Love doesn’t wait for Francis
Many people feel as though everything’s been put on hold, but the pandemic helped Francis realise what was important. He was ready to pop the question; will you marry me?
“Yeah. When quarantine started, all I was ever saying was, I just want to make sure I come out of it better. Sometimes a long pause, or strange times in your life, is an opportunity to focus on the things that you weren’t focusing on. Maybe, things you can improve on. At least that’s what I was telling myself.”
Francis (right) got engaged in January 2021 and is busy ‘figuring out how to hold a ceremony, although restrictions are easing, it’s more of a push to make things simpler’.
Francis Cuevas joined Power Gems in 2019 after graduation as a customer service technician in the Santa Clarita facility, working in after-sales with Jeremy (below) and Chip. He had a year of normality, then COVID hit. The constraints of lockdown have led the man who invented a Rube Goldberg machine to find workarounds:
“Early on, when I joined Power Gems, I knew I would be working by myself the majority of the time. During lockdown, I was often only able to talk to Jeremy on the phone.”
“So, we came up with this cool idea, where I put together a camera, and we can livestream the ballasts that I’m working on. When I was working on the older style ballasts, which Jeremy has decades of experience of repairing and maintaining, it was purely video conferencing. That was kinda neat.”
At the weekends, until it was forced to close, Francis also worked in the Full Throttle Sports Bar at a local theme park because ‘it’s really fun even when it’s chaotic. I like Six Flags Mountain the most the busier it is’.
Be careful what you wish for, as they say, how has COVID affected his tolerance of chaos? He believes “chaos is an opportunity to test your calm. The work should be the same whether the room is flooded with ballasts or near empty. It’s just a matter of priority. I have people I can rely on when the work becomes challenging, and they are always reassuring me that I’m doing a good job. Can’t ask for more than that.”
The early years of your career are when you hope to gain valuable experience and decide about your future direction. How has the shutdown of the TV and film industry changed his plans?
“When I went to school [at College of the Canyons] for electrical engineering, I was told that it was a very broad field of study. I thought to myself, okay, I’ll just apply to any job that has electrical engineering in it. I’ve learned that this industry is pretty resilient. I’ve not personally seen a pandemic before. But based on how everyone has reacted to these restrictions, I’m not worried about the kind of work to come.”
Francis is in an unusual position because he hasn’t been through a massive recession or any other major crisis, something most of us have experienced in the last 30 years. “It is true. I don’t have much to compare against. I can only hope that what I am doing is what I would be doing outside of a pandemic, or better. Maybe I’m learning faster. Yeah, I think so.”
Everyone has their own experience of the pandemic, but we can all agree that ‘lockdown has been pretty strange’.
“Roads were near-deserted. It’s hard to imagine an empty Los Angeles highway, but that was the reality for a lot of 2020. These days, restrictions aren’t as bad, and things are starting to feel normal again.”
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