What Being an Electrician Is Actually Like

When people find out you're an electrician, what's the first thing they ask?

Can you come look at my outlet. Every single time. I'll be at a barbecue, someone finds out what I do, and within ten minutes they're describing a light switch that "does something weird." And I get it, it's like being a doctor at a dinner party. Except nobody's going to die from a three-way switch that's wired backward. Probably. They might pop a breaker.

The thing people don't understand about commercial electrical is that it's basically construction logistics with wire. I'm not in somebody's house swapping out an outlet. I'm on a jobsite with a set of blueprints, a crew of four, and a general contractor's superintendent named Chet who changed the plan yesterday and wants me to figure out how to route conduit through a wall that's already framed and insulated. That's my Tuesday. That was literally my Tuesday this week.

What happened Tuesday?

We're roughing in a dental office in a strip mall off Bandera Road. New tenant improvement. The prints show the electrical layout, where the outlets go, where the circuits run, what size wire, what size conduit, all of it. I've been reading prints since I was 18 and at this point I can look at a set and pretty much see the job in three dimensions. Where the conduit needs to turn, where it'll conflict with the HVAC duct, where I'm going to run into a plumbing stack that the architect drew six inches from where it actually is.

Chet is the project superintendent for the GC. He walks the job Monday afternoon and tells me the dentist added four outlets in the reception area and a dedicated 20-amp circuit for some piece of equipment. X-ray unit, digital imaging, something like that. These outlets aren't on my prints. There's no addendum. Chet just tells me, verbally, "the owner wants four more here and a dedicated circuit for the imaging room." OK. Fine. But the wall is already framed. The insulation is going in Thursday. I need to get conduit and boxes into that wall before Thursday morning or the insulation crew covers it up and I'm cutting open finished walls next week.

That sounds like a tight turnaround for something that wasn't planned.

It is. And this is the thing about commercial work that nobody explains to apprentices. Maybe 70% of the job is executing the plan. The other 30% is adapting when the plan changes, which it always does. The prints are a starting point. By the time you're done, you've made forty decisions that aren't on the paper. This stud is in the way, so I'm offsetting the box two inches left. That duct run is lower than the drawing shows, so my conduit goes above it instead of below. The plumber already ran his drain line through the spot where my conduit was supposed to go, so I need a different path.

My dad was a plumber. I grew up around job sites. I can actually read plumbing prints, which is kind of unusual for an electrician. Most electricians look at the electrical sheets and maybe the architectural. I look at the plumbing and mechanical sheets too because I want to know where their stuff is before I start running mine. It saves me about two hours a week in conflicts. Ruben, my foreman, has been with the company 19 years. He noticed I was reading the full set of drawings my first year and he said, "Your old man was a plumber, huh." He could tell just from that.

What's the actual physical work like?

Commercial is a lot of conduit. EMT, which is the thin-wall metal tube, or rigid if the spec calls for it. I'm bending conduit with a hand bender or a mechanical bender, mounting it to walls and ceilings with straps, pulling wire through it. The bending is the part that separates people. A good electrician can bend a 90-degree turn, an offset, a kick, a saddle, and have it land exactly where it needs to. Bad bends mean the conduit doesn't line up with the box, or it looks crooked on the wall, or the wire won't pull through because you kinked it. I've been bending conduit for 12 years and I still get a small, like, satisfaction when a run comes out perfectly straight with the offsets landing right. Arturo, a journeyman on my crew, he's the best I've ever seen. He bends 3/4-inch EMT like it's made of rubber. Perfectly clean. Never has to redo one.

The other physical part people don't think about is the overhead work. Ceilings in commercial buildings are usually drop ceilings with a grid, and above that grid is where everything lives. Ductwork, plumbing, fire sprinkler, data cables, and electrical. I spend a lot of time on a ladder with my arms above my head, running conduit or pulling wire through ceiling spaces that are 18 inches tall and full of other trades' stuff. Your shoulders feel it. Your neck feels it. After 12 years I've learned to take breaks and stretch, but the first five years I didn't, and I'm paying for it now in my left shoulder.

You're mentoring an apprentice right now. What's that like?

Danny. He's 21. He was working at a Whataburger before this. Smart kid, picks things up fast, but he's impatient. He wants to bend conduit on day one. I get that, I was the same way. But you've got to learn the code first, learn the prints first, learn how to identify wire gauges and breaker sizes before you start bending anything. The NEC, the National Electrical Code, is a 900-page book and it's not optional. It's the law. If an inspector comes through and your work doesn't meet code, you tear it out and do it again. On your own time, usually.

