what is the worst thing you have damaged at an install? whether it be customers property or your own…
I had an installer drill through a wall and hit a waterline…had to cut off the back side of the wall…lift up and air the carpet…repair drywall…good stuff
We had one guy drill into a GAS line that was hidden in a wall. Good thing it was copper!! 
I know a special someone who put his foot through their ceiling while in the attic… luckly it was the ceiling in the garage.
One guy I used to work with drilledtraight through a flat roof from the inside out…and guess what…there was about 8 inches of water on the roof at the time…so guess where the water went?
They had to plug it up as fast and as best they could then drive to the local Home Depot and get tar and paper to make a dam around the hole so it could dry and get repaired properly. Some times you just gotta shake your head and walk away.
i think this may actually top my orginal post…
my sales guy who came to an install forgot to put his truck in gear and put the break on…jumped out and his truck, roled down a hill hitting thier huge propane tank then stoping feet before thier neighbors pool on thier chain link fence.
this same guy also backed full speed into a customers miata in his big truck.
good times
:lol:
Running into a propane tank? Wow… i can only amagine the carnage that could have created. Awesome.
yeah it was a 250 gal. propane tank he knocked off its platform (on the side of a hill)…the only thing holding it in place was the pipe going to the house, propane was till spraying everywhere. he had to have his truck towed back up the hill and the tank replaced.
my sales guy has provided me with hours of fun stories to share over a beer.
Many years ago, One of our installers was putting in an additional outlet in a bedroom, he was drilling from inside the house through a brick wall he smoked his bit, left to get another bit. Came back the bedroom was on fire…85K for that one.
wow 85k…hope your insurance covered that one!
10k deductable, That day the insurance was worth the monies 
hey!
i have a good one, but not near as good as the ‘burnin down the house’ deal. i thought i would just keep it going, though that will likely never get topped.
we had an installer set a 20-foot metal pole down atop a slanted, corrugated (sp?) metal roof, two stories up.
he turned his back just then to attend to his duties as pertained to the foot-mount for the pole.
launched, my friends, was said pole, like some errant missile through the windshield (dashboard, undercarriage) of an SUV below.
try explaining that to the soccer mom.
god knows we did . . .
I feel like we’ve been left-out!
All we’ve accomplished (not me thanks) on our radio side was hitting a control wire for a transmission during a vehicle install and paying $700 of blackmail to keep the customer (which of course we ultimately lost the customer!) and an unplanned hole in a vehicle roof when routing an antenna cable (don’t remember how much that cost). There may be others I haven’t been informed of though.
Pathetic. 
Oh, there was one time I was surveying a network cabling project. I asked my contact (customer’s employee in-charge of the facility) what our access point was for a span of cubicles so we could install network/phone cabling for all the cubes. The guy tried to remove a partition wall (4-ft tall cubicle wall) that was up against the room’s sheetrock wall…at which time he partially dislodged the 110VAC supply line as it entered the span of 20 cubicles. You know, AC power can make a really cool ball of white-hot plasma in just the right conditions for about 10-seconds before you blow any fuses in the office 8) . I’m not sure what the final cost was for them, one cubicle wall replaced due to fire damage, 20 data-entry clerks idle for the rest of the day (days?), electrician to repair broken cubicle system…? Uh, I didn’t get the cabling job… guilt-by-presence or should we call that guilt-by-witnessing-someone’s-stupid-act :roll:
I don’t have anything compared to you guys. I once dropped a company laptop from a 2 story building. We were doing an install on this orphanage. It was a very windy day and I had the laptop to help align because we were having a very hard time getting a good signal. I put the laptop in the bag, which was a little to small for the laptop (a toshiba with a 15 in screen). Since the bag was not for it, I couldn’t use the strap to hold it. The other guy told me not to let the bag go, that he could handle the rest of the install himself. So there I was, sitting on the peak of the roof whatching him work the guys wires. All of a sudden one of the guy wires slip and I tried to get it. I let the bag go for less of the time it takes me to type a word here. A gust of wind tipped the bag over, the laptop slide out of the bag and started going down the roof. The back of the screen towards the roofing material. There was no way in hell I was going to run after it. It slided all the way to the end and then there was that moment of silence, sort of like whan the coyote falls in the roadrunner cartoon. Then all we hear is the CRASH!. Luckily it was just a $700 laptop. Nope, they didn’t make me pay for it. In return they gave a 17in. Apple G4, which is not going to the field any time soon.