The Grunt
the importance of just showing up
I was a grunt on a line crew; that was my first job in cable. The help wanted ad said Cable Construction. I had plenty of construction experience, so I drove down to Rochester NH, and I applied for the job in person. Once again it was Winter and I needed money to survive. For the second time in my short working career, I got a job offer within an hour of filling out the paperwork (see earlier essay “Look Busy”). I started the job the very next day, without hesitation, in spite of that prior experience.
The job did not pay well and there were no benefits at the start. Beggars cannot be choosers. There was not any other viable option for me at the time, so I just went with it. I was dreading the work, because it was cold outside, and this was outside work. It was December and we were at the start of a very cold and snowy Winter in New Hampshire. I had new plans for the Spring anyway, and I was not thinking about this job as a career either. I just needed to pay the bills and wait for something better to materialize. That’s what I always did.
What does a grunt do? The grunt’s job is to support the climbers on the crew with hardware and tools. The grunt pulls the lasher when the crew is running cable. The grunt sets up the safety equipment. The Grunt is on the ground always. The grunt does coffee runs. The grunt runs strand through thick bushes and weaves the strand through the trees. The grunt is literally the low man on the totem pole; everyone on the crew is above the grunt. To my family, and friends from graduate school, I referred to the job as entry level, but it was really beneath that. Anyone else at the company could tell me what to do and I had to do it. That’s what it means to be the grunt.
I reported to work that next morning and got introduced to the rest of the crew. We were all young, except for the head of the crew JB, our supervisor. He must have been close to sixty, judging by his white hair, and his pencil thin moustache that made him look like Don Ameche, the dapper actor and comedian of the thirties and forties. He did not talk much; he was not boastful like the rest of us kids.
Apparently he worked to support his habit of horseracing. Not gambling, although he may have placed a bet once or twice. JB had a team of trotters that he raced at local tracks. I admired his aloofness, and his tolerance for nonsense. He really didn’t care much about work, he was the kind of person that defined himself by his passion. He was a horse man. To be perfectly honest, he smelled like one too! To the rest of us on the crew, he was just JB, an affable old man who we respected, but ignored. But then he didn’t give a damn about what we thought of him anyway.
JB drove the van and he made the commitments to management about the productivity for the day. In that sense he was in charge. But he did not engage much with us; he only intervened, if he sensed that we were not going to make a production number that day, as promised. As I have learned so often throughout my career, employees will set the goals in the absence of consistent, effective leadership, and the goals are typically pretty low. We more or less said what we would do, and then set about to get it done as quickly as possible. If we finished up early, we would often sit in a bar drinking beer until quitting time. Or pick up a six pack and drink back at the yard. I have to admit that it felt good too. What hourly worker does not desire to get paid for doing nothing? It’s the best feeling ever, just ask any person working in Private Equity.
There were three lineman on our crew and the grunt which was me. JB would pull the strand off a large reel with the van; he did the same when we were putting up cable. The climbers would climb alternating poles and perform repetitive tasks. JB also held the maps, which were the plans that we worked from. So he knew what we were doing. I looked these over. I knew enough about house plans to pick up on some of the symbols. Eventually I would be able to make total sense of a design for a cable system, but at this point in my career, I could only follow our progress each day by the pole numbers on the map and by the street addresses on the mailboxes.
The three lineman were just kids in their early twenties. Not right out of high school, but young. This was one of many jobs that they were trying out. I was not much older at the time, but I had been on my own for a while. I was still operating within the orbit of the University of New Hampshire, where I had attended a Masters in Writing program and studied under Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Charles Simic. He was the center of the Universe for me at the time. I had this crazy idea that I would write too, and that I could make a good life for myself at some University in America as he had done.
When we arrived at the work site, the climbers would put on their climbing equipment that consisted of a pair of gaffs, a safety harness, and a hard hat. I wore a hat too, to protect myself from the things that the climbers would eventually drop from above. Every climber was issued a standard set of tools. If you climbed up a pole without a tool, it was my job to fetch it, and to throw it up to you. If a climber dropped a tool, the grunt had to find it for him. If you lost a tool, it would cost you out of your paycheck to replace it. That was a bone of contention between the grunt and a lineman.
