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!

I’m gonna say this one time because this is supposed to be a place where we cut the bullshit. So I am about to throw a HUGE bullshit flag because nothing changes unless we are willing to be honest, honest with our industry and honest with ourselves. Hell this may just be another lesson I learn to just shut my big mouth and go along to get along. My first hard lesson came just recently, and it wasn’t a risk or hazard that most would think of our recognize. It’s a risk that is hiding beneath the surface of this trade - it is the risk of not passing along knowledge. I have always known the physical and mental dangers of this trade, Im good with danger and risk management. I had always been comfortable with the uncomfortable. I have just completed my apprenticeship making me one of the many “new generation” JLs you all speak of. Even I can see the lack of effort put into the “new generation” of journeyman lineman. But I’m going to ask - whose fault is it really. What I am about to say is not said because of the fact that I spent years learning this new trade I am currently committed to. It is said because I spent years dedicating myself to something larger than myself before. I am quite certain that I will challenge a lot of egos here (yes believe it or not I still see a lot of egos on this site) and I will ruffle a lot of feathers and challenge the status quo with what I am about to say, but I bears saying it anyway. I am a retired Army Ranger who spent 24 years training, practicing, learning, and quite frankly failing to become a consummate professional of my craft. I know what it means to survive in a profession where the margin of error is slim and cost of failure is high. Success comes from humbling yourself to a process that takes years for some and decades for others, there is no one clear path and having a student mindset is key. I know what it takes to become a true professional of your craft and trade. The one thing I hear over and over again is constant complaining, bitching, and moaning about this “new generation” of lineman and linewomen. I hear many of the same comments and concerns and see many of the same pitfalls I’ve seen before for many years in the Army.