I really thought that the hardest part about being an HVAC technician was going to be getting through all of my classes and passing the certification exam.
I was wrong about that.
I successfully passed the course and the exam, and I was hired by the HVAC company owned by my teacher. At that point, I thought I’d be going on service runs alone. I didn’t think about the possibility that some other HVAC technicians would be following me on these runs, and I certainly didn’t expect that my former teacher, who was now my boss, was going to be personally shadowing me as I served customers on appointments. At one point, my teacher overheard me complaining about the whole situation, and he said that no one promised that HVAC technician work would be easy. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t think that I would have the added burden of having my former teacher breathing down my neck as I was trying to repair HVAC units for the customer. Then at one point, I heard him tell some other HVAC technician that I was one of the brightest pupils that he had ever had. I couldn’t help but ask him later why he felt the need to personally accompany me on repair trips if he thought I was his best student. He explained to me that although I did very well in his classes, he wanted to see how I would apply my textbook knowledge to a real-world scenario. He wanted to be there to assist me in dealing with the real thing. He wanted to see how effective his teaching had really been.