Ep.4 Reality of Long Hours...

This episode of the HVACTIME video podcast I go into the uncomfortable conversation of pushing to far. There is a line of safe to work and get it done and this line becomes blurred far to often... Be safe HVAC technician.

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Transcript

One of the podcasts I've been wanting to talk about is being tired and being able to work through and how to manage your self tiredness. You know, this is, and this may get a little uncomfortable of a topic as I go through it, and kind of what I'd like to discuss and share. So gonna be probably several people who are extremely safety conscious, and you might find this podcast questionable.

I'm just gonna give you that disclaimer up. . But part of my goal with this is I want to be genuine. I want to be upfront with just how this is, uh, this is a sector of the industry. It is a, a legitimate safety issue at the end of the day, but what actually happens in the field when, when it gets down to it, this is true no matter where you are.

I know that a lot of companies are extremely safety conscious out there. Even those companies, when it happens there, they're not the wiser as to what's going on, and they're technicians are hiding it. I want to talk about it from a perspective of when this. How you can try to properly manage it. And when?

When do you just stop? When? When do you have to stop? Now I'm hitting on the safety aspect of this real heavy up front because I want you to understand that discussing being exhausted and tired and how to work through that on a job site, and sometimes the hours that this turns into officially shouldn't happen, and it shouldn't be this way.

And you shouldn't push yourself on an official level. A company shouldn't ask you to. You are supposed to have proper adequate time and I want you to understand that going into this podcast and conversation, we got a big retrofit going and I'm working this job. At the moment, I'm organizing my tools cuz.

Everything's an absolute scattered mess right now, which is, which is what happens if you've ever done this before. I'm working on commissioning phase of the projects and trying to get this system kind of tuned in, make sure that it will actually stay online. We had to do a re-piping on a 200 ton split system.

This system had some issues with the original piping and configuration work and just it's, it's a long explanation. Regardless of the explanation, what it led to an unexpected overnighter was not anticip. We had a strong plant. We went into, uh, the other night, I guess this, so right now is Friday morning.

This would've been Wednesday, so we had approval. We're in very mild weather right now. We were gonna shut down all the mechanical cooling and re-pipe the system, and I had a, what I thought was a sizable enough crew to actually get that amount of work done in the time given. As with anything though, you run into little hiccups and complications.

We started the day Wednesday at 8:00 AM and we finished and left the job site at 4:30 AM Thursday morning. Well, part of the requirements for the building. We had to make sure that the mechanical cooling was functional enough to support the building, which basically meant we needed one condenser online of the two that we have.

We had to be back by basically about 10 o'clock cuz they had economizer free cooling up until about 10. Then the outside air conditions were gonna get too warm. What that meant for me in particular, uh, I live two hours away. It was not worth the drive home at four 30. Nor was it safe enough for me to drive home to do nothing more than basically take a shower and then come back and be back here at 10 o'clock.

So out of just time and safety, I decided I was just gonna sleep in the truck. I drove to our shop and crashed in the parking lot for, uh, a few hours. I think I got to the shop at about five o'clock. Went down, uh, I was up by eight as everybody started kind of filtering into the shop, and it was just too much going on.

And I couldn't stay down in the truck. So I got up for a little bit and kind of hung out and then kind, I took my time getting here and, and we just, we weren't in a hurry yesterday cause we had to work the whole day yesterday as well. Uh, I got a night's sleep overnight last night and then we're back on site at am this morning.

A lot of things start to happen to you and your body when you push yourself to those levels of exhaustion and, and those things. Necessarily, well, not even necessarily. Those things are not good things. And in these situations and conditions, this is where, uh, a, a, a senior technician, not a, not necessarily a senior, but is seniored somebody who has experienced and has kind of lived through this life long enough, that experience begins to show us value because those guys, you'll.

They know how to work in those conditions and they know how to continue functioning. And then your younger guys who haven't lived through that enough times will be the ones that struggle the most, and you have to keep the most eye on and pay the most attention to because they're gonna be the ones to ultimately go down.

I do apologize if I get a little incoherent at any point in this conversation just because, you know, I, I, one night's sleep, it's not near enough to. From this, and that's one of the things you have to take into account. So if you're gonna start working extreme hours, you have to realize the recovery time for that is fairly substantial.

I don't know the actual math or numbers behind it, and I'm not educated at that scale, but you, from experience, you need a significant amount of time. So let's say you work a full shift more than what you're used to. . And so normally your body could recover from that in, you know, a, a typical night of eight hours sleep or seven hours, however much sleep you're used to getting, you turn around doing overnight or like this or, or something to this level, that recovery time can easily turn into two or three nights of decent sleep to get your body.

