drills through the other side of the wall.
He noticed after a while that the Brace was getting rather hard to turn and thought that it was just the bit breaking through the wall-lining, so he kept turning it.
He said he walked into the room next door, to see if the bit had in fact come through, only to find the entire Scrim gone off the wall and wrapped around his drill bit, wallpaper and all, it was all on the floor.
How would you explain that one, eh?.

Did you see the one on TV recently where the guy fell off a ladder, landed on his skyward-pointing drill with auger bit, the auger bit went in his eye and out the side of his head? Gnarly.

I've been sitting here trying to remember a few of mine over the years.

I built a large commercial warehouse type store once, and it was built with poured tilt walls. I slabbed in quite a few stub ups into the tilt pours, for wall switches, exterior lights, Fire alarm, door security, etc.

When you calculate the stub up heights, you want the stubs to come out of the wall at bar joist level, but you have to factor in that the tilt walls sit on the footers, about 2 feet lower than finished floor.

Somehow I screwed that up, I think maybe I doubled the height difference, and as the roof joists went up, I began to see that every one of my stubs came out 2 feet ABOVE the roof.

Oops. And we're talking a Home Depot size facility, lot's of stub ups. Chipped out and recaptured the critical ones, surface piped the rest.

On another job, on a Sunday Father's Day, I was carrying a 2500A main switch gear across a site on a Lull, to place in the building. I tipped it forward and dropped her face down in the dirt. Snapped the handle off the main breaker. I called the project manager at home. I said "Happy father's day, I broke the gear". But we we're pretty good friends, so he said "Must have happened in shipping".

I did a nursing home one time, and on the third floor, I had a guy hook up a transformer wrong. I think he swapped the neutral for C phase on the secondary side. When it turned on, I noticed all the wall sconces down the hallways glowing rather brightly. 208v on a 120v fixture will do that...lol. The bad part was in all the patient rooms, above the ceilings was a stepdown transformer/controller for the patients bed switches for their lighting. We fried about 35 of them at $100 each.

I'll try and remember some more....

Figured this was appropriate to resurrect this thread:

We've had a couple of guys in the company mis-step while in attics and put their foot through the ceiling. Everyone busts their chops about it, but it's all good-natured.

Working in an attic today and wondering what practical joke I could play on my boss in light of his birthday. Figured I go up to him all morose and claim I'd also screwed up and stuck a shoe through the ceiling. No sooner had I formed the thought than I actually did plant my foot right through the sheetrock.

But I didn't stop there.

There was nothing nearby to grab, and I succeded in falling entirely though the drywall ceiling. My boss hears my surprised exclamations and walks into the Great Room to see me swinging from a truss, in the middle of a hole the size of a Volkswagon, with 20 feet of air between me and the huge pile of cellulose insulation on the floor.

I don't know what ended up worse, the ceiling or my pride. But I'll bet I never managed to live this one down.

-John

I was working in a control room at the smelter here as an apprentice many moons ago, replacing bulbs in the "panagraph" (old style control station using the Swanson system). I dropped my screwdriver, and it landed handle down right onto a stop button for a conveyor. No big deal, until I realized EVERYTHING was interlocked with that conveyor. The sound of everything in the noisy plant grinding to a halt was disheartening to say the least. It ended up totally shutting down 4 other plants and caused a backup of SO2 gas in the system. The automatic gas sensors turned on the evacuation alarms. As it was, the plants were evacuated for 45 minutes (about 700 workers) and after the evacuation was done it took 3 hours to get the plants all up and running smooth again. It took a long time to live that one down.

Now here's one that didn't happen to me, but it did happen at one of our local hydro generation plants. They had just finished a generator re-build, the rotor was put back into place and everything was fine, until one of the electricians doing last-minute checks had a 6" metal ruler fall out of his pocket into the gap between the rotor and stator. They had to pull the rotor out again just to get the ruler out, and lost many thousands of dollars in power revenue. After that their policy changed: everyone going onto the generators had to empty their pockets.

