A Light Week

This past week on the job wasn't terrifically exciting but was plenty of work for me. I actually didn't have enough time to do everything I wanted to get done, even with 8 hours of overtime on Saturday!

My only task this week was to light up the elevator machine room. Simple enough--at first glance--but it has involved more work, thinking, and material than I originally anticipated. I spent the first few days of the week laying out and hanging racks to hang the lights from and the next couple of days hanging the lights themselves and starting to pipe them in. I feel like this entire project should have been completed by Friday afternoon, but here it is Monday morning and I've still got some work left to do! Also, I'm working with a mechanic who is an extraordinarily fast worker, and it's a challenge for me to keep up with him. One good thing I've noticed this week is this, however: when you're focused on getting a particular job done within a particular window of time, the days go by really quickly. It's 2:00 p.m. before you know it!

I noticed in particular this week that there always seems to be more than one way to do a job. I walked around that elevator machine room several times trying to come up with the perfect plan for how to lay out the lights, and then a perfect plan for how I was going to hang them. And I came up with what I thought was a pretty good plan. Sure enough, halfway through the week, my foreman came up to check on my progress and asked a lot of questions that began with the words, "Why don't you just..." It was frustrating to me that he was able to so quickly determine a faster and easier way to do my job, but once I got over that frustration, I was glad to see that there was more than one right way to do what I was doing. Hopefully, over time, I'll be able to more quickly figure out the quickest and easiest way to go about my work. As for this particular elevator machine room, however, you can expect to see carefully calculated light falling from the ceiling by the end of today, I expect!