Normal and, and even remotely functional again, and this is one reason why I wanted to do this while I'm in this state, because while I can, I can speak the most accurately to it because I'm sitting here and I'm currently feeling it, and I literally am in the process of trying to recover from it myself.

So let's talk about what happens would you feel, and just how your body starts to react. Now, this is gonna be slightly different from person to. , but for the most part, people start to get, uh, abundantly, uh, lethargic. Your head begins to cloud. You have a hard time thinking and processing what it is you're doing and what's in front of you.

And a task that would normally be a very quick, instant reaction turns into there's a little bit of a stutter, there's a delay. You don't just respond like you expect yourself to, and that in and of itself, Start to get frustrating and then, you know, small annoyances that like right now I am looking for my channel locks and I swore I had 'em right here.

That small annoyance becomes, I'm getting pissed off. Frustration. No, not because it's a big deal and in the context of what is happening, it makes total logical. Your mind's ability to make that logical sense isn't of the, it's not there. That same level and scale isn't happening. So you have to be aware of that.

You have to be mindful of that. Where you'll get yourself in trouble is when you're not aware and, and a lot of this just comes down to, you have to live it enough times and experience it before it can fully make sense and, and be legitimate in your mind even then and after you've experienced it. If you've, if you're not that mentally, Uh, strong to begin with.

And I don't mean that in a negative way, I just mean that in just a legitimate, some people just aren't as mentally tough. Just, I don't know how else to say that as other people are where that could becomes a problem. Making a judgment decision on what is safe or not. It is much easier to make a unsafe decision, for example, continuing to work.

Uh, it's easier to make an unsafe decision that, you know what, just f it. I'm here, I'm. I'm just gonna keep going until we're done or, or until somebody drops. That can be an unsafe decision depending on what it is you're doing that can lead to people getting hurt. All right, fandom. So this is a prime example of what I'm actually talking about.

I left these inside the air handler. I was using 'em to help me, uh, as a backup to adjust valves, and I forgot that's where I. But I thought I had moved them, but I didn't. I hadn't moved them. And anyway, your memory becomes shorter and you're, you, you'll have problems with remembering what it was you, you were doing and why, and why that thing was important.

And that plays even into measurements. You know, you'll have, say you were trying to take measurements of a piece of pipe or something, Well, you might have to start writing those down cuz remembering the measurement you took from where you took it to where you need to cut it might become challenging.

And I'll use that as a segue to kind of go back to what I started to say earlier about how, uh, this is where an experienced technician who's lived through this, or somebody who's done this long enough, you know, you do generate a lot of, uh, muscle memory. And, uh, and just what you do, and you'd be surprised how much, uh, muscle, mu muscle memory you create, it ends up getting carried with you.

Where that comes into play, when you can no longer really think effectively, you know, your, your mind becomes so clouded by the exhaustion and the tiredness that you, your brain is, is not processing the information. Uh, that muscle memory begins to kick in. For somebody who is inexperienced, that's gonna be a lot harder because they don't have that same level of muscle memory.

And so that night, for example, uh, I, yeah, you're, you're, my mind got to the point where I was doing, I wasn't doing a whole lot of thinking and of the day there was a, there wasn't much thinking happening and there was a whole lot of just my, my body knows how to do this, my body. The goal I wanted to achieve, and my body just started doing what I've done for years to get the results I was seeking.

Is this a safety hazard? Is this a safety issue? You better believe it. Should we have stopped? Yes. So let's talk about that. Okay. So why? Why in the world would you continue working? Like, if you're gonna get to that point, you're, you're obviously not getting as much work accomplished as you would if you were of, of right.

Mind you, uh, you were arrested, you weren't tired. And so if we'd have just called it a night and gone home, well there is a Breakover point. Between every time you stop a job and then come back and, and start, it takes time even for, you know, for good workers who know how to get stuff done. They're not there to play around or waste time or do anything else, even for those guys.

You've got a decent amount of everybody's kind of getting back in the groove and getting back on the same page, and they gotta pick up where they left off. And, you know, we leave, we go home to our families. We're no longer thinking about this. For the most part, you know, it's not actively in front of us.

So there is a level of time being saved by not having to leave the job and come back to it and everybody get back into that groove at the same time, once you start to tip over a a certain scale. You get to where the time that you're saving, you start to, to, uh, balance that time with how much slower you end up having to move strictly.

Because, you know, like I said, you're tired. Your, your, your mind, your body, nothing is responding the way it's supposed to. Even with muscle memory. Now, to answer the question of why did we choose to do that, do that this way on this specific job, why would. Go to that level of unsafe? Well, one, it, it was unintentional.