[This message has been edited by Sixer (edited 12-12-2005).]

Guys,

Thanks for brightening my day. It's been a rough couple of weeks.

My alltime favorite occured about 18 yrs ago. We were doing work at the house of the then NJ Attorney General. One of the men stepped through the sheetrock ceiling.

But the best part was the phone call to my old man: "Hey boss, did you know this ceiling was only made of sheetrock"

Since then, you name it.

John, this is an advantage to being an HVAC guy. When you step through the ceiling you just say "That's where the return goes"

Here's one..,
How about walking through the substation on your way to break and accidentally brushing up against the shunt-trip for the main to the whole General Motors main headquaters building.
Had to go through the whole sub killing all the switches just so we could reset the main and then go back and throw all the switches back on.
We finished and sat down like nothing had happened just as the suits started pouring through the door.
"Must have been an Edison problem."

Before I sold my last house and after much goading from the wife, I thought it would be a good idea to finally install the attic fan that had been sitting in the box in the garage for about a year.

Got the fan installed in the gable..no prob. However, there was no room to squeeze another wire into the existing chase down through the header/rafter above my panel (I wish I could choke the guy that wired my old house..but that's another story). I borrowed one of those long bits from a residential contractor friend down the street and got busy. Drilled hole. Climbed down to see where hole was. No hole. Hmmm.
Strange. You guessed it...the hole was in the living room. Cracked the drywall good too. I hate when that happens.

Last mistake that I remember (or will admit) at work was ordering a 500ft run of 500MCM CLX armored cable without the neutral. Ouch.

2 biggest srew-ups I know about:

First one was a guy I worked with. He forgot to bond the nuetral and grounds, burnt up about 100K worth of cicuit boards. Bosses insurance covered that one...

2nd was the boss himself. He was so happy about buying an auger truck. Away he went to drill and pour light columns.....
And about three weeks later he got a call from the township,water dept and home contractor. Seems he forgot to mark where the storm drains were and somehow drilled right through one, then poured it full of concrete.
48" sewer drain?

I still laugh over that one......


Dnk....

Alright... since we're on the subject...

Back in the day when I was a greenie, I was on the roof of a new tilt-up hooking up A/C units with another "supposed journeyman". The journeyman had me drill holes in the bottom of the pans in the units themselves instead of having to use roof jacks and to top it off, he just had me stubbing flex through the pan (one ¾" for power and another ½" for tstat) times 16 units!!!
Over the preceeding weekend, it rains like crazy! I'm in Fresno over this weekend so no one gets ahold of me to let me know that the flexes are acting like garden hoses pouring into the building! I get to the jobsite the next monday and the foreman and the GC are standing at the door looking at me saying "What the (CENSORED) did you do!?!!?" I told my foreman that I did exactly what the journeyman told me to do (which I did)
Needless to say, they had to pump out the entire building that was supposed to be getting carpet in, had already been painted with some sort of expensive sparkly paint, (which made a beautiful pattern in the water I must say ) They had to run the big propane heaters in there for about 2 weeks to dry everything out
The journeyman that was there wasn't heard from since after lunch that day..

About a year later I went on a small service call to the same building and there must've still been leaks in the units cause the ceiling tiles were water stained.. I remember putting one of the tiles back and a manager for the company that had moved in commented "They sure did a crappy job on that roof, didn't they?"

We were doing some work at a DHL cargo facility in San Diego -converting it from whatever it had been to a cargo facility with conveyor belts/lighting/office ti's- and the GC had to place concrete filled steel bollards around the electric room which protruded into the floor area of the cargo sorting area, and was subject to being hit by truck/forklift/van traffic in and out of the building. He was core drilling holes in the slab for the bollards and nicked one of the underground conduits coming out of the electric room. Luckily he stopped before getting entirely through the pipe, so my story has a kind of boring ending, but I still couldn't help but think: "what if?.."

