Preferred Methods

As a longtime electrician, I have come to have a pretty reasonable understanding of the men and women involved in our craft.  Electricians tend to be a bit shrill regarding issues such as job-site conditions, safety, rushed schedules and that sort of thing.  They also have an inordinate amount of opinions (usually expressed in the form of objections) about nearly everything.  Mostly, they do not like to see changes in the way things are done.  If, for example, you try to teach a standard issue electrician some new way of bending a conduit offset (other than the way he has done for the last umpteen years) the standard issue electrician will either laugh at you with derision or immediately run you away from the vicinity.

Quite often, the electricians of today might be the second or even third generation of their family involved in the craft.  I am such.  My father was an electrician.  Many methods of performing tasks pass down from generation to generation.  Apprenticeship—that is, learning directly from someone who has years of practical experience—also tends to “institutionalize” methods and ideas.

One change, however, has been eagerly adopted by electricians.  This change has to do with the best methods for resuscitating someone following electric shock of some other worksite calamity.  I will not trouble you with the preferred method of today.  But here is the method once prescribed in The American Electrician’s Handbook published by McGraw Hill in 1942:

RESUSCITATION FROM ELECTRIC SHOCK By Frederick Koliz, MD

1st. Lay the patient on his back, 2 Move the tongue back and forth in the mouth by seizing it with a handkerchief or the fingers, while working the arms to induce respiration. 3. Don’t pour anything down the patient’s throat. 4. Try to cause the patient to gasp by inserting the first and second fingers in the rectum, and pressing them suddenly and forcibly toward the back. 5. If possible, procure oxygen gas, and try to get it into the lungs during the efforts at artificial respiration…

CPR class, anyone?

--Mitchell Hegman