Dan: 0:00

Doug Powell is a master electrician. He and a business partner run Lumen Brothers Electric Company in Frederick, Maryland. Most days, he's working in people's homes, people he doesn't know. One day, he gets a call.

Doug: 0:14

It's an Indian family, really really big mansion in Potomac, Maryland, like really massive house, gated property. And they call and they say the Jacuzzi tub in their in-law suite is not working.

Dan: 0:26

So Doug agrees to come take a look.

Doug: 0:31

You know, it's a huge family. I think both sets of parents living there, big house. And there's lots of people coming and going. There's cleaners. There's other trades people. It's like a really busy scene.

Dan: 0:42

He comes in to check out the malfunctioning jacuzzi.

Doug: 0:46

And, I said, okay. I'm gonna need to get underneath this tub as well. Is there a place below where that's accessible? And he says, "Yes. Actually, there's a an access panel in the basement below." So I leave my tools in that bathroom right next to that tub, and there's cleaners in there and stuff. There's lots of hustle and bustle. So I go downstairs. He shows me the access panel. So I say, okay. I think I've got everything I need. I appreciate your help. I'll come get you if I have any questions. He says, thanks a lot.

Dan: 1:11

So Doug takes a look at the access panel and then realizes he needs the tools that he left next to the jacuzzi upstairs. So he goes back up there and he can hear water running in the bathroom.

Doug: 1:23

So I figured it's probably just somebody in there cleaning. So I walk in the bathroom, I reach down to start unloading tools and I kinda get this vision in my right periphery And I look up, and there is his mom completely naked in the glass door shower with her shower cap on, covering her body, screaming. And so I was like, oh my god.

Dan: 1:50

What went through your head in that moment?

Doug: 1:53

On on the one hand, I just couldn't believe it. There was a part of me that was like, was this a move? Was she making a move? Was she like, you know, like, let me show this young man a thing. I didn't know. I was like, in those instances, you're like, what do I do? Like

Dan: 2:04

That's not part of the code book.

Doug: 2:06

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Should I just run away? Obviously, the right thing to do is go tell somebody. And so I went right up to the guy and I said, "Hey, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but I just walked in that and your mom is in there taking a shower." It was embarrassing, man. I mean, you know, you just never know when you go into someone's house. You just never know what you're gonna run into.

Dan: 2:36

I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like To Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a welder, a stand up comedian, a cattle rancher. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Doug Powell what it's like to be a master electrician. We'll talk about why there's been a cultural shift toward blue collar work, why electrical engineers should not try to do electrical repair work, and of course, we'll hear what it feels like to get badly shocked. Stay with us. As a master electrician, Doug can design electrical systems and supervise other electricians. To get that license, he had to become very familiar with the code book.

Doug: 3:30

The National Electrical Code is a thick complicated book, and you can't memorize it. The point is to navigate the book.

Dan: 3:38

It's what he uses to figure out what size wires to use, calculate how much power a house needs, and how to keep everything safe.

Doug: 3:47

Like, say, I'll give you an example. A person reaches out and they say, I wanna install an electric vehicle charger on my home. You know, the process of doing that's relatively straightforward, but the the biggest thing that you have to solve for in the equation is because electric vehicles are a type of electrical load that we haven't seen before and they're very strong continuous electrical load, we have to run a a load calculation on the entire home to see based on the square footage of the home and the usage of particular electrical appliances, what the house is already using, what's available, and what would need to happen in order for us to install this electric vehicle. So long story short, there's lots of little, calculations that have to happen kind of all the time.

Dan: 4:35

One quirk of electrical codes is they aren't the same everywhere. There can be slight variations depending on where you live.

Doug: 4:43

Every area has different things they have to think about. Like, if you're a coastal area, you've gotta think about saltwater and what sort of steps you can take to mitigate corrosion. And so they're everywhere you go, there's some different set of rules.

Dan: 4:57

But no matter how black and white the code book is, the work can get complicated, particularly when you're just starting out. Doug and his business partner learned some pretty tough lessons early on.

Doug: 5:10

When you're new, you wanna just take whatever work you can because you're not sure where it's gonna come from. And if you're gonna make it, you're really nervous. And so we would just kind of take everything. And this project came up where this couple reached out to us and they were building this massive horse barn. These people are equestrian folks. They live in DC. They've bought this beautiful property. They're building this 16 stall just luxury barn.

Dan: 5:34

Mhmm.

