Read Brian's story — ten thousand volts, one button, and "don't touch anything red"
I started in this trade in 1998. Twenty years old. Flew down to Florida, got dropped at a substation, met the foreman. He said: "Welcome to the team. We're power factor testing. Climb up on top of the transformer, take this button with you. We're running ten thousand volts. Don't touch anything red." That was the briefing.
Up I went. Scared shitless. Held the button when they said hold it. Got the job done. Then they told me to reconnect the red part — the bushing I'd just been told not to touch. Nobody had shown me how. I walked away alive. That's the best thing I can say about it.
That foreman wasn't a bad guy. He just didn't know any better — nobody had ever shown him what a real briefing looks like either. But here's what I figured out: even after a briefing like that, he knew an absolute ton. When I started asking questions, the answers poured out — what to watch for, how to torque the connection, the small things that meant the difference between a long career and a short one. Thirty years of knowledge in his head. He just needed somebody to ask.
Years later I met Steve. Senior tester. The kind of guy who'd tell you he could test a transformer with a battery and a piece of wire — then do a kick test on a CT with a Simpson, a 9-volt, and some wire while you watched. I followed Steve around for years with a spiral notebook in my back pocket, scribbling down everything he'd let me catch.
I spent two decades watching the same pattern repeat. Then I tried forms — forms died, you can't crush twenty minutes of context and judgment into a checkbox. I tried chatbots — they died too, a decision tree is no match for a real story where three things went wrong at once. Then I tried voice. The same field tech who'd given me two sentences on a form gave me twenty minutes of dense, irreplaceable trade knowledge the second I let him use his voice. Voice is the highest-bandwidth input humans have. I just got out of the way and let it happen.
That's when the slogan was born. Use Your Words.
Your operation already has the knowledge. It's in your binders, your old PDFs, your senior people's heads, the trick the senior tester does that nobody's written down. We're not starting from scratch. Bring whatever you've got. The conversations fill in the rest.