Meter Reader

“Do this one,” Greg says. It’s only fifty feet away, but the dials are tiny, and the black hands are even tinier, like a gnat’s wings. We’re standing on the caterpillared squares of the sidewalk. Greg’s been going from house to house, just glancing at the meter with only his eyes. This is my first day, and I’m nervous as hell. I pull out my mini-scope, this silver-colored instrument I hold with just my thumb and forefinger. I bring it up to my left eye: one, seven, eight, one. Just as my fingers are about to punch the read into my hand-held, meter reading device, Greg says, “two, six, seven, two.” Feeling the sweat on my lower back, I can’t tell if it’s because we’ve been walking under the radiating morning sun, or if it’s because I’m wrong by a mile.

***

Before that, I had been on a two-week, meter-reader, training course. I learned everything about gas meters there: how they worked, how to read them. My instructor was a tall, Middle Eastern man named Victor. I couldn’t help but wonder why this man who sounded and looked like he could speak Farsi had a Russian-sounding name. In fact, I had never really thought about meter readers before, and now I was seeing my first, real one with a bald head and hairy forearms. I and three other guys were meeting at an official gas company facility where I had to scan my I.D. card at the driveway entrance, and then the black metal gate would rattle across, letting me and my vehicle in. Our class was held on an empty office floor. Basically, royal blue carpets, gray cubicled desks, and boxy, desktop computers.

For two weeks, in the mornings, I sat in front of these computers with the meter reading programs installed on them. I stared at dial after dial after dial, typing into the keyboard the correct answers. Each screen had a timer on the lower, right-hand side of the screen. At the end of each level, my results were given, and the computer told me whether I passed or not. The readings became more and more difficult as I progressed because the time limit got shorter, and the dials became without numbers. You were basically supposed to read them by their position on the dial.

In the afternoons, with the wall of windows behind us, letting in the sunlight, Victor showed us using a slide projector how a gas meter worked. We saw how the gas flowed from a thin pipe from the ground, passed through the meter, then into the lines of the house. We saw slides on how the gray-blue box could be corroded with rust and leak gas. We saw how someone could accidentally back their pick-up truck into the meter, making it leak gas. We saw how a customer could install an illegal compartment to the meter to save money, making it leak gas. The plastic housing could be dotted with condensation. It could be cracked. Or fogged over. The dials could fall off. The white metallic background on which the dials were on could be browned with rust. All things which prevented me from reading the four, precious dials.

***

On our last day of class, when Victor took us out to look at a real gas meter next to the doorway of a house, we got close and personal with it. He was like a scientist showing us bacterial growth under a microscope, and we were like junior scientists taking turns studying the bacterial growth.

When I finally got to the field, I saw that they didn’t quite do things like we learned in class. All the experienced guys I followed in the actual field simply glanced at the meter, punched in the numbers, and walked on through to the next house like they were taking one long stroll through the neighborhood in their standard, gas company uniform of navy cap, light blue dress shirt, and navy trousers.

I came across one life-defining, philosophical question in the field that we didn’t learn about in the classroom. What happens when you are walking through the heart of a peaceful, residential neighborhood, minutes away from any public restrooms, and you’re about to wet yourself with a liter worth of piss because you’ve been gulping down water because that is what the gas company told you to do to keep hydrated so you don’t pass out in the pounding sun? Here I was, hardly able to even take a step down the sidewalk because the slightest movement of my body could uncork any liquids. I was frantically going back and forth between one house and another, debating which backyard to go into. My body had already started a countdown, and it was at that moment that I recalled what Demetri told me.

***

In the mornings, the meter readers all gathered at what they called, “the base.” This building was in a different location from the training facility. It had a different feel to it as well. Whereas the training center had a mid-eighties, blue, black, and gray office building feel to it, the base was more like a fire station. Warehouse garage doors. Interior chain link enclosures. Lockers. Unpainted, gray, concrete floors. This was where we were given our hand-held, meter reading devices which had all the routes for that day. We were getting all our gear ready (dog sticks, mace cans, pocket-sized mirrors, and mini scopes), when I asked one of the more senior meter readers, Demetri, a middle-aged, mustached man from Ukraine, this very pertinent question: where do I go when I gotta take a piss in the field? He laughed at me and said, “Just go into the backyard of an empty house and go.”

***

So, that’s what I did. I walked up to the side of a house, and sprayed a perfectly painted dark gray exterior of a wall. As I was releasing my fluids, I looked up and to the right. To my horror, I saw a kitchen window. One of those that stuck out into three sides. Luckily, there was no one inside that I saw. Just some potted plants and a white kitchen wall. I looked back down. I had so much inside me that I was still getting some stuff out. I did my best in getting my shoes out of the way because a huge puddle was starting to form on the pavement. Finally, I finished and quickly zipped myself up. I could feel my bladder throbbing like a twinkling star in the night sky.

***

After about a month, I adjusted my water intake, and my meter reads were accurate. But I was still dealing with the problem of finding the meter. Yes, most of them were either in the front or to the side of the house. But some of them were underneath houses that were on a cliff, and you had to use a mini scope from half a mile away. Or they were in a yard you couldn’t enter because the customer didn’t want you to, so you had to rubber band your pocket mirror to your dog stick, and lift that baby over the wooden fence. As you raised the dog stick, you looked into that pocket mirror high above you and read those four dials upside down.

They told us about some stories during training that stuck in my mind and made me wonder about them when I was out in the field. One was where a female gas company worker was reading a meter next to a closed, wooden, side gate of a house. This side gate led to the backyard and had just enough space between the bottom of the gate and the grass where a dog could force its head through and clamp onto the woman’s foot. And that’s what happened. It pulled her foot underneath the fence when a second dog got a hold of her other foot and with their collective force, the two dogs dragged her underneath to the other side which was the backyard. I asked Victor what had happened to her, and Victor just shrugged his shoulders and said, “she was gone.”

After all those kinds of stories told during training, I felt like rabid dogs were ready to pounce on me behind every gated fence. Then, I kind of got used to it because I did the ritual that the gas company taught me to do: give a knock on the side entrance door with my dog stick, say, “Meter Reader,” wait a few seconds, and if nothing happened, I’d enter the yard. As I took a moment to get my bearings straight on another person’s property, I hoped some guy didn’t come out with a shotgun, the hole of the barrel pointed at me.

***

I was peering over a low, wrought iron gate where the meter was just nearby in the side yard of a house. The dials were perpendicular to where I was standing, so I stepped to the side to get a good angle on it. As I was doing so, a bare-breasted, fifty-year woman came into view. She was watering the backyard with her garden hose and no top on. She was plump, pale, and big breasted. She showed no signs of having seen me, so I walked away before I could get the read. I punched into the meter reading device, “could not find.”