Sometimes easy money and sometimes not so easy
I service commercial fire alarms. Often get after hours calls. Clock starts when I leave, so its travel plus a 2 hour minimum site charge. Seen lots of calls where I just press the reset button. At $110/hr its awesome. Makes up for the dirty ones!
HERE is a story!!!!
In the late 90's I installed Motorola 911 radio / telco dispatch and hilltop site equipment. We got involved with electric door lock controls mostly for the jail down in Ritzville, WA. As the project got close to the end, I could NOT figure out two doors. These were access doors for the courtroom, and while they could be manually locked / unlocked, the electric system when it powered down left the doors accessible. This was for fire danger, as you don't want to trap folks
ANYway there were no prints of the building, and it had been re-re-re -re modeled. We tried to tone out the wiring and got lost in the conduits
SO ONE DAY I'm in dispatch, and the fire alarm guys are there finishing up THEIR end, and one of them said something about those doors and the "relay in the mechanical room."
"WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY??!" I said to him
He looked at me funny and said, "oh, not your stuff, some of the door locks dump power with a relay on the boiler for the fire system."
AND THERE IT WAS, JUST LIKE THAT!!! LMAO
I bet I had at least 20 man hours into that damn thing on those two doors!!!
