Pleading for My Life While Hanging From a Wire
Cold, desperate and alone…
The amount of strange jobs I’ve had over the years could probably fill a book of its own.
For a while, I was a pizza delivery guy. Great job, if you work in an area where the tips flow freely.
Great, that is, until you get robbed a few times. Even got held up by Richard Nixon once. Well, at least that’s what the mask said.
Did you know there’s such a thing as a legal drug runner? I didn’t either, until I started driving for a pharmacy, delivering medications in the middle of the night to nursing homes around the country.
Oh, and then there’s the five years I spent as a phone operator at an answering service. I still recall the horrified funeral home director who called me in the night after a major storm.
I’ve risked my life for more than a few jobs, but the one that sticks out in my mind the most is when I worked for a cable company as an installer, and found myself pleading for my life in desperation.
A lot of strange things went on at that job.
I saw a lot of crazy things at that job.
Once, I had to get under someone’s house to run a line and saw thousands of cockroaches crawling everywhere. You wouldn’t know it from how clean the house seemed otherwise. At least on the surface.
Another house was so infested with rats I had to argue with them as they crawled all over me in the hot, dry attic.
Oh, yeah. Fun times.
Winters in Indiana can get a little wild, with temperatures one day being in the fifties and below zero the next. Sunshine, rain, snow, the whole four seasons can sometimes play out in a week’s time.
It can get hard to plan for.
Working as an installer, I tried to pay close attention to the weather coming up, plotting out what I’d need to do or wear to get through it. Sometimes, the weather people are right.
Sometimes, they’re wrong to the point you want to strangle them.
They were calling for snow to start on one particular December morning, but by the time I left my house to go to work, the sun was shining and it was fully forty degrees outside.
I figured they were wrong once again as I grabbed my Mountain Dew and arrived at the office.
The day started out easy enough.
I spent most of the day doing easy installs. A few took me only ten minutes, while another lasted no more than an hour. Not too bad, considering the snow still on the ground from the last bout that came through the previous week.
When I pulled into the driveway of the big house owned by an older lady with a bit of an attitude, I knew it’d probably take longer.
See, big houses can be a pain to work in, depending on what the previous installs were like. If they installed the cable while they built the place, we would count ourselves relatively lucky. We could trace lines easier and it wasn’t as tricky to find where a problem in the walls might be.
Older houses of large size, however, were something else entirely. Most of us dreaded having to fish through those walls, especially when you had to deal with the drywall-that-wasn’t and dust of decades would get into our lungs.
Thankfully, though, this wasn’t a fresh install. Trouble calls in a place like that could still be a problem, but I still figured I’d have enough time before anything weather-related started in, though the skies were already darkening.
An hour and a half of discerning the lines and figuring out there was a break somewhere, I knew this call was going to take much longer than I hoped.
She needed a new tap from the pole. A whole new line was going to need to be strung from the edge of her backyard all the way to the house.
Oh, gods, what a pain. Three hundred feet of line across a snowy backyard was not what I wanted to do when I got up that morning.
I figured the easiest way to get it done would be by pulling my truck along the road that ran behind her house and hopefully not need too much effort. Sometimes those little back roads are slippery in bad weather.
It was muddied, but I made it through and was just pulling the ladder from the roof when the weather finally broke and the snow started in.
It wasn’t much, but the winds started blowing and the temps got frigid.
The ladder extended to almost its full length, and I started the climb to the top of the pole, thirty feet up.
The cable from the spool came along easily, tied to my belt as I had become accustomed to doing. I picked up that trick from the guy who trained me, and it always made things simple, especially if I kicked it to the side to avoid tangling in my legs.
That’s when the terror started.
The freezing rain started in before I could do anything to come down.
Dear reader, I do not know if you’ve ever been thirty feet in the air on a ladder with the wind whipping around you and freezing rain hitting your face. I can only hope you never experience such a thing.
I never admitted to my bosses at the cable company I had a slight fear of heights, because I could usually suppress it long enough to get whatever job they sent me on done. The pay was great, and the work was otherwise rewarding.
But that fear soared into high gear, ratcheting up in my spine and through my already intensely stiff fingers.
My feet instinctively moved me down when the wind hit with a fierceness I hadn’t experienced before.
That’s when the ladder fell, crashing to the ground with a horrendous clatter.
I stared down at it with my mouth wide, my left arm wrapped around the top of the pole and my right hand gripping the cable line above me.
I never held onto something so tight in my life.
The freezing rain picked up some more as I started screaming for someone to help.
Most poles have foot-grips we can use to shimmy up and down without a ladder, but this one was old, and I wasn’t sure if any of them would be sturdy enough to hold me. Besides, my glasses were fogging up so badly I wasn’t able to get a clear view of where my feet should go.
My voice called out again, carried on the wind with a hope that someone out there might hear me.
I got desperate.
When my grip on the wire slipped loose, I desperately lunged the right arm around the pole, hugging it tight with both. The chill sapped my strength with each passing second.
I’m not sure how long I hung there, trembling with dread and cold, not knowing if this was going to be the end of me.
When I finally caught sight of movement coming toward me across the back lawn, my heart beating so hard in my chest I thought it would fly out, I called out again, incoherently, I am sure.
This little old lady had raced as fast as her legs could carry her, limping along the stretch of her yard to reach the base of the pole. She grabbed the ladder and — I am still not sure how — lifted the thing up to get it to my feet.
My legs moved around it, pulling it tighter to the pole, my arms still holding on for dear life as I did what I could to steady it with her.
I don’t think I’ve ever come down from a ladder as fast as I did that day, my body fairly flying down it like a sled.
Once I reached the ground, all I could do was breathe heavily, trying to keep myself from retching all over her garden.
When I could finally talk, I thanked her profusely for her help and muttered that someone would be back when the weather cleared.
I slammed the ladder to the roof of the truck, climbed in and, I am not ashamed to admit, cried for a little while as my body warmed back up.
When I made it back to the office and told the manager what happened, the only thing he could say was I should have stayed and at least prepped the house for the next guy.
I put in my notice the next day. I would not go through anything like that again.
Although that was twenty years ago, I still can’t bring myself to go up a ladder without a lot of fear.
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