Monday, January 11, 2010

New Year

So the new year finds me at a new contractor and in a very different situation than I was in with my old company! Such is the nature of the apprenticeship and honestly, it's one of my favorite parts about it.

At the beginning of December, I transferred to a new company for my final transfer. I decided to return to the first electrical company I ever worked for. The past couple of weeks have been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work: they've been fun for the simple reason that I've been lucky to work with a lot of people that I remember from my first year in the trade, and they've been hard because I have a lot more responsibility than I did during that first year!

For the last two and a half years, I've been on really large, new construction jobs, working alongside several other electricians--dozens at a time--apprentices and mechanics alike. Now, suddenly, I'm on a job with a foreman and two other apprentices. It's quite a change and probably a major cause of the increase in responsibility that I'm feeling. Nevertheless, I'm having a blast.

You wouldn't believe how fast a work-day goes by when you are personally responsible for getting projects done. Without having a mechanic by my side for the majority of my day, I have to make a lot of choices and decisions that were ordinarily not mine to make (how should this pipe be run, where should we mount a pull-box, etc.). I also have to set my own tempo, which is perhaps the strangest feeling of all--without realizing it, over the years I've grown very used to tailoring my work pace to that of my mechanic so that we work well together. I feel like I'm getting a glimpse of what life as a journeyman is going to be like: and that's a good thing, because it's only six months down the road!