“What are you doing here?” asked the manufacturer’s testing representative. “We are doing start-up of the gear, and your work seems redundant.” Redundant? That depends on what each of us is responsible for checking. That depends on who is going to ensure that all the known potential failures get checked and as needed, corrected. As an industrial or commercial buyer, …
The technician’s job is usually to ensure the lights are on, but we often need to shut a facility down to perform much needed outage-based maintenance. This switching activity is often straightforward, but when the electrical system is complex and several issues exist, unexpected events can occur. Our team was recently fortunate to be awarded a major contract to provide …
Emergencies always seem to occur on Fridays and weekends, and true to form, a panicked customer called about a power outage to a significant portion of a college campus on a Friday morning. It seemed likely to be a 4,160 volt cable or unit substation problem, so we pulled two technicians away from an acceptance testing project and got them on …
May 2020 was a difficult month for our nation, and 2020 is certainly shaping up to be a difficult year. As essential service providers, many in our industry were called upon to maintain or continue building the nation’s infrastructure. We all understand and appreciate that hospitals, emergency services, government facilities, manufacturing, and even residences could not function without power, and …
I was awakened by a phone call at 3:30AM on a recent Saturday morning and somehow cleared my voice well enough for the customer to understand we would mobilize a technician ASAP to troubleshoot flooding at one of his campus buildings. By 4:15AM, our technician was on site with campus electricians discussing a situation involving the physical education building at …
As I drove toward the office one morning, it occurred to me that we were due for an emergency call. I was about to text a colleague (hands-free voice recognition) when the phone rang. Soon I rerouted the navigation system and I was off to the races! Along the way, I notified the office and called a technician to assist …
It’s very exciting to kick off the first “In the Field” column. Consistent with this NETA World edition’s theme, an article on communications seemed fitting. As I write this, I realize I assumed the “communications” theme was related to interpersonal communications, but I didn’t communicate well enough to clarify that the theme is probably related to equipment communications such as …