I've been working 70 hour weeks for two months and the journeymen I work under has me running a crew of three (I'm an apprentice) to get this big project done. To be fair this isn't a hard job if you have any kind of common sense and can work a tape and have tools but I'm tired of getting bitched at every day to hurry up while they watch me and my crew work.
Like I was sick as fuck yesterday and I had to come in to get our man holes put in for this new electrical service at an industrial site. Literally every 15 minutes I was puking my guts up and climbing ladders, working a jumping jack to pack the dirt and clay, signaling our crane operator and getting everything ready. We didn't get a break for 8 hours or lunch and we worked 12.
So when the journeymen started yelling about I need to hurry the fuck up because we need to get this done now because it costs the owner by the hour I just stopped, looked him in his eyes and said I don't give a fuck about the owners money, he doesn't care about mine, I don't get paid enough for this shit at 16 an hour, and I'm literally sick as fuck and all my crews stuff was on the inside of the building and it wasn't my fault his crew didn't get their shit done. I almost quit on the spot I was beyond pissed. I'm working 7 days a week to get this shit done and my cable trays and wire ways are ready, we ran our conduit for our 12kva switch and now we gotta dig his PVC up because he didn't mark where the fuck it was so we just spent 3 hours digging with shovels and couldn't find it.
The worst part is I have a years experience. I don't know enough to run my own group of guys with decades more experience on me. We're about to pull a shit ton of wire for temperature controls, motors, pumps, and a whole bunch of other shit I have no idea about. My vacation in December is nowhere close to being soon enough. I have two or three more months of 7-10s then a month of regular weeks and then 7-12s for the mills big shutdown. Almost killed one of my guys today because he wasn't paying attention when I was cutting some tray and he stuck his head between the bars before I knew what he was doing. Had to supervise some excavation just for the safety man to run up and bitch about our flagging not being up until I told him to either pick caution tape or getting this shit done because we were running three miny exes and two bobcats to get this duct bank done.
This job really isn't that bad besides the management. I'm tired of getting bitched at for wanting to take breaks when it's over a hundred degrees outside just because I'm in a building. It's a huge insulated warehouse with no ventilation or AC or fans so it's hotter inside than it is outside, especially with the humidity. One of my guys is 59 and he fell down and almost passed out from the heat and when I made him take a break and got into a huge argument with my boss over him “fucking off”. I'm really about to stab one of these fuckers.