If you know me you know me. I see a lot of employees every day. In safety I’ve heard it all. The problem with safety is that companies pick and choose when safety applies. There are companies that use the nice slogans and brand it as if it is their knowledge. Here lies the problem; most of them don’t know how work gets done in the field. I’m proud to be a Lineman, I’m proud to be a Safety Professional. This gives me something that the school boy doesn’t always get. RESPECT. Don’t get me wrong. There are school boys out there that are good. Safety professionals as well. Those are the guys that actually go out there and ask the questions and wanna learn. The problems I’m seeing in the field is that we’re getting away from the old way of doing line work. Lineman apprentices, and ground men v. no longer respect what it is to be in the trade. You can see this in ways like when you watch linemen get in the bucket and not test their gloves, this has been passed down in the last 10 to 15 years cause now you’re saying younger guys in the apprenticeship get out here and do the same thing. Yes there is a generational problem out there as well. The younger guys that are in this line of work don’t understand that it’s hard work. The problem lies is how we trained them is different than how we were trained. With the older generation, known as baby boomers. It was easy you just yelled at them until they got it right, with generation X it was easy to train them basically because we trained ourselves but we also had the baby boomers they’re yelling at us just letting us know that we were doing it wrong. Now we have generation X and millennials. They don’t respond to the yelling now they want to be text everything or a TikTok video showed them the work. The last two generations there there were more worried about how they’re seen and they wanna post everything to make them look good. This is where we need to figure out the direction of line work. Do we go back to yelling and threatening firing, or do we make a TikTok video for everything that we do so these guys can learn.

Tuesday morning, while on storm, we were standing in a parking lot going through the host utility’s onboarding. It was supposed to be routine. Sign in. Listen to the expectations. Cover the hazards. Get everybody released and ready to go to work. Then the utility representative conducting the onboarding suffered a medical emergency. One second he was standing there speaking to the group, and the next he crumpled to the pavement and lost consciousness. What happened after that deserves to be recognized. Nobody stood around waiting for somebody to take charge. People moved. Someone went after the AED. Someone called 911. Someone immediately began checking his vital signs. Another person headed toward the entrance of the facility to flag down EMS and make sure they could get directly to us without wasting valuable time trying to figure out where the emergency was. There wasn’t any chaos. There wasn’t any arguing. There wasn’t any confusion about titles, classifications, employers, or whose responsibility it was. There were Union journeyman linemen, foremen, safety representatives, and others from different crews and different companies standing there together. Most of them hadn’t worked together before. But when a man hit the ground, they responded like they had. That’s the part worth talking about. We spend a lot of time sitting through first aid classes, CPR training, AED training, storm onboarding, job briefings, and emergency response discussions. We talk about who’s calling 911. We talk about who’s getting the AED. We talk about who’s meeting emergency responders at the gate. Tuesday morning, all of that stopped being something written in a safety manual. It became real. Nobody knew they were about to be tested. Nobody had time to rehearse. Nobody had time to look around and wonder what everybody else was going to do. They simply saw what needed to happen and did it. That’s professionalism. That’s preparedness. That’s the culture of the IBEW and the Union movement.

When Experience Becomes Permission Experience is earned. So is respect. Neither one gives us permission to become the hazard. Experience is one of the most valuable things we have in this trade. It teaches us how the job moves, where danger hides, what doesn’t look right, and when something feels wrong before anybody else can explain why. It builds judgment, confidence, and the ability to make decisions when the plan falls apart and the job stops looking anything like it did during the morning brief. But experience can become a dangerous son of a bitch when we start treating it like an exemption. An exemption from the procedure. An exemption from the standard. An exemption from being questioned. An exemption from having to prove that what we’re doing is actually safe. That’s where experience stops protecting the crew and starts threatening it. I’ve written about this before and called it the normalization of deviance. That’s what happens when we repeatedly step outside the standard, nothing bad happens, and we slowly convince ourselves the behavior must be acceptable. We skip one step because we’ve done the job a thousand times. We take one shortcut because we know how the equipment usually reacts. We dismiss one concern because it came from somebody who hasn’t been around as long as we have. Nothing happens, so we do it again. Before long, the exception becomes normal. We stop seeing the shortcut as a shortcut and start treating it like proof that we know better than the process. That’s not experience. That’s complacency wearing an old ticket and demanding respect. A lot of serious incidents don’t happen because nobody knew better. They happen with experienced people standing right there. People who understood the hazard, knew the procedure, recognized the exposure, and had enough time in the trade to know exactly what could happen. They just didn’t believe it would happen this time ... or that it would happen to them. That’s the trap. We confuse getting away with something with doing it safely.

An old Lineman told me this about Safety Meetings: The reason they have Safety Meetings is not to make you a better, safer Lineman. It is to protect them from you when the law suit comes down after your injury. They can prove that they did all they could to train you. Don't depend on them, you have to look out for yourself!