Doug: 5:34

But they called us because they needed power to come from basically a new transformer on the opposite side of a road under the road and 1,200 feet

Dan: 5:44

Oh, man.

Doug: 5:45

To another transformer. And so, basically, they hired us to trench the ground, put pipes in, and pull new wires. What we realized after day one of renting an excavator and trenching it, we we realized, number one, we are not professional excavators, and we should have number one said no. Number two, just if we did say yes, we should have priced that out to a team that does that. Because as we started digging, we realized we were in this geological area in Maryland where there's this hard bedrock of shale about 30 inches down. And I guess because it's impermeable or something, the water table was higher in that area. So the whole time we dug this 1,200 foot 36 inch deep trench, it was full of water. So we were just elongating a river effectively for 1,200 feet.

Dan: 6:35

Oh my gosh.

Doug: 6:36

And it took so much longer than we thought it was gonna take. Well, I mean, we were certain that we had just made a decision in the first year of business that was gonna put us out of business. There were days... and we started in January, so it was freezing cold. We rented a pump to pump water out as we dug. That froze overnight. It just was the most challenging, demoralizing, long time spent. We had to stop paying ourselves for a period of time. It was...

Dan: 7:01

Oh my gosh.

Doug: 7:02

It was brutal. But not only did we make it through, that's one of our best clients. We're over there working on a new house that they're building now. Because during that time, we didn't make it their problem. They could see that we were out of our element and getting our asses kicked and handling it as best we could, and we didn't upcharge them. We didn't say, oh, you know what? Now that we're in here, we're gonna need you to pay us another $20,000. We just ate it, and we got through it, and we learned... So Josh and I have this we neither of us have college debt. So anytime we have to pay money to learn a lesson, we call it tuition, and we just chalk it up to tuition.

Dan: 7:43

I love that. So you paid a lot of tuition on that particular assignment?

Doug: 7:47

It was a well, probably a good year of college we paid for, probably at a pretty good university. Yeah. But, man, we learned so much. We no longer excavate, that's for sure.

Dan: 7:56

What is the most common reason that you get called out to somebody's home? Because you do mostly residential. Yeah?

Doug: 8:04

Yeah. We are just residential. I mean, there's a couple commercial clients that we'll service, but it's rare. You know, the things we get most of the time are service upgrades and electric vehicles stations and things like that. But we also get a lot of, like, lighting design, lighting installation.

Dan: 8:21

Mhmm.

Doug: 8:21

You know, people buy new homes, and the bare minimum requirement in the electrical code for building a new home is to provide a light switch with a switched outlet in a room. So many of the newer homes people are buying, unless they handle this upfront, they don't have lights in the ceiling. Most of them just have an outlet that's switched. So a lot of times people will buy a home and they'll call us in to, you know, design and install lights in their rooms.

Dan: 8:47

If you've got a complicated repair in front of you, like, how do you approach that?

Doug: 8:52

Systematically. That's in fact my favorite part about being an electrician are the systems. Like, I'm obsessive compulsive. Like, I love setting up. I love getting all all of my equipment laid out properly, perfectly, and then every process, every diagnosis, every project has a system. You know? It has an a before b. And so you as as a craftsperson, the beauty of that is every single letter of that system, every a, every b, every c, is an opportunity to do something the best you could do it. So any any project you're doing, anything you're diagnosing, any new thing, it it has a systematized series of steps. And so you lay those out in your mind, or sometimes I'll write them down on a piece of paper or cardboard in front of me if it's really complicated, and I will just systematically check things off my list.

Dan: 9:39

What is the dumbest thing, electrically speaking, that you see people do in their homes?

Doug: 9:46

I think that the danger lies within what people don't know and and the execution. I've seen such ridiculous execution, and that's the most dangerous thing, like not grounding properly and not securing, you know, wires to terminals to the torque specification. Just all the little details. You can always tell when a homeowner has done their own work. I had a woman recently try to convince me that she had some other electrician came in and did all the things that she asked me to come over and and correct. And, meanwhile, she's got all the boxes for all the recessed lights that she installed all over the floor. I think if anybody's listening to this that's not in the trades and they're gonna have an electrician come to their house, listen. We know. We know.

Dan: 10:31

You're not fooling us.

Doug: 10:32

You're not. And that's okay. Just be you'll help yourself, and you'll save so much money if when we come in you say, I did that, it's not working and I don't know why. You'll save well, you'll save an hour, save two hours.

Dan: 10:45

What do you learn about people from just having to go through their house in search of various electrical solutions?

