Taking inventory of all 70,000 telephone poles

For more than twelve hours a day, Nick Thomas rides his bike from one telephone pole to the next, stopping at each one with a Qwest line to audit it.

He stops, nails a metal plate to the pole, then scans the barcode and enters the information into the computer he wears around his neck. Nick tells us that he’s on a team of six people from Alden who are canvassing the city taking inventory of all 70,000 poles, “We’ve only got 50 thousand left,” he told us. We ran into him at 7 p.m. Thursday evening just as he started on Ballard. “I’ve been out here since 7 a.m.” he says. He gets paid $1.50 per pole and says he’s been auditing about 200 poles per day. We talked with another auditor earlier who tells us that when telephone companies merged and Qwest finally took over, there wasn’t a good inventory of the poles. Nick says he’s got a big swath of Ballard to do, so if you see him, you’ll know what he’s up to.