What Do You Do For A Living?

[the swede]

Do you generally blow out the lines, @the swede ?

Depends... I think there's 3 cabins I tend to that I have managed to steer the owners into what I think is best to do. So those are generally just about turning off the water and remove thermostate shower faucets and empty the water heater. Ive also put short flex hoses on every sink and kitchen faucets, and also toilets. So I disconnect them to be sure there's no water there, and I know the pipes empty themselves when I do all this.

Then there's 2 cabins I have where I need to blow out everything with air, and both is owned by grumpy old turds that dont want me to change anything But they insist on me helping them because they forget a bunch of stuff and that has led to some stuff freezing and breaking. Might also be their wives who told them to call us and let us do it Because it gets expensive to fix broken stuff.


Edit: waaaaaait... was this a joke?

 

[la szum]

Depends... I think there's 3 cabins I tend to that I have managed to steer the owners into what I think is best to do. So those are generally just about turning off the water and remove thermostate shower faucets and empty the water heater. Ive also put short flex hoses on every sink and kitchen faucets, and also toilets. So I disconnect them to be sure there's no water there, and I know the pipes empty themselves when I do all this.

Then there's 2 cabins I have where I need to blow out everything with air, and both is owned by grumpy old turds that dont want me to change anything But they insist on me helping them because they forget a bunch of stuff and that has led to some stuff freezing and breaking. Might also be their wives who told them to call us and let us do it Because it gets expensive to fix broken stuff.


Edit: waaaaaait... was this a joke?

I am so grateful for those "mistakes" and "F'ups" because it means more calls and work for me.

If it weren't for inept and unqualified husbands with an overestimated sense of their own competence
I wouldn't have much of an income.

Totally get the old turds being stuck in their ways, too. Sometimes you have to let their ideas and notions
cost them more money before they are really open to listening to someone who knows more than they do.

 

[the swede]

I am so grateful for those "mistakes" and "F'ups" because it means more calls and work for me.

If it weren't for inept and unqualified husbands with an overestimated sense of their own competence
I wouldn't have much of an income.

Totally get the old turds being stuck in their ways, too. Sometimes you have to let their ideas and notions
cost them more money before they are really open to listening to someone who knows more than they do.

100% agree on everything

 

[la szum]

Homeowner is always right, though---even when they are wrong.

 

[the swede]

Homeowner is always right, though---even when they are wrong.

which can be frustrating at times

 

[TSJMajesty]

Homeowner is always right, though---Except when they are wrong.

Fixed

 

[la szum]

Sentence owner is always right, though---even when I am wrong.

 

[la szum]

which can be frustrating at times

It can be. I don't have an issue with fixing their errors in judgment. It's just
when they want me to be there right now to do it, and I have other clients
that didn't force their inexperienced views on me to tend to.

 

[Alex Kenivel]

If it weren't for inept and unqualified husbands with an overestimated sense of their own competence
I wouldn't have much of an income.

I feel personally attacked.

Here's a nugget from my job. My have we come a long way since cloth and safety pins...

"Yoga pants fit"

 

[la szum]

I feel personally attacked.

Here's a nugget from my job. My have we come a long way since cloth and safety pins...
View attachment 1284
"Yoga pants fit"

Haha! Trickle to blowout!!

Looks like someone better eat them before October 2024.

 

[the swede]

Funny… sometimes I’m out driving visiting nice cabins or getting treated with coffee and cake at some old grandma in her kitchen… after spending 5 minutes of professional knowledge fixing her kitchen faucet…
And some times I get to freeze my ass off in a fucking quarry of some sorts listening to a stone chewbacca monster… holding a… plastic pipe while colleague is dragging his feet 100 meters away because he forgot a thingy in the car…

 

[DrewJD82]

Another one for @DrewJD82 . Do you generally blow out the lines, @the swede ?

Something something lines of blow something something, sure, but just on special occasions these days. Like a Friday night.

But a serious answer (cut I was VERY much joking above and would NEEEEVVVVER do that, ever, drugs are bad, mmkay?) HVAC backups are my biggest issue here next to units straight up sh*tting the bed. We’ve got over 600 units on the property if you consider a split system as being two separate units and it’s taken me 3 years to get floatswitches in all of them, but the older ones are starting to fail so we’ll have water crashing onto desks and sh*t all the time. That’s at least 4-5x a week, especially in the summer.

What’s infuriating is we have one suite that takes up the entire top floor of one of our buildings, they’re executive suites for startup businesses. My first week here, when I was still a regular maintenance guy, I went to blow a line out with nitrogen and immediately learned that the c*cknuggetc*ntf*ckingsh*tbags didn’t glue the PVC condensate lines together. It’s like a maze across a 100’x100’ suite. Spent the whole weekend cleaning up desks and taking pics for insurance purposes because I had 1/4 of the suite’s condensate lines blow apart and/or caused water to shoot up out of every clean-out that wasn’t capped.

Learned an important lesson that day- slowly increase the nitrogen instead of opening it full blast.