Doug: 10:53

Man, you learn every you learn absolutely everything. I think as far as houses are concerned, you start to learn that houses were built during eras. If I'm going into a home and I wanna understand what might be happening if I need to diagnose a problem, the first question I'll ask is when was your house built? Because houses are built in eras. And if I'm going into a house and it's a row home and the outside outlets aren't working and it's built in the 1990s, then I know that probably every single bathroom is stacked on one GFI circuit, and they're probably protecting the outside outlets as well. So they're just these little things that you come to get familiar with, not just about people, but about homes of of particular eras. Like, if you buy an old house, you've got all these old house problems. You've got plaster and lathe that you've gotta keep clean and nice, and you've got all this old wiring you've gotta figure out. But if you buy a new house to get away from those issues, you just bought yourself a bunch of new house problems. And what the new house problems entail are nowadays, they're building these houses as absolutely fast as they can and at the cheapest rate that they can so that the builders and developers get the highest margins they can. So what I see most of the time, they're not hiring licensed electricians to come in and do this work because they'd have to pay them actual money. They're hire you know, it's always a contractor who has a guy who, quote, unquote, does electric.

Dan: 12:18

Like, what what would that look like? Like, what would be the diagnostic that you had the electrical guy come in?

Doug: 12:23

Just craftsmanship issues. Things where, like, for example, an outlet, a receptacle that you plug your lamp into. You can attach your cables to an outlet in a multitude of ways. One of the ways that you can do it is there's a little hole in the back of the outlet that you can just strip the end of the sheathing or the insulation off the cable, and you just poke it into the outlet. And there's a little metal mechanism inside there that grabs it, and that's fully legal. The other way to do it is you make a little hook and you wrap it around the screw terminal and you tighten it. And we do that as opposed to the other because I've just seen so many burned up melted devices where people have just done the little backstab thing, and there's just a failure rate that's outside your control. But those are used because they're fast, and you can just stab them in and you're done and you put the outlet in and you're done. Like, to do something with real craftsmanship, there's lots of little tiny detailed, things that I would never do that you just see throughout all every new home you see was just wired as quickly as it possibly could be apparently.

Dan: 13:32

Hey, folks. Dan here. You know, we sometimes hear from listeners who wanna know what's it like to run a podcast, and maybe we'll do an episode someday. But in the meantime, here's a little tidbit. So there's this whole infrastructure of publicists who will reach out usually by email to pitch their clients to get booked on your show. And it's obvious that these publicists have never listened to the show because they're pitching like a CEO with a new book out and that's not really our lane. But anyway, what's funny about these pitches is they're all produced with AI tools and what the publicists don't realize is that their pitches end up having eerily similar structures. They'll start out with some specific detail from a recent episode and then do some kind of highly tortured transition to the domain of their client. Like here's an actual example that refers back to our toy distributor episode. This is a quote from the email. Thoroughly enjoyed your latest episode diving into the world of hobby kits with Alan Bass. The intricacies of distributing 40,000 products and having childhood toys secretly be market research samples were eye opening. It reminded me of John Smith, a visionary with a knack for solving complex puzzles, end quote. John Smith is a fake name, obviously. And then the pitch goes on with all of John Smith's virtues. And folks just this is a bad pitch, like we're not gonna bring John Smith on the show, but the weird thing here is that it has the smooth veneer of a thoughtfully crafted pitch. Is that a glimpse of the world that's coming for all of us? I mean, it used to be that bad ideas sounded like bad ideas, but now even bad ideas sound like good ideas thanks to AI. Anyway, that's your behind the scenes flash for the day, and now back to the show. I really admire your fluency with all this stuff. How did you become an electrician in the first place?

Doug: 15:39

Next month will be eleven years that I've been doing it. So the fluency comes with time. And fluency comes with it's like an equation of, like, time multiplied by getting your ass kicked divided by lunch. And there's still just so much I don't know. There's still so much I don't understand, and I'm constantly learning. But my background was I was a stand up comedian from, like, 2000 to to really 2013. I kind of like, yeah, I mean, I pushed really hard back in the early part of the 2000s. That was all I wanted to do. That was all I cared about. I was in the DC Baltimore area, and I was in a club, like, every night for a decade.

Dan: 16:17

You've gotta be the only stand up slash electrician in the country.

Doug: 16:21

No. No. I think there are more. I think it's a... I think stand up's one of those great things that is, like, cheaper than therapy, and you can just get up and talk through what you need to say.

Dan: 16:31

This may be a weird question, but, like, how did that experience shape the kind of electrician that you are?

