Is Being an Electrician Stressful?

Inspections. That's my honest answer. Every rough-in I do, every panel I land, there's an inspector coming to look at it. And the inspector has the authority to make me tear it all out. Not my foreman. Not my journeyman. The inspector. This guy I've never met who shows up with a flashlight and the codebook and walks the job looking for anything that doesn't meet the NEC.

Last month I wired a panel in a new dental suite. Twenty circuits. Took me a day and a half. I was careful. I double-checked my wire sizing, my breaker ratings, my grounding. Kurt, my journeyman, reviewed it. Said it looked good. The inspector came through on Wednesday. He failed me on one thing: the bonding jumper on the panel was undersized. I'd used #8 copper. Code required #6 for that panel size. Kurt should have caught it. I should have caught it. The inspector didn't care whose fault it was. He wrote it up and I had to fix it.

The fix took maybe 20 minutes. But the feeling of seeing "FAILED" on that inspection report is, I mean, it's a gut punch. Kurt told me to let it go, said he's failed hundreds of inspections over 22 years. "It's part of the job," he said. I know he's right. But when I'm wiring a panel now, I have this voice in my head going, "is this right? Check the code. Check it again." That voice is probably good for quality. It's bad for my blood pressure.

Callbacks. A callback is when a customer calls after you've finished a job and says something isn't working. Maybe the outlet you installed is dead. Maybe the breaker you replaced is tripping. Maybe the light you wired flickers. You go back, on your own time usually, and you figure out what went wrong. The company eats the cost. Your boss knows it was your job. Nobody says anything directly, but you see it in the dispatch notes: "Callback, original tech: Gretchen." That's your name on a problem.

I had a callback two weeks ago that I still think about. I'd installed a whole-house surge protector and a new 200-amp panel at the Kimuras' house. Mr. Kimura called four days later saying half his kitchen lost power. I drove back out, and it was a loose connection on one of the breakers. The wire hadn't been torqued properly and it had backed out just enough to lose contact. The fix took five minutes. But the reason it happened was that I was rushing. We had three service calls that day, and the panel swap ran long because the old panel had aluminum wiring that I had to remediate, so I was behind by 2 PM and I was trying to get to the next house and I didn't torque-check every connection before I closed the panel. That's on me.

The stress isn't the callback itself. It's knowing that if I'd taken four more minutes to do it right, the callback doesn't happen. And it's knowing that a loose connection is the kind of thing that causes house fires. Mr. Kimura's connection was just loose enough to not make contact. If it had been loose enough to arc, to create a spark inside the panel, that's a fire. That's a house fire because I was rushing. That thought sits in my head now every time I close a panel. I don't rush anymore. My boss, Denny, says I'm the slowest finisher on the crew. I told him I'd rather be slow than sorry and he didn't argue with me.

I don't worry about the work anymore. I've done the work. I've bent every piece of conduit you can bend, pulled every wire you can pull. The work is the easy part. What stresses me out is watching other people do the work. Specifically, watching green guys approach a 480-volt panel with confidence they haven't earned yet.

I've got 12 people under me on this petrochemical job. Four apprentices. The apprentices are fine when they're scared. The scared ones are careful. They check their meters. They verify lockout. They ask questions before they touch anything. The dangerous moment is when they stop being scared. That happens around month 14 or 15. They've done enough work to feel comfortable, and comfortable is when people get hurt. I had a third-year, Emery, reach for a disconnect last month without testing it first. I was standing right there. I grabbed his arm. The disconnect was de-energized, so nothing would have happened. But I didn't know that, and neither did he, because he didn't test it. That's the point.

I went home that night and told my wife Paulette about it and she said, "you can't watch all of them all the time." She's right. I can't. And that's exactly the stress. I'm responsible for 12 people's safety and I cannot be in 12 places at once. If Emery had grabbed a live disconnect and I'd been on the other side of the site, that's a dead kid and a phone call I make to his mother. I've been doing this for 33 years. I've never made that phone call. The stress is knowing it only takes one moment of inattention for that to change.

