Shadowing M

I shadowed M on a job to replace a light in a professor's office.  He said that, in winter, people often bring in electric heaters, and too many electric heaters on one circuit will overload it, triggering the circuit breaker.

When we arrived at the office, the professor's door was locked.  I later learned that the electric shop has a set of keys, but M didn't bring one, so he needed to get one from a building on campus.  Before unlocking the office, he checked a nearby breaker room to see if there were any obvious issues.  He needed to use a minimag flashlight to light the breaker room since it was so dark.  The professor's office wasn't listed in the breaker room.

The first step in getting those keys was digging out his three phones (home, work, and on-call) and finding the right person to call.  At one point, he looked up a phone number on one phone while calling on his personal phone because the reception on his work phone was so poor.

I took a ride in his electric equipment van.  The van was moderately cluttered, and it was full of tools that clanged around while driving.

The building that we went to had a set of generators that M was responsible for.  One building at Stanford has databases for the whole state of California, and M said that people told him "if the generators were to fail,, we would lose one billion dollars, and you would go to jail."  In most places, they had only one generator, but at that place, they had 4 redundant generators.

As we walked back, M mentioned that Stanford has a lot of old lights.  The quad lights had been there for as long as the quad existed.  They recently changed the lights and got them retrofitted, which cost $1,500 each!

Once we found the room, we discovered that we would have to search for the right breaker room.  M didn't seem to know where the breaker rooms were in that building, and there didn't seem to be a map or any coherent means of organization.  We had to go to three breaker rooms before we found the right one.  M commented that it's "easy to fix it, but hard to find."  After we found the right breaker room, we knew that it was right because one of the breakers was tripped, but the panel was mislabeled -- the professor's office wasn't even on it!