LOL,
That's a cool story Randy!.

Can I make fun of my father here? I'm gonna anyway.

He is permanently barred from helping the men by driving ground rods.

1st occasion, residential service upgrade. He was pushing the GR in by hand (working it up and down) when all of a sudden a slight hiss. Then water coming through the foundation. He managed to go directly through a 3/4" copper water main.

2nd occasion, service upgrade to a small strip mall. He begins to install the 1st ground rod, same as always, by hand. No hammers, drills, etc. This time an awful hiss. He went right through a 1" plastic gas main.

Now when the men see him on site with a ground rod in hand, they have orders to shoot to kill.

In reply to Electric Eagle's first post, thank your lucky stars you were not up on the 35th floor of a highrise condo when you cut into this h2o pipe. Second, I hope this thread stays acitve for a few days so I can post some of my real good zingers, but I have to get to my current project right now.

Helping the boss install a Delta-480v main fire station. We replaced a 1980s unit with a brand-new, half-sized, computerized unit. Had 2 feeds coming in overhead, one was back-up/emergency from a generator and one was main feed. He pulled the old feeds out and placed them in the same way. On the new unit, the emergency was on the other side. Checked continuity on all phases...except the last one. Both of us completely forgot for some reason. Flipped the disco, kaboom. Phase C was grounded. Grenaded the solid copper on the inside and turned the crimp sleeve nice and black. Almost tore a hole out of the side.

Running Romex in a remodel house. Walking through the attic only not to see a telephone cable running along the joist, trip, kaboom. Size 12 through the ceiling.

On a more recent call...
I had a troubleshoot for an entire trailer park about 50 miles from home. (6 trailers out of the 140 space park were out)
I put the toner on one of the dead pedestals and started trying to follow the lines back to the main gear which was about 600' away.. I finally locate the problem... Some plumbers had nicked the direct burial 1/0 AL and the dissolved themselves apart.. By this time it's already getting dark out, so I called into the shop for some backup to put some pvc in the ground and pull new wire for the damaged section.
The office sends me a journeyman and a couple helpers that I'd never met before...
By this time I have a bunch of people standing around waiting for their power to come back on..
I tell the helpers to start digging a trench from pedestal to pedestal, and warn then "THERE'S OTHER UTILITIES IN THE SAME TRENCH!!! BE CAREFUL!!!"

Not 30 seconds later I hear a loud WOOSH.. and a 20' geyser was flooding out everything! couldn't locate the shutoff for about half hour, Now I have people complaining about water running under their trailers as our work area is becoming a mud pit
I finally find the shutoff for the 1" watermain and now have people complaining about no water UUGGHH!! I get a plumber out and run to the orange box about 5 miles away for a couple pumps and hoses. I get back and pump out everything, by this time, it's midnight... after this we see the cable TV line with a nice slice out of it.
We finally get power restored at 7am...

We later found out the CATV line was abandoned (whew!) and backfilled... I hit the sack at just after noon...

A friend of mine is a foreman for a big drywall out fit and his brother is an apprentice for him.. one friday the brother is firetaping above a drop ceiling in an occupied hospital.. big snow storm monday.. comes into work tues and the super , gen forman, hospital bigwigs are steaming.. whats up? here all the sinks in the hospital get a flush of special solution to keep bacteria and the such from building up.. it flushes 2 gallons every hour.. while fire taping a piece of tape fell into the slop sink and covered the drain hole ... 5 gallon sink... 48hrsx2 gallons=alot of clean up.. they had to replace ceiling tiles and some drywall on the floors below.. i sucked to be him that day

Here's one, I was doing a bathroom remodel with my bro-in laws, one a GC, the other a plumbing contractor. they were on the job before me, starting to put in the jacuzzi, with the box cut open and laying on the floor of the bathroom or so I thought. As I walked on the cut open box my whole leg went thru the box and the dining room ceiling. There was the homeowners little daughter, sitting at the table eating breakfast, when she saw my leg come thru the ceiling she started to cry and got up and ran! That was horrible, but it's funny now!

