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Harold Brown Jr. sees it all – whether he wants to or not.
“You see all kinds of things, I tell you,” he said.
So the NIPSCO meter reader has learned to stare straight ahead when walking past windows. Because sometimes things happen inside those windows that neither Brown nor the people inside are expecting him to see.
But the views – wanted, unwanted, summer, winter – are just part of the job of a meter reader. Day in, day out, rain, shine, sleet, snow, fog, ice, glorious June and chilly fall, Brown is walking his routes, reading meters so that Northern Indiana Public Service Co. can accurately bill its customers for the natural gas they use.
You might think you know your neighborhood well, but chances are you don’t know it as well as Brown does. Because Brown is in your yard once a month. And every one of your neighbors’ yards, too.
Although it might not be Brown himself who reads your meter, you can substitute any of the 16 other meter readers in the office that covers Allen, Whitley and Adams counties, and the facts are unchanged: They see your house up close and personal, and not just the part facing the street. That pile of junk hidden behind the fence? They don’t just know about it, they step over it trying to get to your gas meter.
Here’s another fact about meter readers: They’re at your home in the daytime, when people are at work, so it’s quiet and hardly anyone is around. Except the dogs.
And yes, Brown knows them, too.
“That’s our two biggest things,” Brown said as he hustles between houses in Fort Wayne’s Williams-Masterson neighborhood, just east of the intersection of Fairfield Avenue and Taylor Street. “Gates and dogs.”
There are about 11,000 licensed dogs in the city of Fort Wayne, and untold numbers more that are unlicensed. Many of them are outside full time, and even those that aren’t spend time outside answering the call of nature.
Dogs and strangers – no matter how often Brown walks your route, your dog considers him a stranger – are a bad combination.
In the quiet of the morning, as Brown quickly moves from house to house, there is only the sound of steel wheels on the railroad tracks to the north, and the barking of dogs. Dogs that sound as if they think your calves would make a nice meal.
So Brown carries mace, which he’s had to use only once in the past two years, and a “dog stick” – an aluminum stick about 2 feet long with a handle on one end and a tennis ball on the other. Brown also has a rope taped to it for a carrying sling.
If a dog approaches – and Brown does everything he can to avoid that situation entirely – the idea is “you let ’em have (the tennis ball) while you’re going the other way.”
If that fails, there’s the mace. If the mace fails, you run.
“If you see me running past, it’s every man for himself,” he said, laughing.
Brown carries a hand-held computer called an Itron. He enters the readings into it. The device not only gives him his route but also spells out details such as which side of a house the meter is on and whether a dog lives there.
He wears a neon green vest with “NIPSCO Meter Reader” emblazoned in blue and rubber boots, which today have ice cleats strapped on. The reason becomes clear at the first house, where the meter is in a 4-foot-wide space between two homes where the ground could double as a bumpy skating rink.
The neon vests are relatively new, NIPSCO spokesman Larry Graham said, but welcome. When people see someone walking quickly past their windows, the vest makes it immediately clear who they are and what that person is doing. That wasn’t always the case before, and – just as with dogs – surprise is rarely a good thing.
Brown doesn’t only see what your house and yard looks like, he also sees how things change: These past two years as a meter reader have given him a front-row seat for the nation’s mortgage crisis.
Take the Williams-Masterson neighborhood. It was suffering in many ways before the crisis. But as the economy went south, so did people’s ability to make their house payments, and the number of foreclosures and board-ups have soared. Abandoned, the houses deteriorate quickly.
“You see all the signs and everything. All the foreclosure signs,” Brown said. “You see the neighborhood change.”
There are about 110,000 single-family homes in Allen County. According to RealtyTrac.com, almost 1,400 houses are bank-owned or soon will be. And that does not include thousands that have already been through the foreclosure process. There were more than 5,000 sheriff sales in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
The homeowners who remain suffer, too, as the value of their homes drops because of all the empty houses nearby. It becomes easier to let your property go, maybe put off painting the fence or fixing the gutters. And Brown sees it all.
At one house, after knocking on the door and asking the woman to put her dog inside – “big German shepherd,” he explains – he leads the way from the gate on the west side of the house, around the back to the meter on the east side, which is inaccessible from the street.
But to get to the meter, he has to step around an old utility sink lying on its side, over a cinder block and some boards, around what appears to be a drip pan for changing motor oil, over a huge chunk of ice, around a tipped-over garbage can, past a glass window leaning against the neighbor’s house, over some aluminum siding and past a beat-up laundry basket.
All in a space about 3 feet wide.
And not all the dangers are on the ground. Numerous times, Brown steps over long ice hunks that have fallen out of gutters.
“That’s a nice big one there,” he said, pointing at one. “That’d put you to sleep.”
Believe it or not, it’s worse in the summer: The meter at this house is close to the ground, and he has to bend down to read it. When the air is warm and the dog piles are ripe, that puts his face close to the source of some serious odors.
“I just roll with it,” Brown said. “You just keep moving.”
And moving is key – the average route has him reading 300 to 400 meters a day. Some routes are as high as 1,500 but include apartment complexes that have banks of as many as 50 meters all in one spot. Today, he has 522 meters to read.
Brown also has a few tricks up his sleeve for getting at hard-to-reach meters. At one house, he peers through the slats of a privacy fence; at another, he uses a monocular to read it from a neighbor’s yard.
The most frequent question Brown gets from people he meets while walking his routes is some version of why NIPSCO still uses meter readers.
“The main thing is they thought we could read them from the street like the water company and AEP,” Brown said.
But the capital investment required for such a capability would be enormous: NIPSCO would have to replace about 1 million meters with new meters outfitted with radio transmitters, and for now at least, it’s cheaper to keep checking them by hand.
In the winter, the people Brown meets along his route tell him he has the worst job in the world.
In the summer, they tell him he has the best.
But it’s not the weather, good or bad, that makes his job great – it’s those same people.
“I love it, yes I do,” Brown said. “You get to meet a lot of interesting people.”