Ruben's philosophy, which I've adopted, is he lets you fail in small ways so you learn. He won't let you make a dangerous mistake. But if Danny bends an offset backward, Ruben won't say anything. He'll let Danny install it, realize it doesn't line up, figure out what he did wrong, and redo it. That takes longer. It also means Danny won't bend an offset backward again. I did the same thing with a box offset my first year. Ruben watched me install it crooked, waited until I stepped back and saw it, and said "you see it?" I saw it. Took me 20 minutes to fix. Never did it again.

The part nobody talks about

What's yours?

The coordination. People think electricians show up and do electrical work. They don't realize that on a commercial job, there are five or six trades working in the same space at the same time. Plumbers, HVAC, fire sprinkler, drywall, electricians. And we're all trying to run our stuff through the same walls and ceilings. There's a priority system, sort of. The big ductwork gets routed first because it's the hardest to move. Then plumbing, because drainage needs gravity. Then everybody else fights for what's left.

The amount of my week that's spent not doing electrical work but talking to other trades about who's going where is, I don't know, maybe 15 to 20%. Walking up to the plumber and saying, hey, are you running that 4-inch drain through this joist bay or the next one? Because if it's this one, I need to reroute my homerun. Mariana, my wife, she's a nurse at a children's hospital. She says her job is 40% charting and 40% coordination and 20% actual patient care. I told her mine's the same ratio but with conduit instead of patients. She didn't think that was as funny as I did.

You've been an electrician for 26 years. How'd that happen?

Accident, honestly. I did a year of community college studying business administration and I hated it. Absolutely hated it. I was 19, sitting in an accounting class thinking, I cannot do this for forty years. My roommate's dad ran a small electrical contractor and needed a helper for the summer. A helper is the lowest rung. You carry material, clean up, hand tools to the journeyman. I did that for one summer and I was like, OK, this is real work. You can see what you did at the end of the day. I signed up for the state apprenticeship program that fall and never went back to college.

Worked for two different shops over 18 years. Good shops, learned a lot. The second one, the owner kept underbidding jobs. He'd quote a panel upgrade at $2,800 when the materials alone were $1,400. I was doing the work and I could see the math didn't work. We were always behind, always rushing. I went solo at 44. Sharon, my wife, she works at a veterinary clinic as a receptionist. She does my books on weekends. QuickBooks, invoicing, tracking expenses. I could not run this business without her and I've told her that probably four hundred times.

What does a typical day look like?

Today was a good example. I had three stops. First one was the Hendersons' house. They're in their seventies, their house was built in 1967, and it still has the original Federal Pacific panel. Federal Pacific panels are a known fire hazard. The breakers don't trip reliably. I've been telling the Hendersons for three years that they need to replace it and they finally said yes because their insurance company started asking questions.

A panel swap takes me about six hours working alone. I'm replacing a 100-amp Federal Pacific with a 200-amp Square D panel. That means I'm shutting off power to the house, pulling the meter, removing the old panel, mounting the new one, re-landing every circuit on new breakers, labeling everything, then calling for inspection. Mrs. Henderson makes me lunch when I'm there. Turkey sandwich, chips, a glass of lemonade. She's done that every time I've worked at their house for the past five years. I've told her she doesn't have to. She says she knows.

You said you had three stops today.

Right. After the Hendersons', I drove across town to do an estimate for an EV charger. This is the fastest-growing part of my business right now. Guy bought a Tesla, needs a Level 2 charger in his garage. The charger itself is a 48-amp unit, which means I need a 60-amp breaker and #6 wire from the panel to the garage. His panel is on the opposite side of the house from his garage. That's a 75-foot run through the attic and down an exterior wall. I measured everything, took photos, checked his panel for space. He's got a 200-amp panel with four empty slots, so the capacity is fine. Wrote up the estimate in the van. $3,200 for labor and materials. He said he wanted to think about it. That means I'll follow up in a week and he'll either say yes or he'll tell me his brother-in-law "knows a guy" who can do it for $1,800. The brother-in-law's guy will not pull a permit. I will.

Third stop was a troubleshooting call. Rental property, tenant says half the outlets in the master bedroom don't work. This is detective work. I start at the panel. All the breakers are on. I check the dead outlets with a voltage tester. Nothing. I trace the circuit. In older houses, bedroom outlets are usually daisy-chained, meaning one feeds into the next feeds into the next. If one connection fails, everything downstream goes dead. I found it in about 45 minutes. A wire nut in the first box in the chain had come loose. The hot wire had backed out maybe an eighth of an inch. Enough to break the circuit. I redid the connection, tested all the downstream outlets, done. Charged the landlord $185 for the call. He grumbled about the price. That's 45 minutes of diagnosis and the 26 years of experience that let me find it in 45 minutes instead of three hours.

