those 'ive been doing it like this for 40 years and have forgotten more than you'll ever know" types can be quite dangerous.
Alright, off topic again.
Yeah, so can the kid who's in school at night and works during the day who still think he's a cool SOB and bad **** won't happen to him. Electrical Contracting is risky all the way around. Before I owned my own shop and was building houses, in college I worked for a very large electrical contractor with locations around the country and personally witnessed incidents, some minor, 2 horrific, by both the veterans and rookies of the trade.
I could also get into the politics of small town business and the ramifications if I fired this particular person, we'd never have another job in that town (population 3000) again.
We continue to keep an eye on everyone, we spend allot of monty to have a comprehensive safety training program developed by a risk management firm, everyone drawing a paycheck (including myself) is required to be Red Cross CPR certified every year, all of our bigger commercial job sites have AED units in the trailer or in the truck of the Superintendent on site and also on the commercial jobs we have safety meetings every morning discussing the days goals. Going above and beyond on every job site including residential has a sign (usually a large dry erase board) in a common location listing the job site address, the city in which were working, the Police, Fire, EMS numbers as well as the numbers for the local utility companies.
At some point you have to rely on your guys to take responsibility for themselves and their work, plenty of the "old timers" have witnessed enough shocks, burns, and sometimes death throughout their career that you hope they still have respect for "the beast". We can only do so much as an employer to preach respect for electric; the day you stop being cautious, and somewhat fearful and you lose your nerve around electric, you lose, game over. Working with electric is allot like handling a loaded firearm, there is no REWIND button.