Doug: 16:39

I'll be honest. The thing that I've noticed that's lacking more than anything in the trades, period, are soft skills. Most... I won't say most. I won't offend anybody. But, like, I mean, if you're honest with yourself and you're in the trades, how good are you at coming into someone's house and being kind and courteous and talking to them and being polite and be like all of those skills that that have to do with communication and coordination and going with the flow and being agreeable. All of that stuff came for me through, you know, managing my comedy career and being in front of people and talking on the fly or taking an awkward situation and making it not awkward, and and just kind of learn learning how to manage a room's energy, all those things are are so important.

Dan: 17:27

So I feel like there's been this cultural shift, and I'm probably oversimplifying this a little bit, but I feel like maybe twenty years ago, you would steer your kids to get a white collar job, not a blue collar job. And and these days I feel like the winds are really shifting and it's more complicated than that. Like, there's not a clear status hierarchy anymore. Do you agree with that assessment, first of all? And and if so, like, what's driving that?

Doug: 17:55

Yeah. That's true. I think that people didn't want their children to move into the blue collar trades years ago because, you know, there wasn't always the best outcome. I'm from tradespeople. Like, my whole family is very blue collar. My dad restored historic vehicles and was a body man. He worked on cars his whole life. And when I was growing up, my dad told me if he ever saw me pick up a hammer, he'd hit me with it. Not really, but he just his way of being like, don't do this. Because I grew up watching these men struggle with alcoholism and failing relationships and poverty and in and out of jail. And so for me, like, I didn't go into the blue collar trades out of high school. I joined the military to get out of my hometown, but then I went into just kind of working while I was pursuing my comedy career. And I didn't ever see myself as somebody who would be in the trades mostly because the people that I came from. Now, listen. They're they're I love my father and my family. They raised me and, you know, they're the reason I'm I'm here today, but they really struggled. And I watched them struggle. You know, I I rode in the car with my grandmother and my sisters while she had to drive my dad to work because of his you know, the next DUI he got and then drive us to schools. Things like that where you're like, yeah, This might not be the life for me. But then it was funny because on the back end, when I went to college... I went to college a few times, and every time I went, I couldn't understand how this was gonna help me. Like, I'm too stubborn for college. I was like, yeah. Okay. I get it. I get it. Philosophy. That's great. What is this do.. what am I doing? What are we doing? I'm just gonna go back to working in a cafe at the end of this. Right? Like, I'm not and so it's funny because as I came to the electrical trade, I was working this really easy job. I was like a project manager for a digital media company. I was working from home, and I was making good money. And I was so bored and unchallenged and, like, I don't know what it is, but I gotta find it. And my wife kept encouraging me to get into the electrical trade. And and once I did, everything, like, opened up in all of these brilliant vibrant ways where I was like, this is like, don't get me wrong. The work sucks sometimes. It's really hard. It's not fun most, sometimes... It's really you really are in an attic dying and you're you know? But everything encompassing the hard work, there's so much, like, freedom. I'm in the trades, and I've never been more free in my whole life. I'm doing a podcast with you on a Tuesday morning because I can. There just were a lot of things about it that really, really clicked with me and made me feel like, I think this is it. It just was the cultural aspect that I wanted to see if I could get right because even though I'm a military guy, I came from the military, and I'm from blue collar people. I don't know what it is that makes a person a person or or or why I'm the way I am, but I'm I never really fit in in that in that world. And so the culture for me was the thing I didn't like as much. And so we my friend Josh and I started our own company where we could dictate what that culture looks like. And ever since then, I'm just I've been really happy.

Dan: 20:59

And that is another great lesson, I think, for young people is is your point about the work and the culture are distinct. And if you kinda take the reins, you can create your own culture. Like, being an electrician does not imply a certain thing about what you're like and what you look like and, you know, what music you listen to and what you do after work. Right? The work is the work.

Doug: 21:24

I agree with you. But I do think that that is the main thing that's keeping young people out of the trades. I think the culture I'll be honest, it's what kept me out.

Dan: 21:34

Doug told me that there are formal apprenticeship programs for electricians where you can actually get paid to learn. He didn't go that route though. He worked for an electrician as a kind of informal apprentice.

