One early winter morning not long ago I was involved in a generator test at a health care facility when suddenly things went bad. Two of the three generators failed to synch and pick-up load which resulted in several feeder breakers to critical areas to trip. My co-worker who had been doing these tests for years and who had trained me suddenly looked like a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest as he dashed about in front of the control panel. With the generators running I couldn't hear a word he was yelling and could only observe. Then he ran over to the main electrical vault across the hall to start "pumping" and throwing breakers back "on". I followed and helped with resetting some breakers. In the end, no harm was done and we got everything up and running properly.
Ultimately several lessons were learnt that day and it became obvious that a better action plan was needed before the next test. All that aside, what really struck me the most was that I needed to step up my game. During that failed test I got caught up in my co-worker's reaction which bothered me. Years ago when I was involved in sports I had trained in various ways to help myself perform under pressure. The biggest obstacle back then was finding ways to stay calm when things suddenly go wrong. Years later remnants of those skills served me well in other aspects of my life. Now I feel like I need to revisit some of those strategies and start applying them to my work with the same degree of seriousness that I had back in my sporting days. Up until recently the worst I had to deal with was listening to people lose their cool when a construction/renovation job wasn't running according to plan. Dealing with that chaos was never a problem. I can't guarantee what will happen in the future but if I can avoid finding myself hopping about like a madman when things go south at work then so much the better.
