I'll include today and Friday because they're very much related: Other people's jobs.

Friday: Well, new home project, a pretty decent one (this is backstory). The clients wanted landscape speakers so we wired for them. Once the planters were up around the pool and elsewhere, we ran our wires into them through conduit, mounted up near the tops of the planters so we'd have access to them once the dirt got filled in. Somewhere along the way, some other company pulled our mounted stuff off of the walls of the planters, left it laying in the bottom. We saw it, thought that people would use their brains and put it back up. That was a mistake. Landscape company just threw dirt on top of it. 6 feet worth. Yeah, these were deep planters. So, FINALLY the builder got with the landscape folks and told them they had to dig it up. Yup, that job sucked. The kid (couldn't be more than 20) in charge of that task at first dug one of them up, on the left, we found it. He couldn't pull the whole thing out, didn't want to do the hard work of digging to uncover the stuff of ours that he covered up (well, someone with his company, he says it wasn't him) so we cut the wire and spliced it, wrapped the shit out of it to make sure it wouldn't get affected by water or moisture. (I had to go back and re-do that with the proper wire on Friday). They had done most of the digging for the wire we needed on the right side, but eventually since it sucks, they made the excuse that they were too busy to focus on that. Great. Client asks if we have anyone that could dig for us and I knew what that meant.

So, Friday, knowing we pretty much had no choice, we dug up the other wire we needed. Fortunately it was mostly dug up and only took about ten minutes to dig up. It toned out fine. Since we didn't have to put anything in that planter, we left the dirt out. However, we had another wire on the left side that we wanted to use if we could, and we decided to try and dig it up. Unfortunately, this planter was very skinny, and had an irrigation pipe running through it, so it wasn't so easy. We thought it was drilled through higher, but, nope...it was at the bottom of that planter, pretty much. That one took a LOT of digging. We found it, so that's great, but, we toned it out and it was crushed and didn't work so we had to use the one in the connecting planter to extend to it. Fortunately I had pulled off 20 feet, so it reached. Since we had to put a landscape speaker right there, at the end of our working wire on the left, what did we have to do? Yup, fill it back up with the dirt we just took out so we could place the speaker. It was a lot of dirt. At the end of the day, we were fortunate that we had a wire working on each side (if we didn't have one on each side working, we'd have been in for a lot more work) and it's working just fine. Also, at the end of the day, that wasn't our job to do. Idiots shouldn't have unmounted our shit from the walls and then whoever else shouldn't have freakin buried it. Note to self (and anyone who read that): If you're going into a planter for landscape speakers, drill your hole through the concrete as high as possible.

TODAY: The pool guy's job. We have a client who is great to work for and will just pay his bills when he gets them (very rich). The fiber light tube around his pool wasn't working so he called the pool guys to check it out. They replaced the...unit, for lack of a better word, that provides light to the fibers that light up around the pool and left. It didn't work. He called them back, they couldn't figure it out. He called an electrician, they couldn't figure it out. So, since he likes us, even though it's not what we do, he called us. We went and checked it out. It's amazing what you can learn if you read the instructions from time to time. The pool people who had installed this unit obviously didn't. If you've never dealt with this before, it could be helpful. The fibers come up into a box that shines intense light onto them so it can flow through and provide a cool neon glow around the pool. What the installer didn't know (but he would have had he read the instructions) is that the fibers need to be cut precisely, all the same length, all the same angle, with a hot knife. Otherwise, they're all different lengths, different angles, and the light won't travel through them as they should. Whoever installed it didn't even bother to cut them at all, just stuffed them up through the adapter and called it a day. So, we got a hot knife and went back today, took it apart, removed 4 other tubes of fibers that weren't even being used and/or wouldn't even work with the unit they installed, put the appropriate sized adapter on, cut it correctly with a hot knife to make a nice, even, straight surface for the light to onto and whaddya know? It's working the way it should. You can't tell by looking from afar in the light, but if you get right up on it, shield it and your eyes from outside light/the sun, you can see the light shining and changing colors (spinning color wheel in front of the bulb). You'd definitely be able to see it at night.

Oh and we put up some speaker rings.

Yeah, basically, other people's jobs.