Last month, Harrison REMC’s Andrew Korte found himself in the right place at the right time.
Investigating a complaint about radio noise from a ham operator in a neighborhood some 15-plus miles away from headquarters, Korte got a surprise that had nothing to do with poles or lines.
A colleague in the accompanying bucket truck told Korte, “Hey, somebody’s in your truck.”
Once the immediate wave of panic subsided, Korte noticed a few things about the visitor. One, the rear passenger door was the one that was open, an odd choice. And, two, Korte could only see a pair of feet with socks on.
“I said, ‘Sir, can I help you with anything?’” Korte recalls. “He said, ‘I’m looking for my shoes.’
“That was the first sign to me that we had an issue.”
Harrison REMC’s Andrew Korte
It would not be the last.
While the rest of the Harrison REMC crew found issues on two poles, requiring them to kill a section of line and climb the poles to make the necessary repairs, Korte began to get to the bottom of the problem with the Shoeless Joe he had encountered.
“I was trying to figure out if he was just trying to find something in the truck or if he actually had an issue,” Korte said.
The two kept carrying on a conversation, during which the unidentified man asked the same question multiple times: “Who do you work for?”
“He kept asking that over and over again, so I knew something was wrong,” Korte said. “Then he started talking about how his feet hurt, and of course they did since he was out in socks.”
The journeyman lineman and meter tech then invited the man to sit in the truck and let the sun streaming through the windshield warm him up.
Meanwhile, Korte called Harrison dispatcher Dave Satori with a request.
“I said, ‘Hey, if you’re not too busy, could you try to find out who this guy is? He says he lives here, but I think he has dementia because he doesn’t remember his name.’”
Satori did just that, calling around to several houses in the subdivision and finally getting one of the neighbors to confirm that the man did live there, but they weren’t sure which house was his.
“Dave did the hard work, I just kept carrying on a conversation and kept him comfortable,” Korte said. “My concern was that he was dead set on finding his shoes and wanted to keep on walking, but I didn’t want him to wander off and get lost.
“We weren’t real far from a busy highway, and I could see him going too far. There were just a whole lot of things running through my mind, and I wanted somebody to know where he was.”
They eventually called the sheriff’s office, and an officer came out until they finally got ahold of his wife to get the situation and the location resolved.
“The guy, honestly, was really cool to talk to,” Korte said. “It was amazing how much he remembered and what he knew, but it was the simple things where he didn’t have a clue. I asked what he liked to eat and he just gave me a funny look. He had no idea. But he remembered where he used to work and talked to me like he’d know me his whole life. It was really sad to see.”
The man also provided a little humor when Korte asked how he got out of the house. With a serious look on his face, he told Korte, “Son, it wasn’t easy.”
But lending a helping hand came easily for Korte, who has worked at Harrison REMC for six years after spending the previous five years at Clark County REMC.
“I enjoy helping people, preferably not when something terrible is going on, but it makes my day better to help somebody,” he said. “It makes me realize that it’s not just me I need to think about.”