Re: Wadda Ya Do

[Jim <alarminex@xxxxxxx>]

On Sep 3, 6:09=A0pm, nick markowitz <nmarkow...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Over the years we have had a few detective/guard agencys try it as
> well as police officers who all found it hard to maintain a business.-

The one common trait I've often seen in successful installers is
innovativeness. From the time that I was a kid, I was always modifiing
my bikes, or trains or cars to make them do what they weren't supposed
to do. Thinking of things and attempting to create them and then
having those things eventually show up as somebody else's idea. For
instance, being a boater, about 30 years ago, I thought that if an
electronic fish finder can find fish a hundred feet below while it's
pointed downward, since sound waves travel differently in water as
compared to air, why couldn't there be a similar device mounted at the
bottom of a swimming pool that could tell when a kid fell in the
pool?  After all these years, I see that someone is just now marketing
such a device.

I once had a sub-contractor installer working with me on a residential
job. I was drilling a window, ran into an obsticle in the wall and the
bit popped out of the newley painted wall. Nice elongated hole in the
grey paint. I could tell that the sub-contractor sort of "snickered"
at the fact that I'd made such a novice like mistake and made comment
about having to explain to the owner what had happened. We went on to
finish the rest of the house while I thought about the hole in the
wall. When the job was finished the Sub asked me what I was going to
say about the hole I'd made and I said that I wasn't going to tell him
and told him to see if he could find the hole.

That night, after he had left the job, I went downstairs to the
basement and scraped some soot from the flue of the oil burner and
mixed it with some spackle to just the right color grey and through
the day had added coats and smoothed it out with wet towels. You could
barely tell there was a mark on the wall and since it was behind a
lamp table, it wasn't going to be seen unless you were looking for it.
I remember feeling pretty smug about being able to pull it out of the
fire when the other guy had been willing to give up.

Anyway, I'm sure we all have stories about things like that. But it's
that kind of thinking that has always been what I think is needed in
any kind of trades job.