Here's one, I was doing a bathroom remodel with my bro-in laws, one a GC, the other a plumbing contractor. they were on the job before me, starting to put in the jacuzzi, with the box cut open and laying on the floor of the bathroom or so I thought. As I walked on the cut open box my whole leg went thru the box and the dining room ceiling. There was the homeowners little daughter, sitting at the table eating breakfast, when she saw my leg come thru the ceiling she started to cry and got up and ran! That was horrible, but it's funny now!

Here the fine for damaging a utility is $5000 so we never drive a rod, without a mark out.

Asked my dad for one of his old stories.
Working in a high-rise building pulling 750 kcmil in the elevator shaft.
Someone had the bright idea of lifting it to the roof with a crane and then lowering it down the shaft so that gravity would help the pull.
After feeding it down a few floors, the wieght of the cable got to be too much for them to handle and gravity took over.
The whole run payed out down the shaft and when the end of the spool come off, it fell down the shaft too.

Another one of my experiences..,
Pulling in 1000' of 500kcmil triplex primary cable between manholes.
The bazooka tube (feeding tube) broke between pulls so the foreman welded it back together during lunch. He didn't get it smooth on the inside and when we started pulling the next run, the wire got skined about every three feet.
We couldn't tell until the wire made it to the next manhole (abt. 200')
Long story short, we had to pull the whole thing back out with the big truck and let the apprentices cut it up for scrap.
They got to take home 3000' of 500 kcmil.
Good day for them!

Went to add a couple of circuits to a house that my friend (HVAC contractor)has as a rental. The house was built back in the 50's. Panel was on the outside, so I intend on going up thru the soffit board and into the attic to run the circuits allll the way across the attic. Drilled hole but wire would not feed thru, so I figured they had some blocking up there. The roof was a 4/12 pitch so I knew it was going to be tight...especially for me and my beer belly...lol. Went up in the attic and had to crawl across the ceiling joists on my hands and knees (ouch). Get to the other side of the house and I try to reach over and clear the rockwool insulation so I could see what the problem is...and boom...a half sheet of sheetrock falls from the ceiling under me with all the rock wool following it down. I am laying there spread eagled on the ceiling joists and thinking...well, I don't think I am going to make a profit on this one! The sheetrock was 3/8" instead of the common 1/2 inch. I called my friend and gave him the bad news...he came over and we patched the ceiling. I finished running the circuits and told him there was no charge. We still laugh about that to this day.

Not me, but I remember about 21 years ago, a theatre carpenter was wiring up a 220 outlet for a turntable, and he somehow got the idea that you put both hots on one terminal, and the neutral on the other.. he turned on the breaker (20a), and the 400a main went 'thud', and the building went black. The police responded when the alarm went off, thinking the box office was being robbed..

not me either, but my old instructor used to tell us about an aluminum rolling mill in his juristiction of which he had authority at the time. Electrician was screwing the 1900 blank cover back on to 277volt lighting j-box. shorted to ground. The ground-fault on the main had never been properly set so the main opened. Well this place needed an orderly shutdown. Equipment started fire and the whole place burnt to the ground.

Talk about sinking feeling. I imagine that one felt like falling into a bottomless pit.

--->BUMP!<----
Wow some of the previous ones posted are good, here is one , although not as good but I find entertaining..
Wiring a parking lot for lights.. Journeyman shows up and has the excavator start digging between the two red stakes (assumed that was the markings for the outer edge of the island).. When the Foreman shows up he stops the excavator, and has a chat with the journeyman.. Excavator starts filling in the trench... Turns out the journeyman failed to read the markings on the stakes and had the trench 1.5 meters in the wrong direction..