What's the business side like? You're not just an electrician, you're a small business owner.

That year of business school I dropped out of? It's the most useful education I have. Not the degree, which I didn't get. The concepts. I understand margins. I understand overhead. Most electricians I know who went solo, the ones who failed, they failed because they couldn't run a business. They were great electricians. Couldn't price a job, couldn't manage cash flow, couldn't deal with insurance or taxes or licensing renewals.

My overhead is about $4,200 a month. That's the van payment, insurance, which is a big one, about $380 a month for liability and workers' comp even though I'm the only worker. Tools and materials I buy per job, so that's variable. Phone, licensing fees, the QuickBooks subscription Sharon uses. I need to gross about $12,000 a month before I've paid for anything. My average ticket is around $800 for a service call and maybe $3,500 for a panel upgrade or an EV charger install. I try to do 15 to 18 jobs a month. Some months it's 22, some months it's 11 and I'm nervous.

Miguel is a buddy of mine, another solo electrician in town. We swap overflow. When I'm booked out two weeks, I send work to him. When he's slammed, he sends me calls. It's not formal. We just text each other. It's maybe the most valuable relationship in my business because it means I never have to tell a customer "I can't get to you for three weeks." I just say "my colleague Miguel can be there Tuesday," and they're happy and Miguel gets a job and I don't lose a customer. Everybody wins.

Your son Tyler works in tech. How does he feel about the trades?

Tyler is 24. He does something with databases at a company in Portland. He's never held a pair of lineman's pliers in his life. When he was 14 I tried to get him to help me on a Saturday. He lasted about two hours and said, "Dad, I think I'm an indoor person." And, you know, that's fine. I didn't push it. Some guys in the trades get really upset when their kids don't follow them in. I understand the feeling but I also remember being 19 and knowing that I did not want to sit in an accounting class. Tyler knows he doesn't want to crawl through attics. Same instinct. Different direction.

What's complicated is that Tyler makes $95,000 a year at 24, working from home in his pajamas. I make around the same at 52, and I earned it in crawl spaces and attics and in the rain. I'm not bitter about it. But I notice it. Sharon and I have talked about it. She said "he's using his brain, you're using your hands, you're both working." Which is generous and also not entirely accurate because I use my brain plenty, thank you. But the market values his skills differently than mine and I've made my peace with that. Mostly.

What's yours?

The loneliness. I work alone every day. I drive to a job alone, I work in someone's attic alone, I eat lunch in my van alone, I drive to the next job alone. When I worked for a shop, I had a crew. We'd ride together, eat together, complain about the foreman together. Now it's me and the van and a podcast about World War II history.

Some days I don't speak to another adult until Sharon gets home at 5:30. I talk to the homeowner for five minutes when I arrive and five minutes when I leave, and the rest of the day I'm in their walls or their ceiling by myself. You'd think after 8 years I'd be used to it. I am used to it. I'm not sure I like it. Miguel and I grab lunch maybe once a week when our schedules overlap and that hour is, honestly, the best hour of my work week. Not because of the food. Because I'm sitting across from someone who understands what my day is like. That's harder to find than you'd think.

You were a barista four years before becoming an electrician. How does that happen?

I was making lattes at a coffee shop in NoDa, which is a neighborhood in Charlotte. Before that I'd been a property management assistant for about a year. I was 23 and I had this feeling like, OK, I've been doing jobs. I hadn't started a career. There's a difference. A job is a thing you show up to. A career is a thing you build. And I saw a recruitment flyer at the community college for a women-in-trades program. Free tuition, guaranteed apprenticeship placement if you complete the eight-week intro course. I thought about it for maybe two days and signed up.

The intro course was 14 women. We rotated through electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and welding. Two weeks each. I liked all of them but electrical clicked because it felt the most like a puzzle. You can't see the electricity. You have to understand what's happening inside the wire, inside the panel, inside the circuit, all based on rules that you learn from the codebook and from experience. That appealed to me. I'm the kind of person who likes knowing how things work behind the surface. When I was in property management, I was always the one who wanted to watch the maintenance guys fix things instead of just calling them and walking away.

You said you were the only woman in your apprenticeship class.

One of 14. Thirteen guys and me. And look, I'm going to be honest about this because pretending it wasn't a factor would be dishonest. The first six months were hard in ways that had nothing to do with the work. I had guys who wouldn't talk to me. Not mean, just... silent. They'd talk to each other and then stop when I walked up. One guy asked me, and I remember the exact words, he said, "so are you doing this for real or is this like a TikTok thing?" I told him it was for real. He nodded and walked away. By month eight he was asking me to hand him tools and making small talk. By the end of the first year we were fine. But those first months, you feel like you're auditioning every single day. Every mistake feels bigger because you think people are watching for reasons that have nothing to do with the mistake.

