I remember many years ago, I was earning £7.50 an hour at the time, I had a run in with the revenue, trying to accuse me of not paying the correct tax, they reckoned the average spark was on £35k a year!
My old chap was always going on about us sparks being elitist and how there had been a massive row at his firm when it came out that the sparks were on about £1.50 an hour more than anyone else, he was really winding me up.
I showed him some of the calculations we sometimes have to do, and explained how in our job more so than a lot of others, if it went wrong someone could get badly hurt or killed, and that when there was an incident involving electricity, it usually ended with a game, rightly or wrongly of "pin the blame on the sparky".
He sat quietly for a while, taking in what I had told him, looking at the calculations I'd done, and the other figures, cost of test gear etc, then "you know son, I wouldn't have your job for a gold clock, you don't get paid enough for all the aggro and responsibility"
Hallelujah, he'd finally seen the light!
I don't think people do understand our job, lets be honest, when you are green and starting out you sit down and calculate cable sizes for different things, a shower for example, 9.5 Kw, length of run 20 mtrs, trunked up a wall, part of it covered with insulation, you get your book out, work it out and off you go. A few years down the line and all this is in your head, experience, you now look at an Identical job and you just know what size cable to use. Even if you do get a job where you need to sit down and work it out, the client never sees this bit, you roll up, throw a cable in, connect it and hey presto, it just works, it's easy!
A lot of the time the client only realises how complex certain parts of our job can be is when they've tried to do it themselves and it goes wrong.
There's a lot of myths and rumour spread about how easy we have it, you only have to look at the adverts in the papers from the training centre's, "you could earn upwards of £60k a year, simply by training to be an electrician at one of our training centres"
They never mention struggling to find work, or working in a loft in the middle of a hot summer, or outside on a cold rainy winters day, or getting called out at daft o'clock in the morning to a breakdown that could have waited until the following day! NO! electricians are paid very handsomely for doing easy jobs, they all drive new vehicles, go to work in smart overalls and come home as clean as they were when they left home that morning.
Please can somebody tell me where this electricians eutopia is please, I'd really like to live and work there.
