Nightmare jobs, what's your worst one so far?

[remedy234]

Pork Scratching factory was pretty vile as was a meat processing company in Milton Keynes that made burgers for Maccy D's.

Also testing KFC's put me off buying from there for a long long time.

[jonathan]

The cable used with these plugs is also rubbish. Though marked 0.75mm2 csa, when opened up 2 were 0.5mm2 and one was 0.1mm2!!!!!!!!!!!. The latter also had non standard inner core insulation colours.

I have seen a few of these el-cheapo IEC leads recently, they come with cheap PC cases from China. I have outlawed their use in the company (I am the IT Administrator, I have the power. I'm also the in-house PAT man).

In our company it's mostly circular podiums or desks pushed together with the cables tidied away on wire racks between (which are powder coated, thankfully). Nice and tidy, except when they want to play musical chairs (which happens a lot at the main office) or when we need to perform maintenance. The amount of dust and scraps of paper that falls down the middle of the podiums is rather bad, I spend half of my time just cleaning up for fear of a spontaneous dust explosion. The wiring is not too bad, it's just low power IT equipment and there are plenty of sockets, but having to work around people's working hours and in the hot area inside the middle of the podiums is not great, not to mention wearing out the knees of my nice trousers. We have three offices with between 40 - 100 computer stations each - so that's computer, monitor, 2x IEC leads, half of which seem to have 10A fuses in so they are being changed for 5A. I think I am the first PAT tester to touch most of this equipment, and all of the cables for sure.

I am doing this along side my IT Administrator job, too, so it may take some time to complete! At least it's not a kitchen I suppose.

[LeeTurtle]

Well what an interesting day yesterday was.
This guy called and wanted me to PAT test as soon as possible as he'd got an inspection from the fire officer coming up.
No problem, until I started to fail most of the items drenched in old beer, burnt out plugs, bar lighting that must have been put up by himself one handed with a blindfold on using a shitty stick and insulation tape (as that fixes everything!)
He kept taking things away from me before I got to them saying they were personal items and shouldn’t of been in the bar.
And the kitchen, yuck . you wouldn't of cooked your enemy a meal in that place. He went on to add that the kitchen wasn't used and there was no need to test it...yeah right.
It was obvious he wanted to pay the minimum price to have a few pass stickers around the place to make it look good.
Don't know why this guy even bothered calling me in to do a job... oh yes I remember the fire officer requested it be done. Needless to say I called him and had a friendly chat.
Thankfully I was paid in cash and my report stated that there were untested items on site.

[edutech]

In terms of stress.

We recently did some PAT in Europe. The language barrier aside, parking the van in the centre of Amsterdam made me sweat a bit!

[LeeTurtle]

Wow seems like an age since I've been on here... and my god failures never cease to amaze me. Nearly every new business I enter has a failure of some description. The last school I worked in had 6 resident PAT "trained" inspectors but to call them jobs-worth's or sticker jockeys is polite to say the least. From fake IEC leads to exposed copper on floor cleaners, trailing lead trip hazards the list goes on. At least now I feel I have given back a safer environment not only to the staff but more importantly the kids.

[Graeme]

The worst one I have come accross was in an industrial kitchen.
4 gang 13 amp extension lead feeding a 1.9 kw and a 2.2 kw appliance. The other two sockets were available for use. When I came to test the extension lead, the insulation around the neutral terminal of the plug had melted inside the wall socket. After prising the plug out of the socket in a non standard fashion, and taking the top off the plug, to find all the cable insulation melted, including internal parts of the plug.
This was an accident waiting to happen. When will people learn, do not overload your supply, temporary or otherwise.
Added to this, the extension lead was not of an IP rated type, and was stretched accross the kitchen floor.
I think this one ticked all the boxes for what NOT to do, and in case you are wondering??? IT FAILED lol

[LeeTurtle]

I had one similar to that, small office (recruitment agency) daisy chaining 5 extension leads (1st one of course was a surge protector!) with 4 pc's & monitors with a 2kw heater. All of the extension leads nicely melted together. Only wanted a PAT Test because the landlord requested it!

[LeeTurtle]

Plug.Ext.jpg (43.02 KiB) Viewed 2858 times

Oh dear... can you spot the problem here???

ext.jpg (41.8 KiB) Viewed 2858 times