I Can't Is Not an Answer

The company I was working for had picked up some AT&T work. We had several sites coming up that needed complete upgrades, including new antennas, radios, fiber, power cabling, and baseband equipment. A couple of those sites also needed their old -48-volt DC power plants replaced.

I'd worked on AT&T sites for about ten years, so I knew what we were getting into as far as their standards went. I'd been telling some of the guys for months that AT&T was going to be a different animal. They're particular about everything. You can have a calibrated piece of equipment telling you something is right, and somebody looking at a picture on a computer will still tell you it's wrong.

You have to have patience. Sometimes you just have to do what they're asking and move on. But there was one part of this work I'd never done before.

I'd never replaced a DC power plant.

And these weren't little power supplies. We were talking about a 1,300-amp system feeding the equipment that kept an entire cell site operating. The company had accepted the work. Somebody was going to have to figure out how to do it. I could have said, "I've never done that. I can't do it."

But I've said this many times, before and after that job.

I can't is not an answer.

That doesn't mean you go into something blindly or take chances with people's safety. It means you figure out what you don't know, you do your homework, and you find a way to get the job done. So, I stepped up. I thought I could do it. And I was willing to put in the work to make sure I could.

Doing My Homework

The first thing I did was go look at the existing power plant.

I needed to know what we were taking out, what was connected to it, how the alarms worked, where the AC power came from, and how we were going to get the old cabinet out of the shelter. I also knew we couldn't reuse the existing AC conduit. That meant new conduit, new circuits, and new breakers. That was one of my biggest concerns right from the start. If we couldn't get AC power to the new rectifiers, we weren't going to bring that site back online.

Then I started studying the new equipment. I made a couple of trips on my own time to look it over. It was about a three-hour drive to the site, so this wasn't something I could just run across town and do. I opened the cabinets, pulled out the manuals, took pictures, looked at how everything mounted, and studied the electrical connections. I wanted to understand as much as I could before we ever started taking the old equipment apart.

Nobody told me to do that. Nobody scheduled a day for me to go study it.

I did it because I knew what was coming. You don't want your first look inside a power plant to be at two o'clock in the morning when the whole cell site is shut down and you're trying to figure out where something goes. I've always believed preparation builds confidence.

And if I'm going to be successful at something, I've got to make an effort at being successful.

Getting the Right Guy

I also knew I wasn't doing this one with just anybody. We had a maintenance window from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. Once we shut that old power plant down, the site wasn't transmitting anymore. That meant a hole in AT&T's coverage until we got it back up. I needed somebody beside me who knew what he was doing.

There was another foreman in the company I trusted. He did good work, paid attention to detail, and didn't need somebody standing over his shoulder telling him what to do. I asked the company for him, and they gave me who I wanted. I called him and said, "Hey, you and I are going to be working nights here in a couple of days. I want you to come look at this job with me so you know what we're getting ourselves into." We went out and walked the site together. We looked everything over, talked through what needed to happen, and started putting a plan together.

I love AC electrical work, so I told him, "Don't worry about the AC. I'll handle that." He had plenty of experience of his own, and I trusted his judgment. But here's the thing.

This was his first power plant replacement too.

Neither one of us had done one before. We weren't two guys pretending to know everything. We were two experienced foremen taking on something new, and we were going to figure it out together.

Eleven O'clock

When the night came, we were ready to get after it. We had done our homework, had the materials, and knew what we wanted to accomplish. But there's still something a little nerve-wracking about shutting down a live cell site, knowing you've got seven hours to get it back up. That 1,300-amp DC plant was nothing to take lightly. There was plenty of potential for something to go wrong if we weren't careful. We had radios on the tower, baseband equipment, routers, alarms, smoke detectors, and all kinds of other connections to transfer. We followed our lockout/tagout procedures and started working. And like most jobs, it didn't take long before we found a few things we hadn't planned on. For one, some of the existing wires wouldn't reach the new power plant. We knew what the wires were. We'd taken pictures, identified them, and labeled them before disconnecting anything.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was that once the new equipment was in place, some of those conductors were too short. So now we had to run new wiring that we hadn't expected to run. We also had the alarm system to deal with. There were roughly sixteen pairs of alarm wiring that needed to be transferred over to a 66 block. We had plenty to do, and the clock wasn't stopping.

Then there was something we hadn't thought about at all.

Lighting.

When we went outside the shelter to get tools or materials from the truck and trailer, it was dark. We hadn't brought adequate temporary lighting.

That was a lesson learned right there. To this day, when we're planning a power plant replacement, lighting is on the list. Sometimes it's not the big technical problem that gets you. It's the little thing you overlooked because you were focused on everything else.

Three in the Morning

By about three o'clock, we were feeling it. We'd already been working days that week. We did get off a little early that day to try to get some rest before the outage, but switching over to night work isn't easy. And we'd been going hard.

I remember thinking, man, I wish I'd brought something to eat.

But we kept working.

And one thing I'll always remember about that night is how well the two of us worked together. We didn't have to argue about what needed to happen. We didn't have to babysit each other. We knew what we were trying to accomplish, and we trusted each other to do our part. We just worked in harmony. Now, did everything go exactly the way we'd planned?

No.

Could we have planned some things better?

Absolutely.

But we worked through what came up, one problem at a time. Our priority was getting that new power plant operational and getting the site back online within the maintenance window. Some of the remaining work, including connecting the batteries and finishing up some alarm details, could wait until the following day. We weren't going to lose sight of the main objective. And we pulled it off.

What We Took Away from It

We came back and finished the remaining work, including connecting and labeling the twelve batteries and getting the alarms sorted out. I don't remember having any punch-list items on that shelter work.

But I do remember the things we learned.

The lighting was one. Making sure every existing conductor would physically reach the new equipment was another. And taking more time to walk through the exact sequence of the work before the outage was something I knew we could improve.

I wrote some of those things down in my notebook because I wanted to remember them for the next one.

And there was a next one.

That same foreman and I ended up doing another power plant replacement together. This one was outdoors, involved a lot more conduit work, and took his entire crew and the crew I was working with about three days to complete.

It was a bigger challenge. But now we had something we didn't have before. Experience.

I told him I wanted to write a story about that first power plant replacement someday. Because it was his first one too, and I thought it was something worth remembering. We'd taken on a job neither one of us had ever done before, put in the preparation, worked through the problems, and completed it safely and successfully. That's an accomplishment we shared.

I Can't Is Not an Answer

When I look back on that job, I'm not most proud of the equipment we installed. I'm proud that I stepped outside my comfort zone. I took on something I'd never done before. I didn't pretend to know everything about it. I did my homework, asked for somebody I trusted to work beside me, and we figured it out.

That's how you grow.

You don't gain experience by only doing things you already know how to do. And saying "I can't" before you've even tried to understand the problem doesn't get you anywhere. Now, there are absolutely times when you have to stop a job because something isn't safe, or you don't have the training, equipment, or information to proceed. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about giving up before you've made an effort to find a solution.

That wasn't how I approached that power plant, and it's not how I approach challenges today.

I can't is not an answer.

Sometimes the answer is, "I haven't done it before, but I'm willing to learn."

And sometimes that's where your next accomplishment starts.