Ya'll have seen the Safety Sundays, and I love the conversations they spark. Those will continue, but we can do better. Starting today, a new weekly post will be added to the mix. It will call out... What We Don't Say Out Loud. Let me know what you think... What We Don’t Say Out Loud … Week 1 Here’s something we don’t say out loud… This trade accepts casualties … it just doesn’t admit it. We don’t use those words. We soften it. We dress it up with words like "inherent risk" and "part of the job". We pretend every death is an anomaly instead of a receipt. We hold the funeral. We make the post. We say his name. Then we go right back to rewarding the same behaviors that put him there. Speed over judgment. Silence over friction. Completion over condition. We teach people how to endure pressure, not how to resist it. We train them to keep moving when their gut is screaming to slow down. We condition them to ignore fatigue, doubt, and fear … because those things interfere with production. And it works. Until it kills someone. From the outside, the job looks successful. The lights are on. The storm is cleared. The outage numbers drop. Leadership moves on to the next win. In the field, everyone knows how close it came to falling apart … how many corners were cut, how many chances were taken, how much luck was spent to make it look clean. That’s the blood on our hands we don’t measure. And when someone finally does die, we act surprised. We investigate the last decision instead of the years of pressure that shaped it. We blame the hand closest to the wire and protect everything upstream of it. That’s not tragedy. That’s design. And until the trade is willing to face that … not memorialize it, not spiritualize it, not sanitize it … it will keep feeding good people into a system that already knows the cost… …and has decided it’s acceptable. ~Kevin | Lineman Bull$hit™ Academy

I started in the EE98J program in October 2017...,(please allow me to explain myself... I'm just starting the lineman , pre aprentiship @ the local community college...I don't even have the "right" to even talk...and I hope to always have this reverence, but here am I and here it goes.) His name WAS Aiden McCullough. 22yo. Not even old enough to have lived. (It feels like ripping open an old wound talking about this...it hurts my heart.) What happened was, a semi truck flatbed trailer had 4 spools of 500KCmil weighing a couple of tons ea. Anyway, they unloaded the first one which had chocks. Every spool was required to have chocks, but only the first one did... The second one began to roll and the 1st year, inexperienced appreciate went to "stop" the spool. Milo Trujillo was the first one there...(God rest his soul, but that's another story.) He told me, "1st years have no sense"... I mumbled some BS and then he looked at me directly in the face, and said, "1st years have no sense." They said that anyone could go to the hospital and "visit" so I did, but when I got there, he was dead. The nurse asked if I wanted to say goodbye, but I declined. Now I'm going into something deeper, harder, scarier and I can't even explain to myself why. After reading some of these stories I realize there's no shame in quitting, but there's an "obligation" to stop work if something seems off. You have to know that a job, or a position isn't worth loosing a life. That's what I got.

Before you dive into this, I need to set the stage... My next post — the one about how we turned Safety into a department instead of a core value — the one I intended to drop today — needs context. That post is the heart of the whole damn problem. That’s where the wheels first came off. But before we get to that mess, we need to talk about: How we drifted so far off the path in the first place. We didn’t just bureaucratize Safety… We didn’t just hand it to the wrong people… We rebranded loss prevention and risk management as “Safety,” and expected the boots to salute it like gospel. This is the prequel… the throat punch… the opening salvo... Because you can’t understand how Safety lost its soul until you understand how the suits rewrote the definition to fit their optics instead of our reality. Let’s quit pretending we don’t know what happened here... Somewhere between the bean counters, the lawyers, PR, and whatever “strategic initiative” committee was meeting in a room with catered muffins and designer coffee, somebody decided to pull off the biggest word-swap in the history of this trade: They slapped a “SAFETY” sticker on loss prevention and risk management… and expected us not to notice. They didn’t change the work. They didn’t change the culture. They just changed the label — and acted like that was leadership. And now everyone’s standing around, shocked that the field doesn’t trust a damn thing with the word Safety on it. WHAT SAFETY USED TO BE (BACK WHEN IT STILL MEANT SOMETHING) Safety used to be the old hands teaching you how not to die. Not how not to ding a truck, not how to avoid cracking a tail lamp, and sure as hell not how to protect someone’s preventable-incident KPI. IT MEANT HOW NOT TO DIE. It was blood-and-bone knowledge: • How to hear danger before you saw it. • How to shut shit down when something felt wrong. • How to pick up the guy next to you… when his knees shook. • How to walk away from a near miss with a lesson… not paperwork and punishment.