This may not sound like much for someone that doesn’t know how involved a fire alarm can be but …Lightning had struck a large chain hotel and blown up the fire alarm at 5pm or so. By 11pm I had a temporary fire panel installed, temporarily wired, bare minimally programmed and communicating with a central station enough that the guests were safe for almost a week until the actual manufacturer representative could do a full repair. Parts used were a different manufacturer that shouldn’t be able to “talk” with the intelligent field devices. Most parts were used spares I had in my truck. Customer was thrilled. Most guys would have just thrown up their hands, said it’s dead, notified the fire department and went to sleep.

The fire alarm industry has provided me many days with a sense of accomplishment. It’s the best part of the job.

I quit and told my boss exactly how much I hated him

I went home

The day I quit lmao

I got told to do something, nobody bothered me all day, and I got it finished before I stopped working for the day.

The day I quit that one job. That’s it, that’s the one time.

I’m not a programmer, but I learned how to write a number of Excel macros to automate repetitive and tedious tasks.

There were quite a number that really saved a ton of time, but the best were a pair took about 3 full days work for 3 or 4 people and made it into 10 minute jobs for 2 people.

It freed up so much time every month, and the job went from miserable and error prone to being much more reliable and let us spend time improving related processes rather than trudging through piles of data to get it formatted and sent to the right people.