Why We're Called Fired Properly

Picture this: you're scaling a roof hatch, both hands on the ladder, a full can of spray foam tucked under your arm like a football you definitely should not be carrying. Twenty feet below — a pristine concrete equipment room floor, just waiting.

Gravity, as it turns out, is not negotiable. The can departed hands at the apex of the climb, achieved a brief moment of beautiful freefall, and met the concrete with the kind of enthusiasm that concrete absolutely does not share.

The explosion was… thorough. Spray foam does not have a snooze button. It does not politely stay in one area. It seeks every corner, every pipe, every surface within a fifteen-foot radius — and it EXPANDS. The equipment room looked like a snow globe had a panic attack.

Someone changed the walkie-talkie frequency on the site radios as a joke. Hilarious, right? Except nobody told the site foreman, who spent 45 minutes narrating his entire lunch order to what turned out to be a local taxi dispatch.

The taxi company sent three cabs to the job site. The foreman was somehow charged for two of them. Nobody confessed. The frequency was never officially changed back.

Four hours of precision conduit work — perfectly measured, cleanly run, textbook installation. Clean enough to photograph. The kind of work that makes you feel like a craftsman.

Except it was done from Revision B. The current version was Revision F. Three entire layout changes had happened between those revisions. Every single conduit was in the wrong place. Every. Single. One.

The project manager arrived, looked at the work, looked at the blueprint, looked back at the work, and just sat down on a toolbox without saying anything for about four minutes.

The building had a 'do not touch' breaker clearly labeled in red. Red label, red tape, a laminated warning sign, and a Post-It note that said 'SERIOUSLY DO NOT TOUCH THIS.'

In fairness, the breaker that needed to be flipped was right next to it. And the lighting in the panel room was not great. The resulting outage affected three floors, a server room on UPS backup, and one very upset dentist on the second floor who was mid-procedure.

All that was needed was to move one ceiling tile. One. To check above the drop ceiling for a junction box. Simple. Five minutes, tops.

The tile moved fine. What nobody accounted for was the decade's worth of collected dust, insulation particulate, and what appeared to be a family of dessicated beetles that had been undisturbed since approximately 2009. It rained down onto the open-plan office below during morning standup.

The HR department was directly below. They did not find it as funny as everyone else did.

Three guys, a full tool load-out, and the unshakeable confidence that this was the correct building. Spoiler: the building number was on the OTHER side of the complex, displayed clearly on a massive sign that nobody checked because nobody thought to check because everyone was absolutely certain.

Four hours of cable pulling later, a building engineer appeared asking why we were running conduit through what was apparently a secured government-contracted data room. We had no permits for this building. We had no drawings for this building. We had no business being in this building.

The actual job site was 400 feet away. They could see it from where we stood when we walked out.

Someone needed to move the porta-potty. The forklift was right there. The site supervisor was at lunch. These three facts combined to create what investigators later described as 'a situation that should not have been possible given basic physics.'

The porta-potty was, in fact, occupied. The occupant was a subcontractor named Gerald who had stepped in approximately forty-five seconds before the relocation began. Gerald is fine. Gerald has never fully recovered.

The overhead clearance was listed as 9'8". The truck with the lift gate was 10'2". This information was available. It was on a sticker on the visor. The parking garage had a height bar at the entrance.

The sound of a lift gate meeting a concrete ceiling at 12mph is something you carry with you. It is not a sound that suggests the situation has resolved itself. It suggests the opposite.

The truck was a lease. The lease agreement had a clause about overhead structural damage. The clause was not in our favor.

In defense of the person who pulled it: the pull station WAS in the way of where the conduit needed to go. The logical next step — in a brain that had been awake since 4:30 AM — was apparently to just give it a quick tug to see if it was actually connected.

It was connected. It was VERY connected. The building was a 14-story office tower with 800 occupants, two of whom were in the middle of job interviews, one of whom was a visiting fire marshal conducting an unrelated audit.

The fire marshal was, by pure coincidence, already on-site. We cannot stress how uniquely terrible this timing was.

The company had a mandatory all-hands safety meeting. The theme was 'Awareness and Accountability.' The opening slide was literally titled 'Common Causes of Workplace Incidents.'

During the coffee break, one attendee walked backward into an unsecured stepladder, which struck a push cart, which rolled into a supply shelf, which toppled a 5-gallon bucket of joint compound, which landed open-side-down on the regional safety director's laptop bag.

This incident was then added to the following year's safety meeting as a case study. It is the only incident in company history to appear in its own training material.