Doug: 21:47

Having somebody take you under their wing and show you all the little skills and details, it's awesome to, like, be done at the end of the day and know that you learned something new. Today, we did these disconnects, and now I know how those work. So now next time we're on a project and they need somebody to do that, I'm I'm the guy. I'm right there. So I think that if you can make yourself invaluable and just know it's hard. That's that's the other downside to trade work. It's hard, man. It's there's no way around it. You're gonna bust your knuckles up. You're gonna get cut up. You're gonna get shocked. You're gonna be dirty. It's dangerous and it's hard. So that's real.

Dan: 22:24

So one one thing I know I have to ask you or else it would be malpractice, because I know all the listeners are curious about it, is how often are you shocked? And and maybe tell us about the worst shock you've ever received.

Doug: 22:36

That's funny. It happens. It shouldn't, and it you you can really do everything in your power to not get shocked. I mean, if you're working on a circuit, turn it off, you know, and you won't get shocked. I think the hardest I was hit either was a light post in a commercial setting. I was working for a bigger company down the road. And for some reason, when the timer comes on, this light doesn't come on. And, you know, anytime you anytime you go to any situation, there's been a bunch of people that came before you that know, okay, when was this light installed? Who did the install? How long has it not been working? Did this just start? And people don't have the answers to those. So you're really in the dark, and so there was this one light post that wasn't working. And so that's my okay. I gotta check this one out. And and in order to look at the wiring on a metal light post, you've gotta go to the base where it meets this concrete cylinder

Dan: 23:27

Mhmm.

Doug: 23:27

And lift up the there's, like, a, like, a skirt around the base made of metal, and you've gotta lift it up. So I go to lift up the skirt, and luckily, I just use one hand because I got hit with 277 volts, which is your commercial, industrial, higher voltage. So, like, as where a residential setting would have a 120 volt outlet, your bigger systems that one twenty is is a two seventy seven, four eighty volts. It's just a larger, higher voltage system. And, I mean, it was okay. It definitely hurt.

Dan: 24:00

I mean, what what does that feel like? Can you describe the sensation?

Doug: 24:05

That one was more like a punch in the arm. Sometimes electricity is like a painful tickle where you're like, oh, I'm getting shocked.

Dan: 24:14

That's a good description. A painful tickle.

Doug: 24:16

Yeah. Painful tickle. This one almost felt like someone punched me as hard as they could right where my forearm meets my hand on the inside of my arm.

Dan: 24:24

Yeah. And did it knock away your arm or...?

Doug: 24:27

It did.

Dan: 24:27

What triggers the thing where you like can't release your hand?

Doug: 24:31

That's a great question. I think it has to do with the amount of amperage being pulled through a system at a certain at a given time.

Dan: 24:38

I looked this up after the interview, and Doug is right. When you're shocked with more than around 10 milliamps of electrical current, it causes your muscles to contract involuntarily, including the muscles in your hand, which means you can't let go.

Doug: 24:53

In this case, it was a light, and it just zapped me surprisingly hard when I so, yeah, I thought power had been cut. Power wasn't cut. So we we went ahead and we cut it, and I I used a bucket truck to get up and what I found and I I just couldn't sometimes you find things and you're just like, how? So I look inside the light head, and someone had taken that green ground wire. Then they had attached it to the hot terminal, and they had taken the hot, which was actually sending 277 volts once connected to neutral, and connected it to the actual green ground bonding screw. So I had that whole pole was reading 277 volts to ground or neutral. So anybody who walked by there who was somehow who maybe was grounded in some way that leaned on that pole would have gotten that same shock. So luckily, it was me and not someone else.

Dan: 25:43

So, Doug, we always end our shows with a quick lightning round of questions. Let's get started here. What is the most insulting thing you could say about an electrician's work?

Doug: 25:53

Hey, I would say if I looked at an electrician's work and I was insulted, it would be because it was done poorly or poor craftsmanship or, you know, just messy. I would say clean is safe when it comes to electrical installations. Clean is safe. If you do it in a clean manner, the person who comes behind you is in no real danger.

Dan: 26:11

It reminds me, the software engineer we talked to said that, you know, something called spaghetti code, it's just kind of a, it might be functional, it might work, but it's just a mess. It's not cleanly established, there's not good documentation and so on. Right. It it sounds like a similar thing is true of your work. You can just kinda see something and know it's not good.

Doug: 26:32

We say like hack work, a hack came in here and did this, like, they cut out some part of a structural beam to get a wire, you know, that you just put a put an outlet inside of a structural support beam or something ridiculous where you're like, who did what hack did that you know? So I think maybe hack would be the word.

