The Wild East

Yesterday, after winnowing through the National Electrical Code while teaching an exam preparation course for some journeymen about to take the master electrician’s test, I came home and melted into my sofa.

This teaching stuff is hard work.

As my teaching buddy, Steve, always expounds: “Electricity is hard!”

For some strange reason, I am one of those fraction-of-a-percenters who really enjoys the Code.  To me, the provisions written within the Code range on a scale that starts at confounding but ends at Shakespearean.  Between the ends of this spectrum, I truly enjoy the knitting of shalls and shall nots, the formalized structure.   I even enjoy the run-on sentences dragging ahead like heavy freight trains.  And, in the end, I enjoy toying with my own plain English conversions for better understanding.

Crazy, thick, and perplexing as the Code can be, I think we really need it in place.  I can express why we need it in photograph after photograph.  Today, for example, I am posting a couple photographs I captured in Vietnam in 2009.

-- Mitchell Hegman