SAFETY SUNDAY · Lineman Bull$hit

SAFETY SUNDAY

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.

The missing ground didn’t matter last time. The cover wasn’t needed. The clearance was close enough. The equipment held. The traffic stayed in its lane. The load didn’t shift. The conductor stayed where we expected it to stay.

Nothing happened.

So instead of admitting we were lucky, we call ourselves good. Instead of correcting the exposure, we defend it. Instead of learning from the near miss, we act like the absence of blood proved the decision was right.

It didn’t.

The shortcut wasn’t safe.

It just didn’t collect its payment that day.

Eventually, somebody pays. It might be the apprentice who watched us and believed that was how real hands worked. It might be the groundman who saw something wrong but had already learned that speaking up would get him embarrassed. It might be the operator who noticed the setup shifting but didn’t want to challenge the foreman. It might be the foreman who knew the plan was falling apart but didn’t want to push back against the general foreman.

Or it might be us.

The job doesn’t care how many years we’ve been doing it. Electricity doesn’t respect seniority. Gravity doesn’t check our ticket. Stored energy doesn’t give a damn how confident we are. Traffic, tension, backfeed, induction, fatigue, equipment failure, and human error don’t become less dangerous because the person exposed has twenty years in the trade.

The hazard stays the hazard.

The only thing that changes is how comfortable we’ve become standing beside it.

Experience should make us more disciplined, not less. It should make our job briefings better because we know which questions need to be asked. It should make our setup stronger because we’ve seen what happens when people get lazy. It should make us more willing to verify because we understand how quickly assumptions become consequences.

It should also make us easier to question.

The moment the most experienced person on the crew becomes the person nobody can challenge, that crew is in trouble.

That isn’t leadership, and it isn’t respect.

That’s fear.

Fear keeps mouths shut, and silence keeps hazards alive.

Good leaders make it clear that anybody on the crew can say, “That doesn’t look right,” without being laughed at, belittled, or reminded of how little time they have in the trade.

Sometimes the least experienced person on the job sees the thing everybody else has become too familiar to notice. Sometimes the apprentice asks the question the rest of us stopped asking years ago. Sometimes the new hand is the only person in the circle who hasn’t been trained to accept the unacceptable.

We’d better be willing to listen.

The more years we have in this trade, the more responsibility we carry to demonstrate what discipline looks like under pressure. The younger hands aren’t just listening to what we say during the brief. They’re watching what we do when production starts slipping, the schedule gets tight, and somebody higher up wants the job moving.

They’re watching what we verify, what we ignore, and how we react when somebody raises a concern.

We can’t preach procedure and then make exceptions for ourselves. We can’t talk about stop work responsibility and then punish somebody for using it. We can’t demand accountability from the least experienced person on the crew while treating our own experience like a shield against criticism.

That’s hypocrisy.

And the trade has had enough of it.

Our habits become their training. If we cut the corner, they’ll eventually cut it too. If we dismiss concerns, they’ll learn to stay quiet. If we treat grounding, cover, testing, positive control, planning, and communication like optional steps, they’ll believe those things only matter when the safety department is standing nearby.

Then years later, we’ll look around and complain about the next generation. We’ll say they don’t respect the trade. We’ll say they lack discipline. We’ll say nobody does things the right way anymore.

Meanwhile, they’ll be doing exactly what they watched us do.

That isn’t experience being passed down.

That’s complacency being inherited.

Real experience doesn’t need to show off. It doesn’t need to prove anything by taking chances, and it doesn’t get offended when somebody asks a question.

Real experience is humble enough to verify.

It checks again. It listens. It adapts when the plan no longer matches the job. It understands that familiarity can hide danger and that confidence and competence aren’t the same thing.

The best hands I’ve ever worked around didn’t use their experience to justify doing less. They used it to protect more. You could see it in how they prepared, how they communicated, how they handled pressure, and how they treated the people working around them.

They didn’t need to announce how many years they had.

The standard they carried into the job said everything.

That’s what experience is supposed to become.

Not permission. Not arrogance. Not an excuse.

A standard.

We didn’t earn experience so we could become exempt from the standard.

We earned it so we could become the standard.

And if nobody on our crew feels comfortable questioning us, we shouldn’t confuse that silence with respect.

It might be fear.

Experience should protect the crew.

It should never become the reason the crew needs protection.

Be your brother’s keeper.