Unfiltered Story #242197

For years, I was a Pipefitter. Generally we would work as teams of three different trades cooperating: a Pipefitter to plan, prep and align joints; a Welder to weld them together; and a Laborer to watch out for safety concerns (for instance standing by with a fire extinguisher during welding). In cases where one of these was an apprentice, obviously there would be a journeyman of the same trade training them, making a four person team, or even up to six, if each trade had a trainee and trainer.
When I was an apprentice, I got a job where it seemed the management was too cheap to do this the right way. They put me with a Welder and a Laborer, me being the only Pipefitter, as if I was a journeyman.
I complained to my boss that I was eager to learn and needed a trainer. (I didn’t want the hassle of blatantly pointing out that legally, all apprentices must be supervised by a journeyman of their trade at all times.)
Shortly after, the boss assigned me a task. It was incredibly difficult. A piece of pipe needed to be fabricated to fit into an existing system, where nothing was parallel or aligned. I had to create a snakelike piece with strange angles in each dimension, designed somehow to fit within a few millimeters. Making it harder is the fact that things twist, expand, and contract during work, from the heat of the welding. So even if it was somehow miraculously the right angles and lengths to start, by the time we were done it could mutate. I didn’t know then, and even now as an experienced journeyman, still don’t know, how to measure the space or create the piece for such a situation. Journeyman Pipefitters walking by were saying they didn’t know how to do it either.
I tried making two of these, each taking a full 12h shift. Neither fit of course. And my boss yelled at me something like, “And you want me to give you a journeyman!?”.
Obviously this debacle in fact proved that I needed a journeyman (since I didn’t know how to do the task), rather than that I didn’t deserve one. But I was afraid to point this out because if he realized how perfectly the situation proved my point, he might accuse me of messing up on purpose. So I just moved on to a different job. One where untrained people were not expected to psychically know things they were never taught.