I got pretty good at throwing things. It turns out to be much more difficult than you might think, to throw a small, but heavy item underhand, up about twenty feet in the air, so that it reached the apex of its trajectory, at roughly eye level to a person on a telephone pool. Within a couple of days, I could do that with either hand. The climber had to grab the tool out of thin air, while maintaining his connection to the pole, and with limited mobility. He was harnessed to the pole. I mastered this art with the same kind of determination that I used to teach myself how to juggle as a child. Who knew that these skills learned during my youth, the talents that I had used during college days to relax from studying, would come in handy to me on my new job. But they did. And when we had down time, I could entertain the crew with juggling tricks too.
When we came to an area with thick trees and brush, it was my job to throw the linesman rope through the trees and brush. That involved coiling the line so that it could be thrown without constraining itself with kinks and knots. I held the coil in my left hand, and I tied a heavy wrench to the lead of the rope, and then aimed and fired the rope with an underhand, swinging motion. If I did everything right, the line would infiltrate the tree limbs in a manner that allowed the strand to be lifted into the air without obstruction. It was as if I was playing chess, and suddenly just the right move had popped into my head. I could see the solution before I proved to myself and others that it would work, but it mostly did. Apparently I had a gift for solving simple business problems!
The worst part of my job involved the snow banks. It was a brutal winter that year, and the snow was piled high on each side of the road. It was exhausting just reaching a telephone pole. The banks of snow made the poles shorter to climb and less dangerous, but they wore us out each day, as we waded through the snow to do our jobs. Hunting for dropped tools was time consuming and a great annoyance to everyone. I put a magnet on the end of a pole in order to fish a tool from out of the snow, if I found the right hole. If not, the cost of that tool was deducted from a climber’s pay and no one was happy about that.
Because the work was physically demanding, we wore layers of clothing to keep us warm; as the day got warmer we could take some layers off. It was not uncommon that winter to be wearing a cotton tee shirt, covered by a flannel shirt, a vest, a hooded sweatshirt, and then an overcoat. Long underwear was inserted somewhere between layers if it was really cold, say minus ten or twenty. Driving home from work one night, I was involved in an accident that sent me to the emergency room via an ambulance. As the doctor was cutting the layers of clothing on me, I heard him quip “Is there a person in here!” He got a lot of laughs from the nurses in the emergency room attending to me.
Surprisingly, one of the most satisfying aspects of the job involved my interactions with the general public. People were always waving and so happy to see us. I welcomed that and I smiled back. Here are some things that you can say about a line crew: the tasks are slow and methodical, progress is barely visible, the work is noisy, and you take two trips down the same street. First you put up the strand; then you come back and lash the cable to it. We moved along at a few feet per minute. That brought the good people of Milton Mills NH out of their houses and onto the streets to see what all the commotion was about even in the cold.
In the cold and flying snow of January and February, during the winter of 1982, homeowners were keen to express an interest in a technology that promised more channels of TV to watch and better pictures too. They had heard about HBO and MTV; programming that they were missing. Others had it and they didn’t. These anxious, future customers would put their names and telephone numbers on slips of paper, and stuff them into my coat pockets as I worked. At the end of the work day, I would deposit these, back at the office, in a bowl for the salesmen to distribute as fresh leads. This was before the movie Glengarry Glenn Ross made the salesroom culture infamous with this classic riff on closing and leads. My leads didn’t suck!
In less than a few weeks time, the company would be activating the system and installing new customers. I would never see these folks again, but it brought me a lot of satisfaction to know that I was the first face of the company that they saw, and that my efforts had led to some additional profits coming in. Later in my career, I would come to learn that ambitious people and entrepreneurs have an expression for this, they call it “creating or adding value”. I was pretty naïve at the time and just thought, “this is what every worker does isn’t it? It’s my job!”
No one has ever accused me of being stupid. A prick for sure. An asshole maybe, but not stupid. My goal was to go back to school for my doctorate. My ambition was to write and teach, but this new opportunity in technology got my attention and awoke my repressed, capitalist tendencies. I took a look around at my surroundings. I was working in a relatively new industry with lots of demand, and I was working alongside unskilled labor. A lot of it. This industry, if it was going to thrive, needed a dependable unskilled and skilled workforce. There was plenty of demand for employees and not much by way of supply just yet.
