3

People Do Attack Us, but We Still Have to Service Their Home

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One time my boss went to knock on the door of a house to turn off the electricity. The owner wasn't home, but her German shepherd and 16- and 18-year-old sons were. When he went to find the meter, the dog tried to attack him. He squeezed himself between the screen and front door and sprayed the dog with mace to get it to stop trying to kill him. The sons, thinking some random dickhead was trying to hurt their dog, came out carrying nunchucks and a baseball bat. When they realized it was just the utilities guy who'd come to shut off their power, they brought the dog inside and proceeded to attack him anyway.

Unfortunately for the deluded teenage badasses, my boss was a Desert Storm veteran and most teenagers are not. They rushed him, but my boss deflected both of their attacks, kicked Michelangelo in the chest, and threw Donatello against the wall of the house. Then he called the cops and clocked out for the day, presumably to attend his night job winning the Kumite.

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Not all of us are combat-trained, though. To protect my family and myself, I have to make sure I'm wearing sunglasses and a hat when I knock on a customer's door so they have a harder time recognizing me around town. One of my co-workers was once eating dinner at a bar alone, still in his work uniform. A few guys came up and started berating him for shutting off their power. Like eating dinner at a bar alone still in your work uniform isn't enough of a tip-off that your life isn't going quite as planned. I've had customers follow me on my routes after shutting off their power to scare me into turning their power back on.

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2

You Could Lose Your Kids

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If I had a nickel for every time a customer called after getting his power shut off to say he's got a kid on a breathing machine, I would swim in giant vault of nickels like a second-tier Scrooge McDuck. Many customers will try using nonexistent children to have their power kept on, but others will have their real kids taken away because of us. What? No, I'm not confessing to kidnapping.

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1

There's a Lot We Can Tell About You Just From Your Yard and Electric Bill

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If you've ever watched Weeds or like, just been a person who grows a ton of weed, you probably have a good idea of how much electricity growing pot requires. We have a machine that we hook up to the power lines that can read the raw usage going into a house. Police can use that and past records to see when a customer went from using 200kW to 1,500kW a month -- that kind of jump doesn't just come from binge-watching all of Friends the week that Netflix got it.

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I can also usually tell if you're going through a divorce or have lost a job. If you've had a perfect payment history, and then three months ago you just stopped paying, you lost your job. If you have an inconsistent payment history where you'll get a few months behind, then catch up, then fall behind again, you're probably going through a divorce.

Then there's your yard: when I'm walking through discarded needles and helium tanks, my first thought isn't that you're a diabetic clown. John Law is getting a phone call. We even receive training from the police department on how to manufacture meth, so we can recognize evidence of it being made (as opposed to just like, using that information to build the greatest electric company-based drug empire the world has ever seen). Feel free to steal that idea, Vince Gilligan.

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There are also those little signs people put in the yard for their son or daughter's high school sports team. For some reason, parents think it's totally fine to give potential predators the first name, team, player number, and home address of a child. That's for anybody walking by to see, not just the power guy. But combined with your electricity usage info -- with how much or how little you use, we can generally tell how many people are at home and on what days; when everything goes off, that's when you usually go to sleep -- that could either make for a pretty effective predator, or maybe like an evil version of Santa Claus.

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Bizarre Things Only Mailmen Know About Your Neighborhood and 5 Reasons Packages Get Destroyed (Learned Working at UPS).

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