Uh, we weren't actually keeping track of time that much on the job, and we were so focused on just getting our goal accomplished. One thing led to another and it just, it turned into 4:30 AM before everybody really like legitimately just stopped and acknowledged what time it was. So there was, there's that factor of it, which comes back to, you know, me.

The supervisor and, and managing that site and that crew. Uh, I didn't do a good job in managing that time, which means that, yeah, I'm on a, on a greater scale. I created a safety hazard at that point. Yeah, I did. I created one because I wasn't paying enough attention to everybody's physical state and the time that it was.

So what that means if, if something had happened, nothing. Everybody's perfectly fine. But if something had happened, uh, I would hold responsibility for that because I allowed that, that situation to be created and exist, and I didn't stop the job when I probably should have. Now, the other side of that, the crew that I had on site are guys who would much rather just get the work done instead of taking time, you know?

The alternative. So if we didn't do the one, just the one hard overnighter, the alternative would be that we had to spend multiple nights. And my personal preference, and one reason I wasn't really paying enough attention to time is I would rather have just one hard night. And my, my guys agreed with this, you know, we've got families we would rather have just one hard night.

Granted, we didn't mean for it to be that. Uh, of just getting the work done, getting the job finished that needed to be done. Ot instead of that turning into multiple nights through the week where we're working four or five hours extra each day. You know, say we stop at 10 o'clock, 12 o'clock and then still come back at eight and have to do that two or three times, and that's two or three evenings lost with the family, or, you know, that turn into an entire weekend day, or, Uh, where we're having to spend a Saturday, Sunday, again, away from the family, and we're not getting to spend that with the people.

We'd much rather be spending it with other than each other. That is a, a, a mindset. Is that a safe mindset? No, it's not a safe mindset at all. That's actually quite the opposite. It's very unsafe. But, you know, for those of us who are focused in that way, it's a, it's a sacrifice. You know, it's a sacrifice. We are willing to make, and I'm gonna continue to preface here.

It was far from intended to be this type that, the level of sacrifice that it became, but so is life and so is big projects. So what are you gonna do? That is one major line of thought though, behind. Are you going to stick it out and just just deal with the extra hours? Or do you stop and now you've gotta do this two or three evenings, or you gotta wait.

Saturday or Sunday and do it all then. And it's a hard dilemma. And honestly, it's, it's not the same answer every time. Not every job is gonna make sense or gonna be possible to do it that way, especially if it's one where if it wasn't realistic for us to do all that in one night, it would've been very irresponsible to push ourselves as far as we did and to let the job, uh, bleed over that long because we are gonna have to do it multiple nights.

So if it's that large of a job, then yeah, the, despite the family time for safety and for just being wise, it wouldn't be worth it to go to that extreme. So this, that's part of the variables, that's part of the, the what you have to weigh and factor in. Make the decision in the, in that, at that, What actually makes the most sense.

Now, here's where this starts to turn very unsafe, and this part of it's probably my biggest fear as a manager. And honestly, one of the things that I even personally struggle with, you know, I've got a two hour drive. A two hour drive is not very easy to make, just in general. Not an easy thing to do, especially when you're working a lot of hours.

You're tired, you got a lot happening going on, yada, yada, yada, yada y. Staying up till 11 o'clock at night when you gotta get up at five 30, trying to edit YouTube videos isn't necessarily the smartest thing in the world anyway. You've gotta be careful driving, you know, I've got techniques and things and I grew up, my, my dad uh, drove a truck a lot, you know, wasn't the only career that he had, but that was one of his major ones.

And I spent a lot of time on the road with him and he taught me, You know, he, he was a commercial truck driver. You know, those guys know better than anybody how to stay awake on the road, I promise you. So I have to, I have to utilize a lot of those, a lot of those skills that I learned at that time. Uh, for example, you know, coffee is one way to do it.

Sure. But, but in actuality, when you're driving, uh, my experience is your blood's not pumping fast enough for energy drinks and sugar or caffeine or anything else to play a big enough. It'll give you a very, very temporary spike that leads to a, a fatal crash. And I mean a physical, well, I mean a crash in, in terms of your energy level and your, your mental, like you mentally crash, you physically crash, which then turns into a automotive crash.

Yeah. That turns into an automotive crash. You crashed from the caffeine. So in actuality, you know, it's, it's not that simple. And even for the guys who are, you know, a 30 minute drive, which is, I think, Pretty reasonable. 30 minutes to an hour for most people, that by itself is dangerous because that's more than enough time to get way too comfortable in that driver's seat when you're that exhausted.