There was obviously an organization and business purpose behind all of this; someone was funding the expensive cable construction. We talked about costs among ourselves on the crew but we didn’t know anything. It was just speculation and conjecture. There was going to be a return on the investment for sure. I got a glimpse of this when one of the company managers, Steve Murdough, came around. He knew what he was doing and that gave me confidence in the whole venture. It didn’t hurt that he was roughly the same age as me and that he was all in on this new technology. This was going to be his career. So I made a bold decision to abandon my writing and teaching aspirations, and I focused instead on furthering my career in cable, and having a steady job for the first time in my life. College, graduate school, and the prospect of developing and writing a thesis had finally worn me out.
My first promotion in cable came ninety days later in March of 1982, when I graduated from grunt to lineman. My boss at the time, sized me up and issued me my first pair of gaffs. “Congrats” he said when they appeared to fit me perfectly. “Now you will have to buy a pair of linesman’s boots in order to use those properly”. Soon enough I had a pair; the company had a policy that made that purchase attractive. These were not the kind of boots that you would wear for any other purpose than climbing telephone poles. They had a steel shank that ran the whole way down the sole for support. For me those boots symbolized a new direction in life; I had never taken a job seriously before, let alone purchased clothing or footwear specifically for the work.
Norman Rockwell romanticizes the fictional lineman swapping a lasher
Gaffs have hooks in them that spike into the pole that you climb in a somewhat bowlegged manner. The hooks stay in by design, and due to the weight of the climber, which actually forces the hooks deeper into the pole. I had done gymnastics in high school and I did not have a fear of heights. I took to climbing telephone poles, like a duck to water. Within weeks of climbing my first telephone pole, I was taking on forty footers which meant climbing to a height that could kill you. Prior to that I had only “gaffed out” once when I fell a mere sixteen feet straight down a pole and onto a cement sidewalk. The impact jarred me so much, my socks balled up around my toes inside my boots and my teeth chattered. I never let that happen again.
Climbing telephone poles is a relatively straightforward task. The difficulty with the lineman’s job is doing the work while up in the air. To frame a pole, you had to turn a bit brace with a sixteen inch boring bit, through the diameter of a telephone pole. The one that you were attached to. Then you had to run a bolt, a washer, and a clamp through the hole that you just drilled and then tighten the nut. My first attempt resulted in a lot of panting and the resting of burning muscles; soon enough I could turn the bit brace continuously through the largest of poles. In a relatively short period of time, I developed forearms like Popeye the sailor!
Lashing cable to strand required pulling the lasher, which is a job that I knew a lot about already from my time as a grunt. However, in order to start the process, the lasher had to get hauled up to the strand which was nearly twenty feet in the air. The lasher weighed close to fifty pounds. Imagine pulling a bag of cement, hand over hand, up twenty feet, while attached to a pole. Swapping the lasher occurred at every pole; the lineman has to lift the lasher off the strand and transfer it across to the other side of the pole and the strand on the other side. Sixty days after my promotion to lineman, I was in the emergency room, and got diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. My hand and arm muscles became so swollen and inflamed that I lost feeling in my fingers. I had never heard of such a thing, let alone experienced that.
One Monday morning, shortly after that carpal tunnel incident, I reported to work to find a co-worker in desperate straits. He had been doing lines of crank (called meth today), all day and all night, over the weekend, and he could not face a telephone pole without some much needed sleep. He had also called off work so many times in the past, he was close to being fired. He paid me five bucks a pole to do his work for him that morning while he slept in the back of the van. I agreed to it, not for the money, but because I was part of the crew, and I didn’t want to see anyone get fired. Besides, I wanted to prove a small point to everyone which was that we were all physically capable of doing more each day. That was very obvious to me anyway.
My attendance that Winter was nearly perfect other than the couple of days I missed around those two hospital incidents. There was no accrued paid time off. I took a look at worker’s compensation for the carpal tunnel syndrome, but opted to work through the numbness anyway, because I did not want to send management the signal that I was lazy. The truth is I needed a full paycheck too. But more importantly, for some reason that I cannot explain, I liked what I was doing, and I was learning a lot. I enjoyed the work and I was optimistic about my future.
The brutal winter of 1982 eventually blossomed into a beautiful Summer. The warm weather brought many changes to our crew. JB turned his full attention to horse racing and I never saw him again. Nearly every other member of the crew went missing, one by one, as the weather improved and the Summer went on. Soon I was reading maps and giving production numbers. One of the keys to succeeding in the cable business, I had learned, is just showing up. If I knew it was that easy, I might have quit my educational pursuits earlier, and saved myself some money. But then again, I might not have gained the skillset and patience that is required to wax poetically about the dignity of a grunt on a line crew!