Monday, May 28, 2012

Life is relatively good

Normally, it works like this:

The guy driving the tractor with the fence-post-driver goes underneath the overhead cable to the well-house, clips the cable, bends the mast on the well-house and drags the cable a bit; the cable doesn't snap and nobody is electrocuted, but the mast must be replaced. The guy driving the tractor will do it, if I go into town and get him a length of 1 1/4" metal conduit. So, at the very end of the day, I zip into town into the electrician supply shop, ask for (and receive) 10 feet of 1 1/4" conduit, bring it back to the farm, and find out a disturbing truth.

Everybody in the world, with one exception, measures pipe and conduit by outer diameter. Electricians, alone in the world, measure pipe by internal diameter.

Normally, I'd find this out at 5:30 PM on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. I don't know how this happened--somebody controlling the fates perhaps took off early for the weekend--but I found out about this at 5:30 PM on Thursday, so I had a whole day to go and get the right size pipe. And now we have a nicely repaired power line to our well house.

If I learned one thing during a decade of life in Wisconsin, it's that it could always be worse.

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