’m daddy’s baby. Me and daddy always did everything together.

Yup, I’m daddy’s girl. I’m a tom-boy, always have been. I never liked girl’s stuff. Never liked dresses or any of that stuff.

I like getting’ my hands in it. I like to go down a road and see a building and say, “I wired that. I did that job and it looks good.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a girl or a boy. It just makes me happy. It just tickles me when I can out-do somebody else. What’s your work? I can do it.

But I’m still in the South and I’m in a man’s world. On my first job as a leader the guy called my boss the first afternoon after we started workin’ and he said, “what in the world did you send me a girl for?” And my boss said, “I sent you an electrician.”

The job took four months. Right at the end of the job I had scheduled my vacation for a week. I mean for months it had been scheduled. And I had all the plans set and the guy said, “You can’t leave, you’ve got to finish this job.” And I said, “I’m sorry, we’ll get somebody else out here. I talked to my boss and he knows that this has been scheduled and we’re gonna do something because I’m not going to be here.” So this other guy came out there and I showed him everything that had to be finished. Well, I go back to the shop that afternoon and my boss told me the guy called and said I couldn’t leave. So my boss told him that I would make arrangements and the guy said, “No, we’ll just put the job on hold and when she comes back in a week, she can finish it.”

That made me feel good. Now when I see that guy he’s like “Hey! How are you doing? Hey, I got a job I want you to look at.”

Stories from the Field