 

[Warmart]

Like 1 or 2 of you, I'm a 25+ year software and database developer/architect with a never-ending bout of imposter syndrome. Left a 10 year role at the end of 2021 and am at my 2nd company since then, the 1st place I tried sucked wolverine balls.

I work from home in north GA, and have a great view from my basement office. Sucks lol.

 

[DrewJD82]

Here’s a fun one I did this week-

I may have mentioned this issue in this thread previously, but we have one tenant where someone forgot to write in the lease “You’re responsible for your own IT room and the associated equipment”, leaving us on the hook to handle the AC that cools the IT rack that runs their entire business. You’d think a company pulling in millions would be inclined to do what they can to preserve the IT equipment….but nope, these guys will let that room heat up to 85 degrees before calling us and then flip out that the heat is damaging their equipment when they could have told us at 75 degrees. Anywho…

We had a 35-week lead time on a replacement C-RAC (computer room AC….they’re f*cking expensive) so all we could do was put a spot cooler in there and vent it out the door since it’s an exposed ceiling and there’s no tiles to vent the hot air into. Of course, their insurance company has a clause stating their IT room must be locked at all times or they risk losing their insurance. It was fine for the last 5 months being open, but they decided to take issue with it last week.

I had about 5 inches I could shove a 14” flex duct through. I told my AC guy to handle it and he quit in about 4 minutes and said it’s impossible. The desire to not be called into work after hours took over and I got it done-

IT room is on the left behind glass walls, the open tile on the right is where the duct is venting out to.

Inside the IT room-

And I had this much space to fit that flex duct through, right below the 90 degree conduits and above the duct work above the foam covered lines. I just bent the sh*t out of the wire frame in the flex duct and forced it like a gentlemen through the gap.

All while balancing on the top rung of an 8’ ladder, holding onto conduits for dear life praying they don’t just rip out of the walls and I go crashing to my death or paralysis.

 

[Warmart]

Here’s a fun one I did this week-

I may have mentioned this issue in this thread previously, but we have one tenant where someone forgot to write in the lease “You’re responsible for your own IT room and the associated equipment”, leaving us on the hook to handle the AC that cools the IT rack that runs their entire business. You’d think a company pulling in millions would be inclined to do what they can to preserve the IT equipment….but nope, these guys will let that room heat up to 85 degrees before calling us and then flip out that the heat is damaging their equipment when they could have told us at 75 degrees. Anywho…

We had a 35-week lead time on a replacement C-RAC (computer room AC….they’re f*cking expensive) so all we could do was put a spot cooler in there and vent it out the door since it’s an exposed ceiling and there’s no tiles to vent the hot air into. Of course, their insurance company has a clause stating their IT room must be locked at all times or they risk losing their insurance. It was fine for the last 5 months being open, but they decided to take issue with it last week.

I had about 5 inches I could shove a 14” flex duct through. I told my AC guy to handle it and he quit in about 4 minutes and said it’s impossible. The desire to not be called into work after hours took over and I got it done-


IT room is on the left behind glass walls, the open tile on the right is where the duct is venting out to.

Inside the IT room-

And I had this much space to fit that flex duct through, right below the 90 degree conduits and above the duct work above the foam covered lines. I just bent the sh*t out of the wire frame in the flex duct and forced it like a gentlemen through the gap.

All while balancing on the top rung of an 8’ ladder, holding onto conduits for dear life praying they don’t just rip out of the walls and I go crashing to my death or paralysis.

You are a "get it fuckin' done" type of dude! That's the way to be!

 

[HotRats]

Like 1 or 2 of you, I'm a 25+ year software and database developer/architect with a never-ending bout of imposter syndrome. Left a 10 year role at the end of 2021 and am at my 2nd company since then, the 1st place I tried sucked wolverine balls.

I work from home in north GA, and have a great view from my basement office. Sucks lol.
View attachment 3841

Nice office!

 

[primeholy]

Like 1 or 2 of you, I'm a 25+ year software and database developer/architect with a never-ending bout of imposter syndrome. Left a 10 year role at the end of 2021 and am at my 2nd company since then, the 1st place I tried sucked wolverine balls.

I work from home in north GA, and have a great view from my basement office. Sucks lol.
View attachment 3841

Sup? I’m in Ooltewah, so we are probably not too far apart

 

[scole]

I work for my county’s Public Works department as a GIS (Geographic Information System) Analyst but I basically make maps for a living.

 

[TimOwens316]

Telecommunications, everything from police, sheriff and fire radios, dispatch consoles and internet, etc. Been with the same company for 33 years. When I started we actually had some vacuum tube radios/repeaters/translators in service, those were fun, when they failed there was usually a lot of smoke involved, haha. I used to do a lot of component level repairs, but these days it's send it to the manufacturer for repair, everything is digital and requires proprietary test equipment and software.

 

[Warmart]

Sup? I’m in Ooltewah, so we are probably not too far apart

Hey! I'm near Blue Ridge and three of my guitars are from a boat I sold that was originally bought in Ooltewah