If there’s a group of people that you should probably listen to and trust at every opportunity, I’d say that electricians are pretty high up on the list.

They know their stuff and they realize that one little mistake can lead to some huge problems.

Just ask the guy who wrote this story…

He talked about what happened when construction workers didn’t listen to him on a job…and the results were disastrous.

Take a look and find out what happened.

How you should listen to tradesmen and what happens when management doesn’t know what they are doing.

“I’m an electrician, but I will skip technical details to necessary parts.

Winter got us pinned at the office construction site. My colleagues needed heat to plaster walls, mix adhesives etc. So, as a site electrician I was given a task of making sure there are enough large heaters (30 amps each times 8) to heat 3 floors.

There were some issues…

There wouldn’t be any problem if: we had more power to use (we could use 400A on a wire secured by 315A breakers with all heaters on full throttle we would have 470A, including staff rooms and office) -cables were big enough -tradies would turn them at half power at the end of the shift.

Here comes the malicious compliance.

I knew that our transformer would burn down first if I did what management wanted. After two months of battle, arguing and giving alternatives (which came on top, by the way), I gave up and complied.

They were asking for it…

I told tradies to put these heaters on half power when they call it a day, and they more or less listened, while upper echelon ordered them to put it on max without my knowledge.

It was arguably fine, despite my warnings about heating of wires that powered these heaters. One day, after a month, at the union break lights flickered. I thought of it as fluorescent lights being them. Oh how I was wrong. 5 minutes later I’ve got a call that our transformer is smoking.

I opened the fuse box that was next to it and shut down the whole site, as wires, oil and insulation started banging. I moved to a safe distance, called the fire dept and energy workers.

He tried to tell them..

And when white smoke started turning black I wanted to say “didn’t I tell you?” as I was crouching and smoking a cig.

It was burned down completely.

Next day we got a fuse box with half the power and all but three heaters were decommissioned. As I was sitting in my room after the investigation, I was talking with the energy company.

Reason?

Power cables didn’t have time to cool down, cable entry points melted, caught fire and breakers didn’t work (not my fault, that’s on energy comp) And here is the aftermath.

When the director learned of this he ordered managers to ask me if it’s okay to use anything that needs three wires, and all in all de facto became a person that’s solely responsible in terms of electricity.

Company I work for doesn’t have electrical engineers.

The same day it happened we were visited by overseer of energy comp and he said we can raise the limit on breakers to 400A.”

Here’s what folks had to say about this on Reddit.

This person weighed in.

Another Reddit user shared their thoughts.

This individual spoke up.

Another reader knows all about this.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a teenager who wants to work, but his mom thinks working past 8pm is too late for high school.

And this Reddit user spoke up.

He tried to warn them…

But they didn’t want to listen!

Like I said, ALWAYS listen to electricians.

You can thank me later.

This was a very expensive mistake…