When I was a student at Leith Nautical College I'd come home to Stafford during the Summer holidays and get a job to supplement my grant. One job I got was with a window cleaner, and after a couple of weeks he got the work of cleaning all the hanging lampshades in a workroom in the Lotus Shoe Factory (now long gone.) The lamps were those green on top white on the bottom enamelled metal shades and I had to use a high stepladder to get at them. The room was full of girls working all kinds of 'shoe' machines which made me a bit self conscious wobbling about above them.
The lamps were all turned off and had years of dirt on the upper surface, and I developed a technique of spinning them around while drifting the soogy cloth down over them. This greatly improved the cleaning speed and I was done in a couple of hours.
Feeling pleased with myself I waited near the door while the foreman switched the lights on, which blew every fuse in the room !! The insulation on the wires was that old fashioned rubbery stuff, that gets hard and brittle in time, and my spinning created shorts all over the place. In fact they had to rewire the entire room lighting system (so I was told.)
I explained to my boss that I had probably saved the factory, because that was a fire just waiting to happen. I still got sacked.
When I went home and told my Old Man, he nearly bust his gut laughing.
