(no subject)

I came home from dropping Alex off at nursery school, went through our front gate and garden, and walked down the narrow passage between our house and the neighbors' house, which leads to our side door. Beyond the side door is a tall, solid metal gate that accesses the back of the house and the back outside area. It's all in a fairly tight space:



About fifteen feet away from the house, I saw that there was a man standing very very close to the metal gate to the back of the house. He was obviously trying to get through it or see over it. He was in a dead end, and I was standing in the passage between him and the street. Holding my baby.

"Hey," I said sharply.

He turned around, looking amused. "Hi."

"What are you doing here?!"

"Oh, I'm from BGE [Baltimore Gas & Electric]. I got a call about a tree on a wire at 837."

"This isn't 837."

"No, but I can't get back there. I was trying to see..." He finally got around to pulling out one of those clear plastic ID sleeves people wear on a lanyard around their necks. I could see the BGE logo.

"Can this gate be opened up?" he asked me.

No. No, there is no way in hell I'm going to open up the gate and let you in to the back of my house where you can scope out the kitchen door and the basement door and the back of the neighbors' house. Are you fucking kidding me?

"I really am from BGE," he assured me. "You probably saw my truck when you got out of your car."

I told him that it could only be opened from the other side, and that the back area wasn't shoveled out and that I wasn't going to walk through two feet of snow with a baby to unlock it for him. Which was true. He told me, again, that he couldn't see the neighbor's wire through my gate. I walked up the stairs and let myself in to the house, wishing there was a way to do it without opening the door and making us vulnerable in case he had given himself that BGE ID with a laser printer. Locked the door behind myself. Decided that I probably didn't have sufficient cause to call the police, although now that I write this up I'm second-guessing myself.

Baltimore has massively high crime rates. If you have a job that takes you onto people's property, you have to know that if they didn't call you themselves they are going to be uncertain about you. And, I'm sorry, but if you are a man in American society and you surprise a woman alone in a secluded area where you don't belong, you have to know that she is probably scared. Right? Am I off base with this? So he had no fucking right to be so amused and blase about the situation, and so casual about offering his ID.

I am wondering if I should call BGE to complain - and if I do, what I should say. It is legitimate that utility workers often have to access someone's equipment through a patchwork of neighbors' yards. But when we've had to do that in the past, they've asked us to set it up with our neighbors before the appointment.

I'm also wondering whether I should've handled the situation differently. What would you have done when you saw the guy? Should I have gone back down the passage to the sidewalk and yelled for him to get away from my property? I didn't even have my cell phone on me, since I was just running a ten-minute errand, so just flat-out calling the police from the sidewalk wasn't a possibility. Retreating to a neighbor's house for safety would feel like overkill. And yet.

At the time I didn't think through all the possibilities, but now that I reflect on the situation... if he'd decided to come at me, or come up behind while I was unlocking the door and force his way into the house, I could not have stopped him. There I was, alone with Colin. The more I think about this in retrospect, the more freaked out I am.

Updated to add: I called BGE and at least confirmed that they did send someone out to 837. So there's that.

BGE update.

To update my previous post: I called BGE twice this afternoon. The first time was to ask whether they had a record of a worker being sent out to a call from #837; they did. The second time was to complain.

The BGE customer service rep explained to me that BGE workers have a right to access their equipment regardless of where it is or whose property they have to cross to reach it. I explained that I was aware that he was not trying to do anything illegal; I just wanted to express concerns about how he behaved.

Apparently, in the eyes of BGE customer service he did nothing wrong. It is totally normal, she explained, for a BGE employee to climb someone's fence or attempt to get through or over a locked gate. Did she see how it might be frightening to find an unknown person trying to get through to a limited-access part of one's property? Well, she said, it's not like he was trying to break into my house.

Also: apparently he was under no obligation to show his ID unless and until I specifically asked him to do so. When I said "Hey!" and "What are you doing here?!", that didn't constitute a request for ID, so there was nothing wrong with the fact that he did not immediately provide proof of his legitimacy.

I went around and around with the customer service rep, trying to explain that although his behavior might technically be legal, it was inappropriate from a customer-relations standpoint because it scared me and could reasonably be expected to scare other women as well. I was too smart to say (although I wanted to): "Don't you realize that your guy could have been shot?! He was acting like a fucking housebreaker!"

Oh, and also also: as far as his urgent emergency need to access our back area in order to solve our neighbors' potentially life-threatening electricity problem, using technical skills so advanced that it would've resulted in significant impairment to his performance if he'd been expected to simultaneously exercise common courtesy? He was an arborist. And our neighbors made the complaint on February 6th.