About 10 years ago I told my dad I was gay and living with the guy who’s now my fiance. He just kinda went “ok” and changed the subject to where he was working construction nearby where I lived. Honestly, it sounds weird, but it really worked in the context of everything and our relationship. I couldn’t imagine it being the sappy cliche just because of the type of guy he is.
He later met him and they get along great with each other to this day.
Wasn’t me but your story reminded me of my fiance on the bus a few years ago.
He was riding the bus with headphones on. All of a sudden he sees everyone on the bus start ducking under the seats except him. He’s like hm that’s weird what’s goin on. Like 5-10 seconds go by and he takes his headphones off and realizes someone was shooting a gun outside and a stray bullet went straight through the bus. Nobody was hurt.
I’ve thought about selling my house and everything I own and skipping off to the other side of the world too, haha. But I’m 33 and want to move to Australia and work as an electrician in the mines. It’s 2 weeks on, 1 week off, they fly you in and out of the mines (FIFO), set you up with a free dorm, cafeteria, gym. We have a friend in Melbourne so we’d probably live there. The week off regularly sounds great if I wanted to hop around SE Asia and check out Vietnam for a week or something.
We currently live in Pittsburgh. I have a lot of experience in industrial electrical work and am fine with hard work and long 12 hour days over and over. But my future husband just works crappy food service jobs. He’s been working in a commercial kitchen, basically just like a tiny factory for grab and go food for small businesses around town. Idk how feasible it is for someone like him to immigrate to Australia without any kind of marketable skills or whatever they look at. He dropped out of high school when he was a teenager.
Skilled trades have been flushed with folks who are green and have no experience that they’re becoming very competitive to secure an apprenticeship and long-term employment. It can be tough finding something in plumbing or electrical with no prior experience. Even moreso in the unions. If more office-level workers start getting laid off and start competing for those jobs, it’ll be even harder to make the switch into something like that.
There’s a massive shortage for skilled journeymen and people with lots of experience. I love electrical work to death, but I hear “I’ll just be an electrician or plumber” a lot which grazes over the fact that any company training you is taking a hit for the first year or two of you working there.
My favorite was for a job installing cable for some subcontractor for Comcast and there was a bunch of talk about how much money I could make I just had to “hustle” and “get my numbers up” and I could “make my own way as my own contractor”. Red flags all around but I was like 20 and just getting out on my own and before I got serious about doing real electrical work as a career.
Anyway after orientation that included the guy telling us “don’t have sex with any clients this isn’t like those pornos where she bangs the cable guy”, I go out in a van with a dude. He was basically like “listen man this job pays jack shit. If they don’t have enough work for you you’re gonna be sitting in the van making minimum wage. I would honestly plan for your pay to be around that for your first year”
I basically quit on the spot. Got to go up on a telephone pole though, that was cool I guess.
I know what you’re sayin but AWG doesn’t use fractions. A good equivalent would be like shirt size. Small, medium, large, extra large. It’s just that size wire and that’s the end of it. You don’t need to know the diameter or cross section of conductor or whatever.
And even fractions are more of a feeling for us I guess. If you work with tools you can spot an inch, quarter inch, foot, etc. It really does come down to a “feeling” in a way that’s difficult to put in words.
They’re defined like all American measurements. By “feel” of each size
I’ve been doing electrical work for 11 years and I can feel a 12, 14, 16, or 18 awg wire in my hands and tell you the difference.
I mostly don’t like how there’s no rhyme or reason to the metric equivalent. All the numbers are basically random in order of each other so it’s a crapshoot tryin to say something is one or the other. But again, I don’t use it regularly
I like using metric for measuring with a tape measure. Feels a bit more accurate and easy to remember as you go.
But wire size I think AWG (American wire gauge) is far superior than metric. Easy to remember, 18 16 14 12 or 10 AWG. Compared to metric which just lists the outside diameter. So those same sizes in metric are 1, 1.5, 2.5, 4, 6 mm²
I’m sure if I used it every day it’d be different. And the larger sizes in AWG are kind of a mess. It’s even numbers til 1 AWG, then there’s technically a 0 AWG, then it goes 1/0 to 4/0, then 250 - 1000 MCM (but also some people call it kcmil?)
