Twenty-eight years on the record

Walt Prochazka started Meridian out of a garage off White Settlement Rd in 1998 with one van and a habit that never left: photograph the panel before and after, keep the paperwork forever. He is still here, still pulling wire two days a week, because an owner who stops doing the work starts pricing it wrong.

Simone Aduba runs operations and is the master electrician of record — license #990201, the license all twenty-six of us work under on contractor TECL 990417. Here is what that actually means, because the trade lets it stay vague: in Texas, every electrical contractor must have a master electrician of record who is legally answerable for every permit the company pulls and every circuit it energizes. At plenty of shops that master is a name renting their stamp from three counties away. At Meridian she is in the office, she signs the permits herself, and she spent twelve years as a Tarrant County electrical inspector before joining — which is why our panels get dressed like they are about to be photographed for a code textbook. They are.

Two names on the door, TECL 990417 on the trucks, and a rule that has survived since the first van: if we would not put our license number next to the work, we redo the work.