I thought that the most difficult part about being an HVAC professional was going to be taking all of the HVAC classes and passing the certification test, but it turns out I was wrong.
When I started my apprenticeship at the heating and air company owned by the guy who taught me, I figured that I would be going out on routine repair runs.
I did not consider the fact that I might have someone else joining me on these repair runs to supervise what I was doing. It turns out that the worst part of being a heating and air conditioning professional was that my teacher would be following me around on the routine jobs I was sent out to do. I guess I was complaining about this turn of events loud enough to where my former teacher heard me, and he laughed and said that nobody said that the HVAC training was going to be easy. I never thought it was going to be easy, I just didn’t expect to have my teacher/boss standing right behind me the entire time I was trying to help out our customers. At one point, I actually heard my boss turn to one of the other HVAC technicians and say that I was one of the brightest pupils he had ever taught. After that, I couldn’t wait to ask him something. I asked him, if I was one of the best HVAC technicians-in-training he ever had, why did he feel that it was necessary to keep an eye on me? He told me it was because I only had head knowledge from the books I taught from, and now, he wanted me to get hands-on experience. That way I would learn the proper way to do things in real life scenarios. Up until this point, I had only worked on textbook problems and ready-made HVAC scenarios in which certain parts appeared to be broken. He wanted me to use the knowledge and the instincts that I had acquired while working at the HVAC school on real life scenarios to apply what I had learned.