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mburnamfink 's review for:
Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America
by Douglas Scott Delaney
Douglas Delany is a man split in two. One side is a professional writer with short stories, plays, and movie scripts under his belt. But when writing doesn't pay the bills (which is often) out comes Delaniac, the tower dog. Tower Dogs are the blue collar heroes of the cellular revolution. They're the poor bastards who climb up hundreds of feet in conditions from blizzard to sweltering heat to make sure calls and texts flow smoothly through the air. It's grueling, dangerous work, and all for $14.50 an hour.
The central narrative covers Delaniac's return to the towers in 2008, when he had a baby to feed to a particularly fruitless round of rejections. He worked jobs around New Jersey for a company founded by a former roommate, a sitcom actor who's sidegig turned into a successful business. The stars of the book are the other tower dogs: Godfather, Vic with a D, Triple J, Crack Baby (surprisingly solid), Frogger (surprisingly incompetent). It's long days and longer nights at BBQ "debriefings" in motel parking lots.
Delany's goal is to depict his comrades as they really are, and I think he succeeds. Normal people do not climb towers. These guys are freaks, but the veterans are by and large skilled professionals. There's not a lot of room for fuckups on towers. The thing is that a lot of people wash out on the way to veteran status. Frogger and Sean Dog are the local antagonists of the book, two Central Floridians so dumb it's a wonder that they can breathe. One of them doesn't know colors! Not colorblind, just never learned what "blue" or "yellow" was. Frogger gets fired after he gets hit by a truck crossing Route 17 (six lanes of 55 mph traffic) to buy beer. Sean Dog should have gotten fired after tossing a ton of discarded coax cable off a rooftop, which could have easily killed someone on the ground. He makes it until he glasses a dude in a bar and goes to jail.
The other narrative is Delany trying to sell the story, first as a Deadliest Catch style reality show, then as an NBC Dateline investigation. The Dateline investigation happens, the reality show doesn't. And here the enemy is The System. Tower Dogs die by the dozens. Delaniac would tell you that almost all of the dead killed themselves by failing to follow simple safety rules about clipping onto the tower and checking your lines. Delany will tell you that it's because the cheap bastards at say, Verizon are insulated by at least two layers of middlemen from the guys plummeting to their death, and it'd be too slow and expensive to do it right.
This is a gripping story. And one with a happy ending. According to Wireless Estimator, the premier industry tracker, 2013 was a peak year for fatalities, with 14. Every year since 2015 has seen single digit deaths, and only 2 deaths in 2023 and 2024. That's two families who'll never see their son or husband or dad again, which is two too many, but it's a dramatic improvement.
The central narrative covers Delaniac's return to the towers in 2008, when he had a baby to feed to a particularly fruitless round of rejections. He worked jobs around New Jersey for a company founded by a former roommate, a sitcom actor who's sidegig turned into a successful business. The stars of the book are the other tower dogs: Godfather, Vic with a D, Triple J, Crack Baby (surprisingly solid), Frogger (surprisingly incompetent). It's long days and longer nights at BBQ "debriefings" in motel parking lots.
Delany's goal is to depict his comrades as they really are, and I think he succeeds. Normal people do not climb towers. These guys are freaks, but the veterans are by and large skilled professionals. There's not a lot of room for fuckups on towers. The thing is that a lot of people wash out on the way to veteran status. Frogger and Sean Dog are the local antagonists of the book, two Central Floridians so dumb it's a wonder that they can breathe. One of them doesn't know colors! Not colorblind, just never learned what "blue" or "yellow" was. Frogger gets fired after he gets hit by a truck crossing Route 17 (six lanes of 55 mph traffic) to buy beer. Sean Dog should have gotten fired after tossing a ton of discarded coax cable off a rooftop, which could have easily killed someone on the ground. He makes it until he glasses a dude in a bar and goes to jail.
The other narrative is Delany trying to sell the story, first as a Deadliest Catch style reality show, then as an NBC Dateline investigation. The Dateline investigation happens, the reality show doesn't. And here the enemy is The System. Tower Dogs die by the dozens. Delaniac would tell you that almost all of the dead killed themselves by failing to follow simple safety rules about clipping onto the tower and checking your lines. Delany will tell you that it's because the cheap bastards at say, Verizon are insulated by at least two layers of middlemen from the guys plummeting to their death, and it'd be too slow and expensive to do it right.
This is a gripping story. And one with a happy ending. According to Wireless Estimator, the premier industry tracker, 2013 was a peak year for fatalities, with 14. Every year since 2015 has seen single digit deaths, and only 2 deaths in 2023 and 2024. That's two families who'll never see their son or husband or dad again, which is two too many, but it's a dramatic improvement.