Dan: 26:48

What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Doug: 26:53

I really like using my wire strippers. We use pliers all the time and clippers and cutters. There's a company called Knipex. They're a German based company, but they've got some American spots where they sell their tools, but they just focus on pliers, and I like that about them. They make just, in my opinion, excellent pliers with a great feel. And, like, a lot of times when you get a set of pliers, you have to break them in. You have to take them out of the package and take the handles and and move them back and forth and kinda loosen them up, hit them with some WD40, get them moving. Not Knipex pliers. They come out of the box with, like, ease of use. They're just sleek, well built, and I like all their stuff.

Dan: 27:36

What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of an electrician?

Doug: 27:42

Well, my dad is an electrical engineer. I think that's the thing that scares me the most because it's it's always every time I'm in a scenario where somebody did all of the things they shouldn't have done, it is an instance where someone's dad is an electrical engineer, and they always wanna tell me that. They always wanna let me know. My dad did this. He's an electrical engineer. And I'm always like, oh, no. Because they are smart, and they do know electricity, but they do not know any of the rules. And so there's always crazy stuff that you don't expect, or or a lot of times you're trying to troubleshoot something, and there's inevitably a buried junction box somewhere. So anytime I hear somebody say that, and they always say it with a point of like, I'm gonna help you out. Right. My dad did this, and he actually is an electrical, so you should be good. And I'm always like, that's actually the worst thing you could have said to me.

Dan: 28:28

Now that's an interesting tension to me because why shouldn't they be really good given that training?

Doug: 28:35

Because electrical engineers are not electricians. They're trained on everything electrical engineers are trained on. I have no real understanding what that is, but it probably signal flow and resistors and all kinds of stuff. But the the electrical trade is bound by the laws of the National Electrical Code. And unless you have gone through training to understand that book and know what is expected of you in particular situations... now, the electrical code can be so complicated that when we we have to do continued education classes you you sit in a class full of master electricians, and you have master electricians in there debating with one another and arguing and misunderstanding and trying to get to the bottom of what this rule means and why. So when you have people like electrical engineers that have zero understanding of any of it, they're just gonna do things because they work. And they do work. And these people can be very smart. And some of their solutions are incredibly inventive, although very illegal and sometimes dangerous.

Dan: 29:29

What's an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?

Doug: 29:33

The freedom, honestly. Like, I love so much that I have a set of skills that I can work if I want to. I cannot work if I don't want to. I've set myself up to where now I won't make money if I don't work, so there's that. I also savor about about, like, this industry is when you get to a certain point and you're skilled, you can come into a setting and you know exactly what to do and say, I've sent somebody an estimate for a project, and I'm gonna do a project, and they've agreed. They like the price, and we're moving forward. One thing I savor the most is getting there, setting things up, and just knowing what to do. Like, when I stand in front of this switch box, I know exactly what to do. It's gonna take me a little time. I'm gonna take my time. I'm gonna make it look really clean and neat. I love that. Like, all the other stuff fades away. It's a very flow state zen thing. You're you're almost like doing a rock garden or something. You're just zenned out. Nothing else. You've got music on. Everything fades away. And all that's left is you and the task and your expertise. And can I do this better than the last one I did? You know, we you want it you want it to be where when you stand back after something as simple as tying in a outlet box or a switch box, you wanna stand back and look at it and be like, that looks great.

Dan: 30:52

Doug Powell is a master electrician in Frederick, Maryland. We'll have a link to his company in the show notes. There's a famous, and honestly possibly apocryphal story in the business world about Thomas Watson, who was CEO of IBM in the early to mid twentieth century. So the story goes like this, a subordinate comes to Watson apologizing profusely for a very expensive mistake that he'd made and acknowledging that he'd probably be fired as a result. And Watson says, "Fire you? I just spent $10,000,000 educating you." What triggered that memory was Doug's story about the trenching fiasco he talked about and how they called that paying tuition. Isn't that great? I love how it reframes a painful, costly experience into something that's positive in the long run, I'll never have to make that mistake again. And isn't that how most of us get better at what we do? We kinda stumble forward one mistake at a time and then at a certain point, the mistakes just get less frequent. Those tuition checks get smaller and smaller. And that's certainly been the story of Doug's business. Consulting the code book, wiring outlets with proper craftsmanship, bringing soft skills into a hard edged world, and finding flow in disciplined orderly work. Folks, that's what it's like to be a master electrician. A shout out to recent Apple podcast reviewers, Janessa Ann, Mad Jack fifty eight, the EIC, Ken the Country, DSM twenty five, and Hope for Humanity. Thanks to all of you. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.