The new job

Job is an acronym, it stands for Just Over Broke. Back in January I got a call from the local union. They were desperate for qualified electricians for a major project. The job is running behind for the sparkies, and it is holding up the project.
Since this is something with national as well as regional ramifications, they were begging.Ordinarily I would not have been interested. Being my own boss meant I set my own hours picked what I wanted to do, ran the show. It also meant long hours, lots of head aches and dealing with lots of spectacular idiocy when home improvement projects went massively awry and some one had to clean up the mess.
Couple that with my wife not driving, and I had no reason to want to shift over to the union. But, the wife is spending time with her family in Honduras, so......
My field of expertise for the last twenty years has been residential remodeling and renovation with a lot of time spent on trouble shooting problems associated with older structures which have been neglected and mistreated. Not a skill set that blends easily into the union mindset or industrial assembly of a massive commercial structure.
The last month has been a shift of gears in about twenty different ways. I am back to using skills I have not utilized in over fifteen years. Sure, I've bent conduit for some projects, but nothing like the miles of it we are running for this one.
And the people factor. for the last twenty years, it has been mostly a small crew. usually I have had only one or two helpers Now I am one kid working in a crew of ten for a company that employs fifty people on a site where three other electrical contractors divide the work according to the dictates of the contracts and interweave with workers from other trades in an effort to make America better and safer.
Since I'm past my mid fifties, I was expecting that I would be one of the older guys. Turns out that most of the journeymen on this project are older than me. Sure, the Apprentices are all kids, but almost no one is in their thirties here. Also, a lot of the journeymen are travelers. we have guys here from places as far flung as Florida, Texas, Arizona and even Canada.
Today one of the Texans was getting into it with the Canuk. I had to open my mouth. Told Tex to not push it too far, didn't think I could handle having a guy whistling Dixie with a Canadian accent.
The crew I'm working with are a great bunch. While I have no respect for the SIEU and some of the other unions, The tradesmen are a much needed group. They provide a pool of capable workers available for large projects which otherwise wold not be possible. Were it not for the unions, this project would be impossible here in the heartland., and difficult in a place like New York City.