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.

Now let’s quit dancing around it. This ain’t just a technology conversation. This ain’t just about digital credentials, online wallets, APIs, compliance dashboards, or whatever other polished language gets thrown around when somebody’s trying to sell the trade a new system. This is about control. This is about trust. This is about whether the Brotherhood keeps ownership of its own standards… or whether we hand that power to an outside third-party vendor from another country that doesn’t understand who we are, where we came from, what this ticket cost, or how many men had to bleed, fight, sacrifice, and die for the conditions we’ve got today. And that’s where I draw the line. Not a soft line. Not a dotted line. A hard damn line in the sand. Because I’m not against technology. I’m not against digital credentials. I’m not against making it easier for a hand to carry proof of what he’s earned. Hell, I think that’s exactly where this trade needs to go. But I am against letting outsiders build the gate around our work and then tell us they’re doing us a favor by handing us the key. There’s a difference between a wallet and a gate. A wallet belongs to the hand. A wallet helps a Brother carry his proof. A wallet says, “Here’s my training. Here’s my certs. Here’s what I’ve earned. Here’s what I can prove.” A gate belongs to whoever controls access. A gate says, “You may enter.” A gate says, “You don’t meet the rule set.” A gate says, “Wait over there until the system decides whether your career, your ticket, your training, and your experience are good enough.” That’s a hell of a difference. And any Union hand who can’t see that needs to slow down and think about where this road can lead. JNCTN may have capability. Fine. Nobody’s saying a slick platform can’t be built. Nobody’s saying a third-party vendor can’t create digital credential tools, compliance checks, access controls, dashboards, and all the fancy shit that looks good in a presentation. But capability ain’t Brotherhood.

When you're working night shift and nothing is open for dinner at 3am...