Hectic

My day started by having to rush to Waikiki to attempt to do a service call on Friday's work. We had to re-route some phone lines in a kitchen remodel because in the 70's builders were too stupid to separate everyone's phone instead of running it floor-to-floor through the kitchen walls. So I cut 5 people's phone lines and had to extend and splice them in the new wall & ceiling. Unfortunately cutting the lines apparently blows fuses in the telecom room which kills their service. My biggest mistake was my affinity for courtesy and helpfulness in which I told the building management that I would be doing this and that the occupants should not be alarmed. Had I not said anything, they each would have called the phone company, which would have sent a technician who would have easily found and replaced the fuse. Instead, they are all told that I had cut the lines and everyone assumes that I fucked it up, and they want blood.

In a technical sense, it is my fault. Unfortunately I had never seen a fused phone block before, and had cut at least 100 live phone lines in the past without incident. I wasn't anywhere near the telecom room, and since we were doing rough-in I had no reason to check the phone in that unit for operation yet. I was extremely careful, meticulous, and painfully slow in making sure my splices were accurate and proper. It then is a crappy way to start the day going back to check my work, which was right, when the phone company would have already fixed it if I had kept my mouth shut. Crappy for the phone guy, but he has to fix it either way, because I don't have an array of telecom fuses and nobody is really allowed to touch their equipment anyways.

So then I drove to another jobsite 15 miles away, dropped off 1 roll of wire, ate my lunch on the road, doubled-back and drove another 25 miles into Kailua. Jumped into a job I have very little history on and we ended up working an extra 2 hours of unplanned overtime and still didn't finish it. The very last thing I did was flip a light switch and hear *pop!* Guess where I'm going tomorrow morning. We still have to take down the scaffolding after we troubleshoot, and the flooring goes in tomorrow. Ugh. So not every day is palm trees and ocean breezes....