Why I'm so passionate about training (and the feeling I never want to experience again)

It was back in the late 1980s when I decided that being gone from home for months at a time was incompatible with raising my three young daughters.

And so I gave up my lucrative (more than $100,000 a year back then) and adreneline-producing career as a deep-sea, oil-rig diver and got a job with a building contractor in Santa Barbara.

One day, when concrete for a basement had just been placed, the contractor wanted us to get done for the day and he sent me out on the concrete with knee boards and a steel trowel long before the mix was dry enough.

And that's how I came to be on my knees in the middle of a wet concrete floor with this thought: "I don't know what the f--- I'm doing."

I did not like the feeling I had. At all. I felt humiliated and belittled and just overall bad.  REALLY BAD.

I wasn't used to that. I knew you could feel powerful at work. On my knees on that wet concrete, I recalled the job in the Gulf (of Mexico) when every single 170-foot dive I did was a home run. Every dive was so spectacularly successful that the Exxon company man started calling me Super Bill.

I recalled another time on a Swedish oil rig support boat anchored  next to a North Sea oil platform when a storm was coming in and our anchor cable was stuck on one of the rigs legs and we couldn't get loose. The cable had to be cut for us to get away from the rig, which I knew was dangerous. But nobody else was doing anything and we had to run out the storm. I had the torch fired up and was just about to start the cut when the cable went slack and we were able to get out of there. The rush was unbelievable.

So here I was in the middle of a basement slab in Santa Barbara and I said, man, it doesn't have to be like this. How do you find out how to do this right? And that's when I realized there weren't many places to go learn how to do construction right.

That's what first got me going in the direction of training. My thought was that people working on jobs shouldn't have to feel the way I felt on that slab.

I thought: "Someone can do something about it and that someone will be me."

I don't ever want to forget how I felt that day and I don't want any other worker to feel that way.

If you have any training needs, let's talk it over. Send me an email or call me at (805) 797-4127 and I will throw in some diving stories as well.

Comments

[Elite Concrete Restoration]

Bill these are great tips for construction training. We know the feeling of "being in the middle of wet concrete" and it is not a good spot to be in.

We will be recommending this program.