It's been a while...

It's been quite a while since I've posted here. There are two reasons.

Reason one is that work has been incredibly busy. First a bit of background: I'm working on four new operating rooms and an MRI room in a hospital expansion. Each of those operating rooms has four operating booms coming down from the ceiling. Each one had been piped for the power circuits and the data requirements in the drawings. A few weeks ago revised drawings came out from the company handling all of the data requirements for the equipment on the job. In addition to the conduit we had already run about half of the booms would require two 2" pipes and a 1-1/4" pipe from the that boom to a new trough mounted in the wall in the sterile corridor.

This wouldn't have been a big deal except that the new trough in the wall (one for each O.R.) and all of the pipe had to be run after the walls had already been dry-walled, the air curtain duct work was up and the bulkheads built.

All of this was change order work so it made my company happy - they can charge time and materials - but it meant that we ended up way behind and we've been working weekends to get caught up.

Reason number two for my lack of posting has been that I've been working hard to finish out Book One of my apprenticeship strong. The final sections of the first book are on voltage, current and resistance in combination DC circuits. It's not exactly the hardest thing in the world. Like everything else we've learned, it's built on the concepts we've already covered. But the process to solve combination circuits is long and involved. Each step is an opportunity to make an error which would throw the entire calculation off. All the studying paid off, though, and I just finished up my last test in Book One this week. I have a CPR class next time and then it's on to Book Two.

It's a whole other language...

One of the first things that hits you when you start in the electrical industry is all the new terms that everybody else throws around that have absolutely no meaning to you. 1900, 11B, device ring, MC connector, stub 90 and the list goes on.

It doesn't take you too long to start to get a handle on all of this - mostly because you get plenty of practice when everybody's sending you down to the materials room to pick up a box of whatever they need. Pretty soon you can let the foreman know that there are no more 11B single gang 1-1/2" raise mud rings left on the job and actually know what the object you just described looks like. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that has trouble keeping 'connector' and 'coupling' straight, though.

I'm half a year into my apprenticeship and I still run into names and lingo that are new too me.