Top 5 WORST Things About Being An Electrician

these are the top five worst things about being an electrician now I will tell you that I do enjoy being an electrician I just want to bring you guys the facts and let you really see it for yourself to decide if it's a good thing for you to do or not and if you already are an electrician or you want to be stick around to the end because I'm going to give you guys a way around a lot of these or at least to minimize the negative effects of these comment down below let me know your least favorite thing about being an electrician and let me know if you disagree with any of the five that I've put up here because different people have different experiences so if you haven't found that to be true let us know down in the comments number one is the work environment and that is because it can be so drastically horrible sometimes if you're outside which is the majority of electrical work it's new construction you can be incredibly hot during the summer and are incredibly cold during the winter this means that you really have to dress accordingly during the winter you have to wear a bunch of layers you have to wear all of this extra stuff and then on top of that be able to be productive still keep your hands warm all that stuff and then during the summer it's incredibly hot and for new construction you do a lot of these things and for new construction you're going to be using the bathroom in a Portage on and during the summer it is brutal especially when they don't have enough porta johns on a job they get nasty fast it is one of the more harsh things that you deal with as an electrician is the environment and it also tends to be dirty now this can be true for service people who work in existing buildings or new construction new construction obviously there's dirt and debris everywhere you're working in the ground you're working in all these new places there's a building there's drywall being put up there's paint there's all this stuff it can be extremely dirty or if you're working in service in existing buildings even if that building is clean you're going to be working in the part of it that's dirty because no one else goes there no one else is there ever in my case you know you work in a lot of factories or you work and forges and stuff like that those places are disgusting I mean they are downright atrocious I have a special set of tools boots pants and shirts that I wear only in those places because I cannot clean my stuff to the extent that you need to in order to go from a forge one day all the way into a clean nice office the next day number two is that the work hours can be very demanding now it depends on the project but in new construction when the deadline starts to approach and you're not where you need to be this is where you tend to see extra hours and extra days that means if the foreman calls for six tens you're working six tens if it means they call for seven twelves you're working seven twelves and that happens it depends mostly on the company it depends on the foreman who's running it what that's like and if they have guys that they can bring over to help substitute instead of putting so many extra hours on but it can be stuff like that where you end up getting into these incredibly long stretch inches of time where you end up working 70 80 hours a week it's not unheard of it's very common especially towards the end of a project this also means very early hours sometimes I have gotten up as early as two or three sometimes you work through the night and you have to go work at a night shift because you're doing a shutdown and during the day they can't shut that part of the building down this also means that there's times where you have to travel far distances and so work might start at seven but if you live two hours away from your job site because you do get stuck doing that depending on your company then you end up traveling two hours and being there at seven that means you really are leaving your house at about 4 45 maybe even 4 30 depending on if you're worried about traffic or not that is a long trip and it means that you have two hours there and two hours back which can drastically add to the already long hours especially if you're getting towards the end of a project and they're overloading you on hours already these come in waves they come in batches you don't always stay at the same facility at the same site you know it may be you're there for a year you may be there for two months it really just depends if you're working in service it might be two weeks it might be two hours it all depends on the company the field that you're in and those different factors number three is that you can have some of the most physically demanding days now this tends to happen when you are having long days as well I know for service it's always the days that we get stuck doing something crazy like a huge wire pool that we end up working 12 14 15 16 even 17 hours however they're also the most physically demanding days there are days where there's easier things to do as an electrician there's also days where we work extremely hard and they can be extremely hard on your body and you could be just exhausted when you get done with work we had a wire pool that was 17 hours long and it was strenuous they were 500s and somebody cut a concrete bank and we had to pull those wires out and pull new wires through repatch that conduit and what happened in between it was a two-day event but the first day was just us pulling the wire out but it was an old type of wire that had some rubber in it and it had melted from all the Heat and so it was very very strenuous to keep all that stuff going especially for that long and then we needed to do it all in one day so that the next day we could pull wire through and set all of the new wires in when you get into emergencies like that you have to be able to work and go do those things and be physically able to it can be very taxing on your body you need to be able to be strong and you need to be able to work long hours it doesn't happen all the time but it does happen and it's important that you pull through and finish through that way you don't have a company or a person who's waiting to have their power restored and you have to stop and make them wait a whole another 24 hours to get everything fixed to come back the next day and sometimes you don't have the scheduling availability to come back the next day number four is that you can work with some of the worst people I love most of the people that I work with but I have worked with some absolute turds I just I I have I really have worked with some people who just really didn't give me the time of day or didn't care about me or just were grumpy and miserable to work with I've enjoyed most of the people that I have worked with but you can get stuck especially depending on how large your company is if you're an apprentice or if you're just working on the job site with other Journeymen their lives are just miserable and I think that their goal sometimes is to make your life miserable there's fun that happens there's people you make great relationships but man there's always one or two people who you're like I really don't want to work with them my day does not go well when I have to work with them and the fifth thing is that there are companies that will exploit you for money that means that they will use you to make their money and they won't care as much about you as they should I've worked with some really great contractors and I have worked for a contractor who really didn't care much about me it was a very large company but at the same time it was really about the bottom dollar and I understand that it is however I was very used especially when I would just say yes to everything and they would take all my time they paid people way less than they really deserved and they would skimp out and try to make it so they didn't have to pay their people as much even those who were doing well now I do love being an electrician I very much so enjoy the work and more than that I also think that there's a lot of ways around some of these five things depending on the company you work for and depending on the space that you're in what field you're in if you want to know how to look at those things how to approach those things and kind of look at your career I did just make this video about five things that nobody's talking about about being electrician so if you're looking for more freedom in the field of electrical go ahead and check that out remember it's all for his glory I'll see you guys on the next one

Channel: American Electrician

Views: 3,218

Keywords: electrician, Apprentice electrician, Being an electrician, Construction, Electrical apprentice, Electrical trade, Electrical work, How much do electricians make, become an electrician, becoming an electrician, electrical apprenticeship, electrician apprentice, electrician apprenticeship, electrician class, electrician courses, electrician podcast, electrician school, electrician vlog, how to become an electrician, journeyman electrician, mad electrician, master electrician

Id: nqMXxfDJXZ8

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023