Same job, same journeyman.. instructing the excavator operator where to dig for the conduits... The journeyman has the map with the locates in HIS HAND, and still has the poor operator excavate in the vicinity of a 2" gas main... Excavator found the main! $5G later!

Same job, Foreman and engineers mess up:
We were on the line truck digging out the 24" holes for the concrete bases... Foreman is saying "Deeper"... We heard a funny noise then noticed some blue plastic coming out of the hole... Oops, we found the center of a new storm sewer! It is exactly where its supposed to be according to prints, and so are our massively heavy concrete bases for these lights... One right on top of the other!


Same job SAME journeyman... Payback for him, entertainment for us:

We had just set the pole on top of its concrete base and said journeyman started adjusting the nuts and fastening hardware at the bottom in attempts to "level" this pole.. He cranked and wrenched until his level said the pole was straight but it looked WAY off.... Moved his level to another side and did the same thing, cranking and wrenching.. This went on for 35 minutes until he eyeballed it and made it look good.. Too bad the pole he had his level on was TAPERED.. too bad he didn't realize his level was not!

I was distracted by the owner of a commercial laundry asking me technical questions while fixing the solenoid valve on a 100 pound dryer and missed the step where you turn the gas off. He decided to leave me alone to do my job after seeing half his dryer become engulfed in flames.

Working in a pet food factory doing motor control wotk and dropped my bundle of zip ties onto a conveyor of dog food headed for thew bagging area. By the time I got down and told the foreman it was to late. They had to shut down the line and tear every bag open to find the zip ties.

One of our residential guys was doing a service change on a home as he was on the roof a freak ice storm blew through coating everything, including him and the roof in a matter of minutes. We got a help call at the shop to send the bucket truck over to get him down as he could not move from his spot on the roof to get to his ladder.

Years ago in Houston had an electrician stop by the local bar on the way home. He had a little to much to drink and got pretty mouthy. He ended up tossed out of the bar and laying in the parking lot. He did not like the way he was treated so he pulled the estension ladder off the truck and proceeded to cut the drop. He did a pretty good job taped the ends and did not cut the neutral (had to fix it the next day). When the lights went out some pretty big old boys came out of the bar mad that they had to stop drinking. Lucky for him the police showed up and he thought it might be better to go with the cops than try to talk to the crowd in the parking lot.
After his wife bailed him out the boss seemed to find a lot of jobs for him that involved hand digging ditches.

A few years ago, I was installing baseboard heaters and had to drill down through the floor. My apprentice would cut a square out of the carpet, then drill the hole. The last hole, he didn't make the cut quite big enough. The bit grabbed one string of the carpet and pulled it the whole length of the room. The owners got new carpeting out of the deal.

One more.

This one happened to the boss, thankfully.
This was before satellite communication. My old boss was out trenching some lights for a football field. Everything had been marked or so he thought. He had gone about 150' when he noticed a phone cable that he had cut. Nothing was marked there, but he stopped and dug it up anyway. As he was down in the hole, holding the ends of the cable, someone yelled "Stop, right there". He looked up and there were 4 guys with
M-16's pointed at him. Turns out that simple phone cable was a Department of Defense communication cable to one of the local missile silos.

I suppose this may be a wee bit off topic because when the guys did my new driveway the electric service drop is the only thing they didn't break. They got the phone, the TV cable and the water in 3 separate incidents. Then they left me with a dozen footprints in the concrete.

I was doing a remodel for a customer. We were changing Gasoline Dispensers, POS, Signage and canopy lights etc. We're changing 2 of the 4 dispensers while station is still operating on the other 2. The new Dispensers should be phased with the POS equipment so I move some stuff around in the panel to get enough room to get all electronics on the same phase. The problem was the new stuff and old stuff were now phased differently. We were testing the new equipment when a customer came in and turned on the old equipment, pooof out came the magic smoke Thankfully the new equipment had cube relays and the old had triacs, the cube relays won:P