I wanted to share a story for all the new techs/apprentices. Its long, sorry. I had just started with my current company (about 4.5 years ago) I was just a couple months out of trade school. I had worked residential and light commercial thru school but never saw anything over 10 tons. On my third day, in the middle of August, my manager decided to throw me into the fire and sent me on a service call for a 50 ton Lennox system (same ones I just posted videos about in the commercial page). I got up on the roof and immediately told myself I could never fix this unit. It stood taller than me and had 100 wires more than anything I had seen. All I had was high pressure code due to a failed condenser fan. This unit had 6 OFMs. Fast forward about 7 hours, and I ended up smoking 5/6 motors because I wired the capacitors wrong after looking for shorts. I ended up with about 12 man hours in this job over two days. I took ownership of the situation and told my boss what happened, told him I would not be putting more than 3 hours on my time sheet. He said he didn't care about any of that, said the only thing that mattered was that I didn't give up and leave the customer hanging. He paid me all of the hours. That moment developed a lot of trust between the two of us and has led to a very successful business relationship for almost five years. He's challenged me over the years and I've now become one of the top techs in the company. The moral is don't give up, ask lots of questions when you're around guys with more experience, and always admit your mistakes and learn from them.

Posted by Ryan Lineberger at 2021-02-17 23:40:06 UTC