Still just “feels” right to me after using it for so long
I am extremely focused on industrial electrical work as a career and have done it for about 12 years. To be quite honest, I can’t picture myself ever doing anything else.
As a hobby though, I love working with wood. I’ve been slowly building my new kitchen and enjoying it quite a bit. Woodworking may be in my future. A good friend of mine has a membership to a shop that’s close by
Yeah I have some of the traditional tin snips. These are pretty similar but way more “scissors” like. I’ll probably be grabbing them next time I go to the store
I saw a pair of $40 scissors at the hardware store the other day. These things were like almost the size of my forearm. I have no idea what I’d use them for. I may pick them up next time I go.
Edit: Ok looks like cutting thin steel and plastic stuff like siding. I don’t know when I’ll need this but I know I will at some point.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Malco-1-in-Straight-Cut-Tin-Snip-M12TS/100147753
They make these electrician scissors that I used to have. They’re more meant for cutting cables and stuff. I used them to cut some flat rolled roof material and ruined them but got the job done. These would have been great for that.
Been hearing this exact line for decades. Yawn
Yeah. It’s the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.
Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don’t also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn’t even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.
I’m an industrial electrician with background on what they’re ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it’d make you sick. And we’re only one supplier, they have others.
Like most of the US, we had a weeks long cold spell with average temperatures around 5-10° F. It started to really affect my psyche. It was followed by a sprout of really mild winter weather, getting up to 60°. It snowed a bunch last night but it’s supposed to warm back up this week.
I couldn’t even get up my street for most of the cold weather due to a foot of snow that wasn’t melting. So I was parking under a bridge and walking like 5-10 minutes each way thru the woods every time I went to work, which has been 7 day weeks lately.
I finally got some crucial insulating done at my house but there was some bad drafts and stupid shit I found behind the walls of just holes out to nothing. Which the house is right up against a story tall retaining wall so it was almost impossible to see from the outside. There’s like maybe a foot between the wall and the house.
My fiance is not into gaming whatsoever. He only played a handful of games as a kid. He’s 30
Man there’s obviously some exceptions of really good shows and games but there was a ton of garbage shovelware type crap in the early 2000s in both mediums. Video games had tons of movie to game entries that were terrible, plenty of no-name games that were incredibly generic with bad mechanics or ripping off other more successful games, way too many sports and racing games, I could go on.
Older games really had more of a “spray and pray” approach where they developed so many more games and hoped to get people’s attention in stores rather than everyone knowing every detail about everything right as it launched like today. This had pros and cons for sure. The developers of GTA:San Andreas said that they had 2 years to make the game and they already had the engine from Vice City. They finished it and had so much more time they just started brainstorming new ideas and things they could put in, which does stand out looking back at it now.
This point could be said doubly so of the previous generations of games in the late 80s and 90s. Take a look at a list of SNES or Genesis games. There are hundreds if not thousands of just absolutely terrible sidescrolling platformers that are not worth anyone’s time. You walk, jump, and shoot or punch and they all play the same way.
TV I feel like was pretty bad in the 2000s as well. Cable TV was still the default method of watching shows, and that meant crappy sitcoms with laugh tracks, cop dramas like CSI, reality TV, and so on. I didn’t see the sopranos, which is arguably one of the best TV shows to ever exist and came from this era, until 2020 when I was 28 years old. Even if I wasn’t a kid back then, I didn’t know any other family who had HBO. Now everything is at everyone’s finger tips, going back decades if you do want to watch something old like the office or whatever. Back then I just had to sit through whatever was on TV, with commercials, or censored movies, or I’d have to watch something on DVD that I had already probably seen too many times.
Anyway this is getting kinda rambly, but all I’m getting at is nostalgia can be a helluva drug. There’s so much crappy media, games, tv, music, movies, whatever made all the time since art has ever been a thing. A lot of it sucked back then, and sucks now. And that’s fine. One day someone will be reminiscing about 2020’s games like Clair Obscur and saying stuff in the late 30’a suck lol. And there’s plenty of good games and shows coming out now, it all depends on your taste. I love a ton of indie games and anime for example. There’s so many good examples from all eras, and everything is more accessible than ever before in history.