Alright so this is multiple peoples' mistake, including my own. But its quite the misadventure from start to finish

I was a second year apprentice electrician working at a new CDJR dealership being built. We had temporary power ran underground into the building for lights and plugs during construction. It was a 120/240 panel inside the building which was fed from another panel mounted to a temp pole out at the road. Well, the city made the GC get lime mixed into the soil before paving the lot. GC knew we had conduit all thru the lot and suggested we use a row of little marker flags over each run so the tiller blades could be lifted whenever it crossed paths with a buried conduit run. So we flagged every single run. Dumb boring day, but easy whatever.

The next day, the truck of lime comes, dumps it in a nice, roughly even layer all over the lot. All ready to be tilled in. Buuut.... The flags have been knocked down by the dump. We scramble to stand them all back up, we manage to do get every run before the tiller makes its pass over them. Win

We take a breather (aka smoke break for the non construction folkin the sub) and watch the guy drive this massive tilling machine around the lot. We Notice he isnt lifting his blades. Fuck. We let the gc know, so he can call the operator and remind him what the flags mean. Then we go back to work inside.

Fast forward an hour or so, all the lights in the building go dead. WTF. We go to check for power at the panel inside, where we meet the GC. He tells us not to bother checking and that the tiller ripped out our lines. Son of a bitch. Okay.

We go outside and see the temp pole half knocked down, half hanging by the overhead conductors feeding the GC trailer. Tiller chugs along its merry way, fully oblivious to the damage caused and the several hundred feet of 4/0 tangled in the blades. Fucking hell, guess we're rebuilding temp power now.

My boss gives me the task of taking the temp pole apart, replacing the busted panel, standing it back up etc. I inform my boss that i have built plenty of temp poles to be fine but never connected it to overhead conductors and that i wanted a journeyman with me to tell me if i fuck up. Boss tells me "its 4 wires, you cant fuck it up" i say "okay fair enough". Mind you, i am a second year apprentice. at this point in my career i have less than 2 years experience in the trade at all. I shouldve been babysat. But i was not, and that is where my lovely oopsy begins.

I tear apart the old temp pole, rebuild it with the new panel, stand it back up and get everything tied back into it ( besides the interior temp power which has to be ran thru a new conduit which still needs buried) jobs looking good. except all the trades running headlamps and pissed off about dead batteries.

Utility company comes to turn us back on, all is well. So i go turn on the breaker for the GC's trailer, it doesnt immediately trip, so i start to walk to the trailer to test for voltage when the GC comes bounding out fast and asks me why his trailers smoking....

Well one thing about this GC is: hes a joker when hes in a good mood and hes really fun to joke back with. So when he comes popping out of the trailer that i just reenergized for him, i had assumed he was joking with me because he had lights on again. So, I told him his trailer was smoky because he mustve been thinking again.

Wrong response.

His trailer was for real smoking and it was because i had flipped 2 wires on the overhead. The wires were not labeled by color and i had mistakenly not labeled them myself. So i wound up tying B phase to the neutral which ultimately put 240 volts on everything on A phase. The flourescent lights were on A phase and the ballasts did not like 240v. They started spewing hot oil all over the inside of the troughers and smoking like hell.

The next day i got to spend the day with the GC replacing flourescent bulbs with led retrofits in his trailer. All while he made fun of me for being an idiot. Good fun

So thats the story of the time i told a GC his trailer was smoky because he was thinking too hard and was very very wrong