Pull the String

Everybody, everywhere asks questions on a daily basis. The average child asks almost 300 questions a day. I used to have trouble asking people questions. I was worried about what the answer would be, or sounding stupid asking questions so I would just try and figure things out myself, I can’t remember a time that I didn’t do that. This is a story about the time I didn’t ask for help, when I REALLY should have. I learned the hard way that no question is a stupid question.

This story comes from this summer, I worked at a pool business in Farmingdale called New England Pools. It was very hard work, and I learned a lot of new things. I had worked very hard this summer and earned respect from my boss and got a little pay raise as well. My boss had a lot of trust in me right away which was a good sign. One of my coworkers had been working with my boss for 9 years, and some of the tools I was using, my coworker couldn’t use until his 4th or 5th year. It was a blistering hot Friday in the middle of July, our boss was letting us have Saturday off for the first time in weeks and we were all very happy. We were doing service work this day because we had finished building a pool earlier that morning. It was our last stop of the day at a pool that was built last summer. This pool was the most insane pool I had ever seen in my life. My boss said it took 8 weeks to build (most of the in ground pools we built this summer took just over a week) and cost $150,000. This pool was very intricate and our job that day was just to finish installing something called laminar’s. Laminar’s shoot water streams from outside of the pool, back into the pool. The installation process consisted of running hundreds of feet of conduit to the pool house. Inside of the conduit was a string that we would use to attach wires to, and pull through. We had been feeding this string through the conduit very careful, making sure to not let it fall through and lose all of our work. This is when I messed up big time, and cost us another 3 hours in 100 degree weather. It was time for us to attach the wire to the string inside of the conduit. Once we attached the string, we would just run the wires through and call it a good week of hard work. I heard my boss yell to me from the pool house: “NATE, PULL THE STRING….”. That is all I heard, I missed the part where he said “A little tiny bit”. So, I started pulling on the string, and not just a little bit. I had pulled the string a little over halfway through the conduit when I see my boss sprint out of the pool house, screaming at me to stop pulling the string. I dropped the string so fast, and was getting myself mentally prepared to get fired. My boss had fired someone previously this summer after 2 days of working, he didn’t care who you are or what you did, he meant business. He got right up in my face and starting ripping into me, he called me every name in the book while I just stood there dumbfounded. The coworker who I mentioned earlier had pushed the boss away from me and told me it was okay, he said I didn’t ruin anything, only our work day would be longer. I tried shaking it off and continuing to work, but I was so rattled for the rest of the day. I went home that night and was just thinking about if I had just asked him to repeat himself. I wouldn’t have gotten screamed at, and I would have had an early night home from work. We had comeback to work on Monday and had a pretty good laugh about it, and it became an inside joke for the rest of the summer.

My biggest takeaway from this whole situation was to ALWAYS ask questions. Taking 10 seconds and asking him to repeat himself would have saved us 3 hours of work, and my dignity. The homeowner was even laughing while I was getting yelled at because him and my boss are pretty good friends. I am glad they all got to laugh at it right away, and I learned a very valuable lesson that day: No questions is a stupid question.

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