Ralph and Billy, Pepco, Wisconsin and Upton

        I poked my head into the open sides of a Pepco truck parked near 7-11. When I asked if either of the men inside wanted to be interviewed, one of them, seated on the floor, immediately said “Yeah! Billy loves to talk!” Sitting shotgun in the Pepco truck while Billy and Ralph ate Z Burger, I chatted with them amid loud drilling and sawing. Billy obliged for a picture, but Ralph didn't want to be photographed.

“Alright, um, I’m William Mitchell, I work for Pepco. I’m from Calvert County.”

Billy

I ask him what brought him to work at Pepco

“Um. Money. Honestly, when I was like five- don’t laugh- I wanted to be a professional soccer player.”

Ralph laughs. I ask him what job he wanted when he was younger. “I had a passion for cars so it had something to do with cars. An auto mechanic or a car salesman, something along those lines. I never got into the auto mechanic, but I was a car salesman. But you can’t make a living off that.

 I ask them what they were like when they were eighteen.

Billy: “I dunno, I guess I just played video games.”

Ralph: “I was a knucklehead. Somebody who’s always getting into trouble. Who don’t listen to nobody. You know, people try to give you good advice and it goes in one ear and right out the other. I think having kids changed me. You know, once I had a kid I had to be responsible for my son. I think that’s what changed me. The oldest one is six and the youngest one is two.

I ask him to introduce himself

"I’m Ralph, I’ve been working here, what, six months?”

“Three months” Billy corrects him.

“Four months”

“Four months and five days.”

“But who’s counting, right?” They laugh.

Ralph continues what he was saying. "Having kids made me calm down, take responsibility. Cause I was just whatever, doing whatever I wanted to do. Wasn’t taking it down a path I needed to go. I guess I was just living every day like it was my last, wasn’t really thinking about it. And having kids was kind of like a wakeup call. My first son was my wakeup call. Cause, you know, I went to work but I just blew my money because, you know, if I couldn’t pay rent and I got kicked out I could just go live at my mom’s house. But you can’t go live there with your baby moms and your kids, you can’t do stuff like that.”

I ask Billy if he wants to have kids.

“Eventually. Someday. Honestly, I’da though I’d have had kids by now. I just haven’t found the right person.”

I ask them if they have any advice for kids about to graduate high school.

“Fail, stay in.” Billy laughs at his own joke.

 Ralph laughs, then says “My advice would be to make sure you’re doing something that you wanna do and not just doing it because it makes money or you’ve got things to take care of. It makes it easier when you’re doing something you like doing.”

Billy adds “I guess one thing I see a lot of is people going to college and they just pick a major or whatever and they end up changing it because they’re not sure what they want. I would say make sure you know what you want so you’re not wasting time.”

Ralph nods. “Right, that’s what I’m saying. Make sure you know what you want to do. I went to school, college for automotive. I’ve been working on cars, doing things with my hands since I was five years old. And I think I’d still be doing but there’s not a lot of money in it.”

Billy says “For me it was sort of like from experience, cause I’ve been working since I was like fifteen. When I started high school I started working. And for me it took all that experience to figure out I wanted to do something where I wasn’t behind a desk all day long. I needed to be out on the street. To figure it out, maybe just sit down and try to figure out what a passion of yours is. And then do it. But I guess that could come back and backfire because you like it and you end up doing it as a profession and hating it.”

I ask them if they mind all the bad press Pepco has gotten recently.

Ralph laughs. “I don’t take it personally, because we work really, really hard.”

Billy adds soberly “One thing I see about Pepco is that we gotta work safe. It doesn’t matter how long it takes as long as it’s safe, cause we don’t want anybody to die."