"Don Foreman" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 23:28:51 -0700, "Ken Davey"
wrote:



A couple of lifetimes ago when I worked for the Canadian National
Railroad
we had a book.
This book was called "the Uniform Code Of Operating Operating Rules
(UCOR).
This rule book was a distillate of several centuries of global
railroading
experience.
In theory, if all the rules were adhered to nothing could go wrong.
It was (unofficially) understood that if one knew *ALL* the reasons for
any
given rule and *ALL* that could go wrong if said rule was broken one
could
selectively break it.
Any defect in your reasoning that led to a disaster resulted in (at the
least) brownie points (get enough and it was bye bye job) and at the
worst,
jail time.
When I was a greenhorn someone decided to break one of of those rules to
save a couple of seconds.
Rather than seem officious I went along with this.
The result was I almost got six people killed.
It was so close that, to this day, I break out in a sweat just thinking
about it.
And it happened more than thirty years ago!

The moral?
Before you break/bend the rules think long and hard about ALL the
possible
consequences.
This is not a 'the towers fell because of an engineering oversight' kind
of
thing.
It is a 'the rule was there for a damn good reason' worked out by your
betters.
You might just get away with a non-code installation and you may just get
someone killed, all for the saving of a few miserable dollars.


Good advice.




I'm trying not to belabor the obvious here, but the "damn good reason" Mr.
Davey espouses is in place for those individuals without any understanding
of electrical power, circuitry, and distribution. Those who don't know
what's hot and what's not. And the people who write these regulations are
certainly not anyone's "betters", they just understand the dangers to
linemen from people without any understanding of electricity backfeeding the
distribution circuits. I'm not one of them. Once again, a lineman
will_never_get zapped from any current that I backfeed into the circuit.
It's not going to happen. My circuitry will never be operated by anyone but
myself or my sons, who know just exactly the dangers and the correct
procedure. We know what we're doing, and judging from Mr. Foreman's posts,
he does also. Unlike him, I just simply can't stomach safety fascists.
And, yeah, feel free to worry Mr. Davey.