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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Hardeeville, SC
    Posts
    133

    Default The Noob: The story of a wanna be

    Hello everyone,

    My name is Dave and I am a student at the Southeast Lineman Training Center in Trenton, Ga. I thought I would share with you a few small and continuing snipets of my experiences here at SLTC and after I graduate ( pretty confident for the 3rd week huh? )

    A little information about me before I started at SLTC... I am currently 35 years old , and grew up in a small town in Florida called Vero Beach, graduated 619th out of 657, and went on from high school to work a number of jobs before spending 5 years in the resturant industry a few years in Lawn Maintenance and Landscaping and the last 7 years working for Comcast Cable ( initially TCI , then AT&T and finally Comcast over the 7 years ).

    My time at Comcast
    I often said that after I started they would have to burn me out of my job there... and in a matter of speaking they did. I had a 5 year goal of becoming a maintenance technician ( Tech that maintain the plant on the poles ), but managed to leap frog over that and ended up as a supervisor. Imagine my dismay when we were hit by Francis and Jeanne one month after my promotion and I learned that as a supervisor I recieved no overtime for working 14-18 hrs a day. After being in my desk for 6 months I realized I made a serious error and that while I might have been a decent supervisor I was a much better technician and prefered my time outdoors to time behind a desk. So I started making preperations to get back outside. In the process of this I soon discovered that while the Maint Techs make better money , they were grossly over worked wiht only 8 of them on 'on-call rotation' being called out all hours of the day and night to repair any outage or serious reception problem that may occur. The monies those techs were making didnt really seem worth the effort. Granted it was better than I was currently making , but the trade off of quality of life didnt seem worth it. I might add here that I often traded with other installer techs to work as back ups to the maint techs, but it didnt happen nearly as often as the regular maint techs.

    It was during my transition time behind the desk that I discovered the forums here at powerlineman. I also started talking to a few FPL guys that had had contact with and so I started looking into how to become a lineman. Rather than start at the end of a shovel or a meter, I wanted something to give me an extra edge, so that I could jump into an apprentice position. I have worked for too many companies previously that would promise promotions in X amount of time but never came through, so the idea of working for a company for a few years before getting to apprentice at my age didnt seem viable. It was then that I came across NLTC and SLTC websites and recieved course catalogs for both. I started making preperations, putting my house in Vero Beach on the market, and 'lightening my load' so to speak. So in September of 2006 when I closed on the sale of my house. I decided that perhaps Georgia might be a better location to be in January, which is the first sessions of class I would be available for.

    .....to be continued....
    Last edited by Doggboi; 01-18-2007 at 08:34 PM.

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