 Hi, my name is Marion Bell, and I am the Alabama 4-H State Ambassador President this year. And today I'm with Mr. Jason Quick, who is a crew foreman for Alabama Power. So my first question is, what is a day like as a lineman for Alabama Power? It's very hectic, to be honest with you. When we get to work, you know, we have daily jobs that are scheduled for us to go out and do, but like as today, for example, we head out to do our job and we get a call that, you know, somebody's lights are out or we have a problem with the system, you know, or something like that. So we have to plan accordingly or we have to pull off and go do trouble. Like this morning we've had an outage, we were just finishing up when I pulled in. So you never know, it's pretty hectic. You know, you get phone calls with car hit a pole or a tree fell towards some wire down. You know, you may have to go out in the woods and climb poles and put the wire back up. You know, so you never really know, it's very eventful day. I've always said, if you don't like what you're doing, just give it a few minutes, cause it's gonna change. And my next question is, when did you know that you wanted to become a lineman? To be honest with you, you know, I've seen them guys when I was a young kid out working and I always thought it was neat, but I never, I never really thought about becoming a lineman until I graduated high school and started pursuing career and I applied here. And when I got accepted and got hired on and then found out what these guys were about, what the company was about, you know, how is you go help other people and stuff and then I knew then that, hey, lineman's what I want to be. That's cool. So what are some critical skills for a lineman or what is some advice that you would give a youth interested in pursuing? Well, as far as skills, you know, you need to be, of course all we require, you know, is a high school diploma, but you need to be, you know, it requires some math skills, it has some mechanical skills to do this type of work. You know, you gotta be able to read prints, you gotta be able to comprehend and understand, you know, retain knowledge. So you gotta be able to do all that to do this job because it's a very dangerous job and you need to learn, you know, how to read a rule, how to read your books and how to retain your information to make sure that you're doing this job safe and make sure you're keeping your partner safe or your crew safe, you know, it's not just come to work and do what you're asked to do. You gotta take a lot of initiative to read your material and study, you know, even though, you know, we're not required a college education, we have our own training facility in-house, you have tests, you have material, you're tested on from a safety aspect and from a skills aspect that you gotta show proficiency in or you don't advance to that next level to make alignment. Cool. So you kind of mentioned this, but what is your educational background? Okay, so I graduated with a high school diploma and then once I hired on here, they teach you everything they need you to know. They have their own training facility that they teach in-house. So they teach you basic electricity, they teach you rigging, they teach you how transformers work, they teach you how to climb poles, they teach all that in-house. So I got all my training through the Power Company. Okay, cool. So my next question is, what is the best or most rewarding part about your job? Turning the lights on. When you go into an area, you hate to see people affected by storms and such disasters, but it is a very rewarding feeling. I know we work for money, of course, everybody does, but it's a rewarding feeling when you get to go in there and you work hard and you give a good hard days work, you know, replacing poles, putting wire up, hanging transformers, and then you get to flip that switch and the lights come on. It's a very rewarding feeling. Awesome. So my next question is, do you foresee any changes in the near future in the work of alignment? To be honest with you, no. You know, it still requires of right now, you still have poles and wire and material such as transformers and switches and devices like that. The technology is growing. We are hanging more devices that do more stuff that help eliminate outages, but it's not gonna totally do away with it. You know, the alignment to me is always gonna be around to help keep the infrastructure up. Awesome. So that's all the questions I have. So thank you so much for being here today so that we can learn more about what alignment does. Thank you. Absolutely. Jason, do you wanna add anything else before we leave? Yeah, I will. To me in this role, you know, as a lineman, you work with a crew of guys, you gotta be willing to work with other people. Good people skills, you need to have good people skills. You also gotta have self-motivation. And that's what I like to tell bunch of these guys that hire on, hey, we're gonna give you the material you need, we're gonna give you the training you need. But a lot of that, you need self-motivation to train yourself, read your material, study your material at night even. So that's what we had to do. Come in here, be open-minded, be willing to listen and be willing to work with other guys who are willing to teach you this profession because it's a good profession, it's a hard profession, but it's very rewarding. And that's why I say, you know, study hard in school, work well with others and keep an open mind about this stuff. Well, thank you so much, Jason. And thank you, you know, you're one of our essential workers.