Zapped

Electricians on the boat are lucky, because we are the only ones who never get shocked (though you may occasionally see us jump back if we touch something "sharp" inside a controller). In fact, after fifteen years working around high voltage, the only time I ever got truly zapped was the one time I ignored my better instincts and just did as I was told.

At the time, I was a nub. A real nubby nub, not even qualified to run the ball valve on a shitter. It was one of my first duty days, and I was in middle level cleaning up after we'd just got done with the MG monthlies. The A-gang leading first (a huge bear of a man, who was only in the Navy because he was over-qualified to be a professional wrestler) came stomping by on his way to maneuvering. Then he came stomping by again, heading forward. He stopped, and looked at me like he'd never seen me before.

"You an electrician?" he growled (there's no other word for it)

"Uh-huh"

"Grab some tools and meet me in AMR - I need you to unhook a motor."

And then he left, leaving me to ponder exactly what tools I needed. I sure didn't want to screw anything up - it had been impressed on me from day one that, until you get your fish, you do not, under any circumstances, piss off A-gang. Not to mention the fact that most of them looked, and acted, like the Navy was the only thing between them and an Alabama chain gang.

I scurried up to AMR with a bag of miscellaneous tools and was presented with a big black cable coming out of one of the refrigeration compressors. In the center was a huge knot of rubber and vinyl tape - presumably where the cable connection was. "Hurry up" commanded the A-ganger, as he started to leave.

"Umm..." I asked nervously, "Do you need me to tag this out?"

"Nah, we took care of that" he replied, pointing out that the mechanical connections to the compressor were already disassembled. That just left the motor connections (in a junction box) and the cable going to the heaters.

Now, even an electrician nub knows better than to trust a non-electrician tagout. It's not that other rates don't know how to tag things out, it's that lots of equipment has multiple power supplies (sometimes for no apparent reason other than to make the tagout harder) that can easily be overlooked on a wiring schematic. It's almost like tribal knowledge, and A-gang just wasn't in the tribe.

So I started to leave to go get a multimeter to check it de-energized, and to make sure all the breakers were tagged. The A-ganger stopped me at the door to AMR.

"Just disconnect the fuckin' thing, nub" he ordered "It was supposed to be up on the pier two hours ago, and I'm tired of waiting on E-div to get their shit together".

"But..." I started to protest, before a look from him told me it was pointless, and probably suicidal, to argue with him.

I started hacking away at the ball of tape with my trusty dig'it tool. Sure enough, the one time I took someone's word for it, I got zapped. To make the day complete, when I stumbled back I ended up knocking half my tools into the bilge. But, no one else knew what had happened, and I sure wasn't going to tell. I grabbed some fuse pullers, found the power supply (the heaters were on a different circuit than the motor itself), and quickly de-energized it. By the time the leading first came back I managed to get the motor completely disconnected and some (but nowhere near all) of my tools out of the bilge.

That would probably have been the end of the story, except that I later went back and added the heater power supply to the original tagout. When it was time to reinstall the motor, the A-ganger noticed the extra tag and probably figured out what had happened. He never said anything about it to me, but I never got hassled by his brethren the way most of my fellow nubs did. Since I wasn't exactly the most knowledgeable nub around, I can only assume it was some sort of compensation for almost killing me.

Lesson learned - never trust someone else's tagout.