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When Sarah Palin booked a flight to Europe, the French immediately surrendered.

calendar   Tuesday - January 19, 2010

The Continuiing Adventures of Windo Gai

Have Gun, will Travel Ladder, will do stupid stuff for money



So I get a call from my doctor customer. The guy I do weekend cleaning and maintenance for. “Can you replace some light bulbs for us? Bring a ladder” Sure, Ok. So I head down there and find out that it’s a street light in their parking lot that needs some attention. I’ve seen the private property street lamps before. Anodized aluminum box up on a square pole, usually about 16 feet tall. Fine. No worries. So I get out my 27 foot extension ladder, and set it up, and up it goes. And keeps going. And going. This is not a 16’ lamp pole. It’s a 30 foot pole. Yikes. So I set the base in close, a little too close for safety, and up the ladder goes me, the monkey. That’s when I found out that to my surprise, a hollow core 4x4 rusted steel square pole is actually quite whippy! So I’m 20+ feet off the ground, and the pole is going harmonic as a Honer. Eff uck dis! So it’s back down the ladder and get out my cinch straps. I lashed the ladder to the pole at about 8 feet and then again at about 20 feet. Cranked it down tight, and that took a whole lot of boingy-boingy out of things. Up the ladder again, and now it’s time to bend out into space to reach the underside of the light fixture. Turns out these boxes have a trapdoor plate underneath that holds the lens. To my delight they’re put together with a wire hinge on one end, and the trapdoor is held in place with 4 Dzus screws. Give each one a quarter turn and they unlock, and the trapdoor opens. The glass of course is utterly filthy, but now I can get at ... almost get at ... the bulb. And it’s a standard one. Amazing. Takes a 400 watt high pressure sodium. Which is pretty much the John Holmes of light bulbs, a glass cucumber about a foot long (including the base) and about 2 1/2” inches across. Comes out just fine. Now, where do I go to buy a new one?

I tried the local lighting store. They had every kind of chandelier and carriage lamp you could imagine, and I saw some awesome low voltage under cabinet lights that were only 3/8” thick. But no HPS bulbs. And no T7 exit sign bulbs, which was another thing that needed doing. So it was off to Home Depot down the street. Home Depot has everything, if you know where to look. The clerks didn’t know. I got there at the dead time of day, around 4:15pm, so I had 2 clerks working for me. She was trying to find me 4 of the exit sign bulbs ( which are like aquarium bulbs but use an even smaller base, and they only pull 20 watts ), while he was digging through the dust covered industrial light bulb section. She managed to get me 3 bulbs, but their cards were already opened, so she stapled them closed and only charged me for 2. He brought me a mercury vapor bulb. No, that’s not it. I need a high pressure sodium bulb. He brought me a 400 watt metal halide bulb. Mmmm, metal halides. I loves me them things, but it wasn’t what I needed. Finally he just gave up and walked away. I found the bulb I needed, hiding in a corner, unpacked in it’s case of 3. I had him open it and I bought one. $22. For one light bulb. And I’ll cut the guy some slack; the package label was in French and Spanish. So I got that stuff, and 4 par-38 outdoor floods that they also needed.

Back to the doctor’s office, which is only half a mile up the road. Oh good, nobody has stolen my ladder. Back up the ladder, while the wind is picking up and it’s just about ready to rain. And the cars go zooming by on the highway. Oh, did I forget to mention that I’m pretty much leaning out over traffic doing this, because his office is only a couple feet from the edge of the busiest local highway in the county? Sorry. So I get my screwdriver, get the bulb, and carefully time my steps back up the ladder. Because you want to move in time with the oscillations. I feel I’m starting to understand how those old time sailors felt. So I get up to the top, hang onto the pole with one hand, lean back and reach out with the bulb in my other hand, and ... there’s this Chunk! Brrrzzzzz! noise. I missed my window of opportunity by about a minute, and now the ballast has turned on. Ok, maybe it is safe to hold onto a metal pole (possible ground) while screwing in a glass lightbulb (insulation, right) which is almost surrounded by a minimal clearance metal reflector. But I’m not taking chances. A 400w high pressure sodium bulb has a crystal core in about the size and shape of a pencil. That’s the part that ignites. How many farads and how many hundred/thousand volts does that take? I have no idea, and I don’t want to provide any electrons an easier path. So I go back down the ladder once again, and have the guy inside figure out what breaker it is and turn it off. Klank! All the lights in the parking lot go off. Great! Back up the ladder, and then Allen sticks his nose out the office door “I’m not sure I turned off the right one. Maybe they’re all resetting. Let me throw another one.” “Allen, no, it’s off, I can tell!” “No, I’ll figure it out!” So back up the ladder again, right up to the top, start reaching out to the turned off lamp unit ... and the office sign, a billboard sized light up affair right next to this street light, goes out. And then Chunk! Brrrrzzzz! and the ballast is back on. AAAAAALLLLLEEEENN!! Geex. Finally got that straightened out, went back up the pole for the 4th or 5th time, screwed in the new bulb, then overcame the challenge of locating the rusty Dzus fasteners in the dusk, and got them all back in. And I even managed to clean the glass, although all the years worth of crap rained right down on me. But after I flipped the proper breaker back on, my lamp lit right up, like a big orange star. Cool.

Spent another 45 minutes replacing the par-38 floodlamp bulbs outside, then trying to put new bulbs in the Exit signs. Those signs were junk to begin with, and these ones are 25 years old. The plastic is falling apart in my hands. So I got 3 out of 4 dead bulbs replaced, and held the red plastic together with some scotch tape. Good enough to keep the fire marshal happy.

Going up that damn bouncy rusty pole at dusk, messing with a zillion volts just as it starts to rain, and hunting down weird-ass light bulbs. For all this, I’ll charge him $60. My bet is a service call from the “pros”, who would show up with their truck and a cherry picker rig, would have set him back $300. Minimum. Plus parts at a huge markup.

So that was my adrenaline rush for the day. It’s almost funny now that I’ve had a half a coffee mug of Grouse on the rocks. Swaying around a couple feet in the breeze wasn’t funny then though. Now to turn on the TV and see if we’ve got MA election results trickling in yet.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 01/19/2010 at 06:35 PM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
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