So yeah, you end up taking time to, you just gotta pull over and take a nap. It's something that I, you know, I hate admitting, but yeah, it has to happen all the time. Where, but just between. House and, and, and house and work. It just, you can't keep your, your mind engaged enough to keep yourself awake and, and something I do a lot is I just, I have to snack Now, snacking is not healthy either because that leads usually to some very unhealthy snacks and.

You know, it's an easy way to put on a ton of very unhealthy weight. So you gotta be very careful with that in and of itself. But, you know, that is one method. Uh, you know, chewing gum, again, that's a lot of sugar. Chewing gum or, or having, having some kind of physical stimulation, like eating can go a long way.

Uh, for me, you know, doing, listening to podcasts and stuff like. Or just having our conversation on the phone does a lot to help me. Uh, there's many evenings where, yeah, me and my wife have to have this full in-depth conversation on the drive home. Sure, we enjoy talking to each other, but if we weren't having that conversation, uh, I would've to figure something out because I don't have enough mentally to keep myself going.

And that's the, when you work those hours and you push yourself to that condition, that is the state you get. And you know, I've honed in on this ex specific example on this project and job, but the, what, what I'm talking about goes way beyond just what I'm dealing with here on this particular project.

When you're working, especially like in the summer, we've got long, hard grueling hours where it's three digit temps outside and we're trying to get everybody they AC going, and you're putting these 12 hour days in, five days a week, six days a. You'll push yourself to the same state without having to work freaking three shifts back to back.

Like you don't have to go three shifts in to get to the same place. Now three shifts will get, get you there a hell of a lot faster. But my point is, you know, this is the conditions that we've gotta find out how to survive at the end of the day. I'm not completely sure where I'm going with this convers.

Other than maybe some awareness. Yeah, I think, I think, I think that's where I'm trying to go is awareness. Be aware, be, be, be conscious of this and know, know, you have to know when to stop at some point somehow. Uh, the problem becomes where do you draw that line that's realistic and something I see. So for some of you younger guys, I'll be honest, you know that line of where y.

Feel you should stop compared to what we have come up in, in the trade is not the same line. Sometimes, you know, some, some younger guys just need to be more willing to suck it up and it just, it sucks, but it is what it is. At the same time, some of those older guys are, I say older, I can't really claim that title, but those who of us who've been in this trade and have come up through the old time.

That, uh, that, that were the ones that taught us these habits, we might push a little too far. And I don't know, maybe that's just a, a, an experience and generational training thing. It's, it's very possible that when I was in that stage, early in my career, you know, I had the same issue. And maybe my senior techs that were yelling at me for that stuff felt the same way about me that I'm speaking now.

I don't know. There's a. Thing to that you could chase for probably hours and get nowhere. And that opens a whole political conversation and cultural conversation. And that's one of the other con the symptoms, by the way, is your mind will wander in weird ways that you, you'll just have thoughts that you don't typically have and be careful chasing those lines.

Because most of the time they're usually fairly irrational, but they won't feel that way in the moment. You'll realize that later. But if you make a decision on those thoughts versus waiting until you were a little more rational minded, you might regret that irrational decision later. That's not from experience.

That's just me speaking from others. I haven't had time to look up any news. I did some quick browsing at one point. I didn't see anything that stood out to me. Uh, I did see one article about, uh, EPA is looking to ban four 10 a or, or is looking at a proposal to ban four 10 a for, uh, 2025 for commercial applications.

But maybe I'm just not read up enough on the topic, but I thought that was already a. . So maybe it was just kind of a clickbait news article. I'm not sure. Anyway, no legit news segment. So I'll try to have some articles for the next podcast. That being said, if you have any interesting news you think is worth sharing, throw 'em in the comments down below.

Let us know what they are and, and you know, if you've got any thoughts, you know, maybe post your article that you wish somebody would make a news article about that's worth reading. How about. That'll drive some engagement. Anyway, I'm not sure how to conclude this honestly, other than to say be careful out there.

Uh, there's several ways you can drive yourself to this state. Rarely do we do this intentionally. It's usually just the nature of this industry, even from a management perspective. I intentionally try not to allow the guys to push themselves as far as just happens, but at some. I can't stop it from happening either.

It's just, it is the nature of what we do and it's one of the hard things about working in the service industry is this is how it is. It's not always this way. You're not always so exhausted. You're falling asleep trying to get home. Not sure what else to say about it. Spend time with your family. I'm gonna enjoy my weekend with mine.

I haven't seen them as much or enough this week. Been a crazy. Hope you enjoy this video. It'll be probably a, I don't know, I don't have any idea when it's coming out, weeks, months from now, something. It'll show up. You'll know it when you see it. Appreciate it, everybody. Thank you.