My role? It included opening my meter base and taking measurements with my own meter. Setting up my ladder to access mast connections. Hooking up and removing test loads.
Look, I felt perfectly at ease doing these tasks - but I guarantee that lots of official rules were cast aside. All others were PoCo employees. At least, with my boots, hard hat, and gloves I sort of looked like I was part of the crew
I suppose the fact I had gone to a class last month, and had the PoCo super sitting next to me, might have helped the situation.
As for the other folks in the area .... well, lots of people have learned to expect the worst from authority. Some of the fear was based upon ignorance; all they knew was that there were suddenly strange men traipsing through their yards, doing tasks that made no sense to them.
Some had their worst fears surface, where the loss of power as connections were replaced was thought to be disconnection
for late payment.
Most interesting were the folks racing to their yards, trying to replace the meter seals they had broken for some dishonest reason.