Money. Not my salary. The flow of it. When you own a shop, the money comes in unpredictably and goes out like clockwork. I have three employees. Payroll hits every two weeks regardless of whether I've been paid for the jobs we finished. My insurance premium is due on the first. My van payments are due on the fifteenth. The supply house wants payment within 30 days and they are not flexible about that because I'm not a big enough customer to negotiate terms.

Last November was the worst month I've had. We finished $38,000 in work. I collected $19,000 because two big customers, a property management company and a GC I'd done a tenant improvement for, were both slow paying. The property management company owed me $11,000 and they just, they didn't pay. For six weeks. I called their office manager, a woman named Darlene, every Monday for six weeks. "It's in process." "I'll follow up with accounting." "We're switching payment systems." Meanwhile I'm trying to make payroll for three guys, and my personal checking account went below $3,000 for the first time since I started the business.

My wife Carla works in hospital administration. She has a steady paycheck and benefits. When I tell her about the cash flow stress, she listens and she's supportive but she doesn't quite feel it the way I do. Because her check comes on the 1st and the 15th no matter what. Mine comes when someone decides to pay me. Those are two completely different emotional realities. The work itself, the actual electrical work, is the least stressful part of my week. It's the only part where I feel like I know what I'm doing.

My body. Everything else about this job I've figured out. The code, the prints, the coordination, the politics. I'm good at all of it. What I'm not good at is being 47 and climbing a 12-foot ladder fifteen times a day. My knees creak when I go up. My right shoulder, the one I reach overhead with, has a rotator cuff tear that my orthopedist Dr. Khanna says isn't bad enough for surgery but isn't going to get better while I keep reaching overhead eight hours a day. She told me to "modify my activities." I asked her what activities she'd suggest for an electrician who works on ceilings. She didn't have an answer for that.

I started noticing the physical decline around 40. Before that, I could work all day, go home, throw a ball with my son Mateo, feel fine the next morning. Now I feel it. Not sharp pain. Dull. Persistent. My lower back after a day of pulling wire through floor penetrations. My hands cramping after a few hours of stripping wire. My feet on concrete. Everything that was easy at 30 has a cost now.

The pension kicks in at 55 if I want reduced benefits or 62 for full. I'm doing the math a lot these days. If I can make it to 55, that's eight more years. Mateo will be in college by then. My wife Gloria says I should look into becoming an estimator or a project manager, something that uses what I know without destroying what's left of my shoulders. She's probably right. But leaving the tools is its own kind of loss that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't spent 24 years with a pair of Klein pliers in their hand.

The phone. My phone is the most stressful object in my life. I'm on-call two weeks a month, rotating with Webb, the other on-call guy. During those two weeks, my phone can ring at any time. 2 AM, 4 AM, Sunday morning while I'm making pancakes for my daughter Gemma. The call is always someone who has no power, or sparking in their panel, or a burning smell in the wall. They're scared. They need someone now. I'm the someone.

Last Thursday I was asleep at 1:40 AM. Phone rang. Restaurant on Broadway lost power to their walk-in cooler. They had $8,000 worth of food in there and the thermometer was already climbing. I got dressed, drove 25 minutes, and found a tripped GFCI breaker that was feeding the cooler circuit. It had tripped because there was a slow leak from a condensate line dripping onto an outlet behind the cooler. Reset the breaker, identified the moisture source, told the manager to get the condensate line fixed. Total time on site: 35 minutes. But the getting out of bed, the drive, the adrenaline of knowing someone's panicking, the drive home, trying to fall back asleep at 2:45 AM with a 6:30 alarm. That's the part that grinds you down.

My girlfriend Kelly says I sleep differently during on-call weeks. She says I'm tense. I keep my phone on the nightstand with the ringer at full volume and she says I twitch when a notification comes in even if it's not a call. I believe her. The anticipation is worse than the calls. A call at least gives you something to do. The waiting is just lying there knowing it could ring. It could always ring. Webb says he's been doing on-call for seven years and he's used to it. I've been doing it for four and I'm not used to it. I'm not sure "used to it" is the right goal. I think you just learn to function inside the discomfort.