25 years ago I wired a maintenance facility for garbage trucks in Maryland with 60' steel parking lot poles, each with two 1000 watt fixtures. At the time of installation I had the nuts and washers but not the lock washers for the 1-1/4 anchor bolts, so we installed the poles without them. When the lock washers came in I gave them to an apprentice to install. It is probably obvious now what happended. On the first pole, he removed all of the nuts, installed the lock washers and retightened the four nuts. On the second pole, he was not so lucky, but a guy driving a Toyota pickup truck sped up just enough to avoid the falling pole. When I called the project manager at Dynalectric to tell him what happened, I realized that I failed to state the obvious, only do one bolt at a time. Only one fixture was damaged, so we got somewhat lucky. The same apprentice eventually went away for other reasons, such as leaving my keys in the side door of the van on a downtown Washington, D.C. street two days in a row and leaving my wheelbarrow full of tools on the street behind my van at a construction project (the following day, the wheelbarrow's muddy track could be seen wandering down the street toward a housing development). I hope he is no longer in the trade!
