KEVIN HINRICHS: The snow's
flying and your power goes out. Instead of staying
home from the fire, we get called out
to come to work. My name's Kevin Hinrichs
and I'm a lineman. I've been a journeyman
lineman since 1995. Four years before
that as an apprentice, and then about a couple years
before that as a truck driver groundman. Turned out, I really liked this
line of work, and so here I am. We have to go upgrade a
transformer from a 25 KVA to a 50. It's in some people's backyard. Customers are the biggest deal. Dogs, yeah. If a customer's not home,
we have to get into a yard, then we've got to
call animal control and have them hold the dog
for us while we do our work. Threats is the big deal. You know, where we
have to call the cops and have a police escort
while we do our work. We were out one night, in
the middle of the night. And we're up in the
air working on a pole, and some kid runs up down
here right in the yard where we're working, and
he pulls off five rounds. When I was coming up,
it was free climbing. You just jumped on
that pole and went. And if you fell, you didn't
stop until you hit the ground. That type of safety
equipment that's coming in, it's made things a lot safer. The ones we're working on
now is 120 volts, or 240. It's the same voltage that you'd
use on your stove or your dryer at home. And then the high
side up top, that's one phase our
primary, so that would be 7620 volts to the ground. I still get the jitters
sometimes when I get up there. When you're up there in a
basket and you look back, there's not a lot between
that's keeping you in the air. And our company's
been pretty fortunate. We haven't had
horrible failures. But there haven't been
that many years ago we had trucks that have fallen
and it kills guys, you know? So that stuffs always in
the back of your mind. We try to take
care of each other, we watch each other's
back all the time. A lot of times, it's the guy
in the same basket with you and you spend hours
and hours and hours in the air together doing work. Day in and day out. Family, kids,
wife, the problems. We don't need shrinks. We come to work and
go to work, you know? Everything comes out. That's the way it is. Well, this pole was set in 1953. I wouldn't say stuff wears out,
but as the neighborhoods grow, we need to grow with it. And we don't always know that
a neighborhood's growing. Their lights go
out, they call us, we go out there and
discover we need to put something bigger
in here, so then we do it. It doesn't matter if it's wind
generated, coal generated, whatever. We're going to get
it to the customer. That's what we do as linemen.
