‘I’m a broadband engineer – a man nearly ran me over just because I was working’

All Adrian was doing was his job when the car drove at him.

The senior engineer for the telecom company Openreach was carrying out repairs in Midhurst, Surrey, last June, as he’d done so many times before.

It was a simple enough fix for a vulnerable customer, one that involved closing down the road, Rumbolds Hill, with the council’s permission.

‘I was in a road box, up to chest height, then all of a sudden, I hear this commotion,’ Adrian tells Metro.

‘I see traffic cones being thrown across the road. This man – he didn’t even speak to me – was throwing them before he got in his van, drove up the pavement and at me.

‘I slapped the side of the van, telling him to stop. He then goes, “Don’t hit my f***ing van”. There was no reasoning with this guy.’

Since April last year, there have been around 700 incidents of either physical or verbal assaults and threats against Openreach employees.

This was up from about 450 the year before and almost 10 times the volume reported almost a decade ago.

Engineers have been spat at, racially abused, pushed down the stairs, threatened with dogs and knives and even barricaded into homes.

Assault is now the leading cause of injuries among engineers, far above falling off ladders or tripping over potholes.

After all, when Adrian returned later that evening to finish the repairs, the same ‘abusive’ man hurled verbal insults at him.

‘”I want to drive my ‘effing car up here”,’ he shouts. I tell him the council has authorised us… but then I think, I ain’t doing this.’

So the engineer did what is now available to his 27,000 colleagues – he got out his phone and opened an app.

The app is a tailored version of one made by Peoplesafe, a workplace safety service. It allows staff to sound an SOS alarm to silently call the police, a sensor-based fall alarm and GPS tracking.

Officers arrived within minutes of Adrian pressing the panic alarm, defusing the situation so Adrian could finally work.

He adds: ‘I’ve never had an app like this. If I fell unconscious – sometimes we work kilometres in the countryside on our own – who’s going to find me?’

‘The guy grabbed my colleague and set his dogs on him’

Being an engineer always made sense to Adrian – hunched over an office computer isn’t the life for him. He’s been an engineer for nine years.

In other words, Adrian has seen and heard of it all. One of his colleagues once went to a customer’s home only to find it littered with dog faeces.

‘He says he’s not working in this environment and the guy just put a newspaper over the dog crap,’ Adrian recalls.

‘He says he still won’t work and the guy physically grabbed my colleague and threw him out the door and set his dogs on him.

‘He damaged his knee and it ruined his career as a field engineer. Customers can be like an advent calendar – you don’t know who’s behind the door.’

In times like that, Openreach engineers would phone the company’s control room and slyly ask to ‘talk to Albert’, code for them being in trouble.

There’s a simple reason why engineers face this kind of abuse, says Adam Elsworth, safety director at Openreach.

Around 45% of the time, field engineers are tinkering with WiFi routers or installing new cables inside customers’ homes.

‘We’ve heard from people who were barricaded in someone’s home who say, “I’ve locked the door, you’re not going anywhere until my WiFi is working”,’ Elsworth says.

‘They’re in someone’s home and it’s a vulnerable place – out on the High Street, people can see it and there’s a sense of protection.’

Elsworth warns that Openreach’s figures aren’t even the full picture – some staff simply see abuse as part of the job.

‘I speak to a lot of engineers who will say, “I’m just letting you know, Adam, I did fix their service,’ Elsworth adds.

‘These incidents, like what happened to Adrian, have an impact on them. They knock on the next door and think, “What am I going to see next?”‘

Openreach joined calls made by telecoms giants last year to update the law to better protect field engineers and other customer-facing workers.

The crime and policing bill, which is not yet law, will make it a standalone offence for assault on a retail worker amid a retail crime epidemic.

But this should also cover engineers, broadband companies said in a letter from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) last year.

‘The Government must act now to enshrine vital protections for all our service workers; without action now to create a strong deterrent, this problem will continue to grow,’ the 100 co-signatories said.

For Adrian, everyone should feel safe not only when they’re on the clock.

‘Women can use the Peoplesafe app on the way home. If it was going on a night out in town, I know I could use it,’ he adds.

‘It spans more than just being an engineer.’

Sussex police told Metro: ‘On June 4, an engineer working on Rumbolds Hill in Midhurst reported to police he had been threatened and that a man driving a van had behaved in a verbally aggressive manner towards him.

‘Enquiries remain ongoing.’

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