I said it might be a guy in a truck, back on the 305 page, one of those is a guy in a truck and the other is something further up the chain than a guy in a truck ever gets sent for, I wrote that not two weeks ago and this week half of it came true. Different camera though. 297 this time, same corridor, south of the underpass where 305 sits, and 297 doesnt fog and it doesnt ring either, 297 just goes dead for exact hours and comes back like nothing happened, I have that logged separate from the other two because I dont mix cameras once Ive started a file on one. This week while it was dead a truck showed up right at the pole.

Two men. one stayed at the base, one went up in the bucket, and they were up there eleven minutes, I timed it because I have learned to time things, eleven minutes to fix an outage that was never reported anywhere public, it only lives in a log I keep on this site, so who called them. Nobody called them. That is twice now a repair has shown up for a problem I never filed with anyone but this page. Twice. Coincidence? No. (the bucket was the same yellow the school buses were when I was a kid, the ones that idled at the curb twenty minutes before anyone got on and I used to count those minutes too, different count, same itch. anyway.)

They didnt look at me once the whole eleven minutes, not a glance across the street, which is its own kind of tell, you dont ignore a man standing there with his phone out unless somebody already told you not to react to him, and I havent worked out yet if thats worse than being looked at. I still havent lined the dates up against the district line calls the way I said I would on the last page, I know I said I would, Im saying it again now, its on the list. The camera came back that night, I checked, static gone, timestamp overlay back in its corner where it belongs, except the counter in that corner had jumped ahead further than eleven minutes accounts for, four days maybe, could be five, the exact number matters less than the direction of it, so either the clock is wrong or the outage ran longer than my own log says it did, and my log is usually

UPDATE 10/14:

Went out to the actual pole today, daylight, because Im tired of only ever looking at it through the camera, the camera is a middle man. Walked the half block, which I almost never do because the whole point of watching from inside is you dont walk up to the thing that might be watching you back, did it anyway and looked at the hardware itself for the first time since whatever those two men did up there in their eleven minutes.

The insulators arent original. I dont know how I can tell with this much certainty and Im not going to pretend I checked a catalog, you live under a pole for six years you know its hardware the way you know a face, and the lower of the two knobs on the crossarm is a half shade warmer yellow than the one above it, same shape, same size, bolt in the center clean, no weathering on the threads at all, while the top one has rust bleeding down the screw like its been there since before I moved in. (my father used to say you can spot a replacement part by whether its trying to hide or trying to match. this one is trying to match. which means somebody cared whether I noticed, or cared whether the next guy in a truck noticed, I havent decided which bothers me more.)

Four days, maybe five, the counter jump I already logged, thats about how long new hardware takes to weather in sitting in full sun on that crossarm, so the timing lines up with itself even if the district never lines it up with anything on paper. I circled the clean one. Coincidence? no. Havent called it in. last time I called about that pole they sent the eleven minute truck, and I still havent checked whether its the same crew that shows up in the second white truck pages, same color, similar hands, I keep saying I will line the dates up and I keep not doing it. the knob is still circled. going back out there tomorrow to see if its still the warm yellow or if somebody came back for it overnight, which would answer a different question than the one I started with.