KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM Electrician shuns routine
Steven Nakamura owes
his career to his momI supervise electricians. I coordinate construction projects, the electrical portion of the project. I got started as an electrician in 1975. There was no interest in the job, it was just a whim. A friend said let's take the electrician's test. We had no idea what kind of work was involved, we only knew supposedly the pay was good. We were right out of high school.
We took the test, did our interviews with the union and got on the waiting list.
I sat on the waiting list for about two years. I was just working job to job; pumping gas, doing dishes, that sort of thing. I kind of forgot about it.
Then my mother happened to see an article in the paper about electricians being hired. On her own, she called the union and said "I hear about you hiring people and my son's been waiting for two years, how come you never called?" They said "he hasn't called, we thought he wasn't interested." So I got put back on the list.
Two months later I got a call for a job. I took it, then I found out I was the last guy they hired for the next seven years. They closed out the apprenticeship program.
My mom's passed away now. But if it wasn't for my mom calling and kind of complaining, I wouldn't be an electrician.
I'd been doing construction work, gas station work, fiberglass work. I never really liked any of it. But this job I never really thought about just clicked with me and I've enjoyed for the last 27 years.
It's not a routine. You never know what's going to happen, especially now in this position. I started with a smaller company and it was just me and the boss moving from job to job and it didn't get boring. Now I'm general foreman of Electricians Inc. and it's really different from working in the field. I generally come in about 5:30 in the morning and phone calls start coming in and thing start happening; trouble calls, emergencies, people needing things done. The work itself is electrical construction. We do ground work, installing conduits before the building goes up, we install wiring in the building, and we do finishing touches like plugs, lights, whatever comes up.
The requirements when I first started were a full-time apprenticeship and four years of night school. Now it's five years of night school and the apprenticeship program has changed. I think if I was an apprentice now I wouldn't pass, my time was a lot easier.
You have to have a certain mentality to be in construction, it's high stress. The costs are so high and it's so labor intensive, everything is about how quickly you can get things done. We would actually judge people by minutes in terms of how fast they can get things done to determine whether we were going to keep them around.
Because you can't see electricity, working with it is partially understanding the theory and partially just experience. Even reading the book is not necessarily going to help you.
I'll give you an example. We had a homeowner call with a outdoor light on a post. The bulb kept exploding. Not just burning out, the glass would shatter. Everything looked OK. But one of our guys kept thinking about it. He figured out there was a small leak in the fixture ad when it rained a drop of water would hit the hot light bulb and shatter the glass. Now, whenever we'd be called to check it out, it would be a dry day, so you'd never think of that, but he figured it out.
You just have to keep thinking about it and look at everything, just take all the factors one at a time until you find the problem. It's almost like investigating.
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