Daryl was the journeyman who trained me on my first jobsite. Retired Army. He treated me exactly the same as every other first-year, which meant he was hard on everybody. He didn't care that I was a woman. He cared that I checked my lockout/tagout three times instead of once. He cared that I wore my safety glasses. He cared that I showed up on time. That's it. Daryl is the reason I have the habits I have. Every time I approach a panel, I hear his voice: "Test it. Test it again. Now test it with a different tester." Three checks. Every time. Non-negotiable.

What does industrial electrical work look like day to day?

Right now I'm on a 50-megawatt solar farm outside Monroe, North Carolina. It's about 300 acres of panels. My crew's job is the electrical infrastructure that connects everything. We're pulling wire through underground conduit runs, 400-foot pulls from the inverter pads to the combiner boxes. The wire is #4 copper, which is thick. Pulling it through conduit over that distance takes a pulling machine and four people. I'm usually at the pulling end, feeding the fish tape back through and guiding the wire as it comes out. My hands are coated in pulling lubricant by 9 AM and they don't get clean until I'm home.

Wednesday was a mud day. It rained Sunday and Monday. The trenches where we laid the conduit had standing water. I was in rubber boots up to my knees, pulling wire in a trench with six inches of water in it. The conduit is below grade, buried in the mud, and the junction boxes at each end are sitting in puddles. None of this stops the work. We just do it wet. Beau, my foreman, he's been in this trade for 30 years. Climbs ladders faster than I do and he's 57. He looked at the trench Wednesday morning and said, "well, that's not going to drain itself." And we got in.

That's a big difference from making lattes.

Yeah. I mean, yes. The physical part was the biggest adjustment. The first month of my apprenticeship, I came home so tired I would sit in my car in the parking lot for ten minutes before I could walk up the stairs to my apartment. My hands were blistered. My back hurt in places I didn't know had muscles. I lost seven pounds in the first six weeks without trying because I was burning so many calories just carrying material.

But here's the thing, and this is what I tell people when they ask about the trades. The coffee shop was harder on my mental health. I was exhausted in a different way. Bored, underpaid, anxious about the future. Now I'm physically tired at the end of the day but I feel like I did something. Lyle, my boyfriend, he works in logistics. He's at a desk all day. He says he envies that I can point to a thing and say "I built that." He's right that it's a specific kind of satisfaction. Wednesday I was standing in mud pulling wire for eight hours and by the end of the day we had completed the whole east section. Two hundred feet of wire, terminated and tested. That's real. That's in the ground. It'll be there generating electricity for 25 years.

You mentioned Chandra earlier. What's that friendship like?

Chandra is one of two other women in my company's field workforce. Out of about 200 field employees, there are three of us. We text each other constantly. Not about work stuff, necessarily. Just, like, life. But also work stuff that we can't really talk about with the guys. Like when Chandra's foreman assigned her to sweep the trailer instead of pulling wire and she knew, she knew, that he wouldn't have asked one of the guys to do that. She texted me and I told her to go back and say she'd prefer to be on the wire pull. She did. He put her on the wire pull. It was that simple, but having someone to talk to first made the difference between her saying something and just doing the sweeping.

We're not a support group. We're friends who happen to share a very specific experience. We also go to the movies and complain about our boyfriends and talk about normal stuff. But the work thing is the thread underneath everything because nobody else in our lives quite understands what it's like to be one of three women in a crew of 200.

What's yours?

How much of the job is waiting. People picture electricians as constantly busy, hands always doing something. The reality, especially on big industrial jobs, is that you spend a significant amount of time waiting. Waiting for the inspector. Waiting for material to arrive because the supply house shorted us on fittings. Waiting for the other trade to finish so you can access the space. Waiting for the foreman to get the scope change approved. Wednesday I probably spent an hour and a half of my ten-hour day just waiting. Standing in mud. In rubber boots. Waiting for the pulling machine to get repositioned.

And you can't really go do something else because when the wait is over, they need you right then. You can't be across the site. So you stand there. You drink your coffee from a thermos because there's no coffee shop on a solar farm in rural North Carolina. You check your phone. You talk to whoever's standing next to you. You wait. And then suddenly it's go time and you're pulling wire for 90 minutes straight without stopping. The rhythm of the work is bursts and lulls. The lulls are boring in a specific way that makes you very grateful when the burst starts again.