Petras\’ Corner

Mark Petras
Essay 1 - Portfolio Edition
Las Vegas Electrician

            Working as a Las Vegas electrician went from being a job that interested me greatly, to one of those jobs I wished I had never signed the paperwork. While I was growing up, I spent a lot of time doing various activities, which added to my building interest in the electrician field. I always had an interest in playing around with electricity, or maybe it was building some type of contraption from electric motors. I would soon find out that a Las Vegas commercial electrician was not what I had hoped it to be, but it would teach me that quitting is not always something bad.

            Most of my jobs in the past have been in retail, which means having to do a lot of customer service. As you can guess, having experience in retail does nothing in the electrician field. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t worked in a job with mostly older males and hard labor. In addiction, I was probably the youngest person there and only a few were even close to my age. Compared to a lot of the other electricians, I was much shorter and to be honest, looked like a kid. I knew exactly what those guys were thinking, that I was just some kid from
Wisconsin that didn’t know anything and they were going to give me hell. I say some kid from Wisconsin, because everyone that I had told found someway to make fun of me for it. If it wasn’t my accent, then it was some kind of redneck remark. I don’t mind the jokes or remarks, because that is just part of the job and I’d just have to learn to deal with it.

            My actual first day of work was a full day of shoveling hard, frozen dirt in the basement of a high rise condo. I wasn’t actually in shape for 8 hours of digging, so my foreman and I traded off shoveling all day. I would later find out that my foreman was telling the general foreman that I wasn’t cut out for this work. This came up a few weeks after I started, at a review of my pre-apprenticeship. It’s not the fact that he called me lazy, but it’s the fact that he couldn’t tell me to my face. From that day on, I started to dislike this job more and more until I wanted to quit so badly.

            One day when I had taken so much garbage that I just couldn’t stand to even be at work, I was hit with external pressure from a co-worker that I had been working with for about a month. He had taken me under his wing you could say, and was teaching and working with me most of the time. When I told him the news that I had taken enough from the other guys and planned to quit, he was not happy with my decision and was asking me to reconsider. George was just telling me to hang in there because he really wanted me to succeed in this career. By this time I had already made up my mind in what I was going to do. At the end of the day, I grabbed my tools, told my boss I was quitting and that was it. I had made some friends, like George, but I never once looked back. I could not see myself making it here even if I put up with all that nonsense.

            After I realized that the electrician field was not for me, I soon moved into an office job. I worked in the billing department and also as their head computer technician. This soon became my dream job because everyone was friendly and I knew what I was doing. Like I said before, I never looked back after leaving as an electrician and I was very happy that I made the right choice to leave.