If your timeline has suddenly filled up with talk of linemen, no, it's not about the big boys working in the NFL trenches.
The linemen in question are the utility workers who climb poles and ride bucket trucks to keep the power on. And, as we near the tail end of Hurricane season, these workers are at the center of one of the internet's stranger recurring feuds: lineman wives versus "bucket bunnies."
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"Currently going down the rabbit hole of 'line wife' TikTok…I'm literally dying of cringe," says this X user, whose viral post has brought new attention to this subculture of blue-collar work.
What's a lineman?
For those who don't know, linemen build and maintain power lines, and that work becomes urgent during storms, wildfires, and other emergencies. Some people call them first responders, a label many would rather you didn't use. Either way, most communities love them for the simple reason that they restore power.
Doesn't hurt either that the work pays really well. According to Lineman Central, a training and job hub for line workers, the average U.S. lineman earns a little under $82,000 a year. Storm work pushes that much higher. The site reports that linemen restoring power after a hurricane or fire can earn $13,000 to $14,000 in a single week. Though it is a dangerous line of work.
Lineman Central reports about 2,400 serious nonfatal injuries per 100,000 workers each year, or roughly 1 in 42. Storm work is the most dangerous part of the job. Data from HAAS Alert puts line workers' fatality rate 400 percent above the national average for all occupations, with an average of 26 linemen killed on the job each year.
Altogether, with the occasional periods of travel combined with the high pay, linemen can be some of the highest earners in the areas they live in. Making their profession ripe for a subculture built around being their spouses.
Lineman wives and bucket bunnies
Lineman's wife culture belongs to the same family as military spouses and WAGs (the wives and girlfriends of pro athletes), just a tier below. In each case, the partner's job is all-consuming and often involves extensive travel. It makes sense that spouses build an identity and a community around it. On TikTok, that community has produced its own influencers, who document life as a lineman's spouse.
Each of those worlds also has a name for the women accused of exploiting that time apart. Hockey has puck bunnies, football has jersey chasers, baseball has cleat chasers, and music has groupies. Linework has bucket bunnies, named for the bucket trucks linemen use to reach the lines.
The accusation is the same as with any groupie. When linemen travel for storm work, bucket bunnies allegedly try to hook up with them to get a piece of that storm pay. In rural parts of the country, where linemen are highly regarded and often among the top earners, that's a real draw. The result is an annual hurricane-season standoff between lineman wives and the women they say are after their husbands — plus the people online discovering the drama for the first time.
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None of this is new. Newsweek and Jezebel both covered the feud back in 2022, and Reddit has plenty of snarky threads devoted to "entitled" spouses of service members (derogatorily called "dependas"). Nearly every job that pays relatively well, is dangerous, and keeps people away from home for long stretches has a similar niche subculture: oil wives, firefighter wives, police wives.
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The lineman's wife subculture is making the rounds again, thanks to the previously mentioned viral X post. Now that it's broken containment, many commentators are remarking on how cringe the whole thing is. So it's easy to see why it caught on.
On top of the cringe, the drama pairs a genuinely novel subculture — influencer careers built around a husband's blue-collar job — with some of the internet’s favorite targets. Linework carries working-class Southern stereotypes. The women who have become the faces of lineman wives on TikTok don’t fit the glossy image of a WAG, and they get mocked for making their husbands' jobs their entire personality. Add the usual judgment of "promiscuous" women, and you get a trashy Jerry Springer-esque showdown for people to gawk at. Cringe and entitled behavior aside, much of it runs on condescension toward Southerners, blue-collar workers, and women.
There's also the novelty. Most Americans have never thought much about the people who fix power lines, so discovering a whole soap opera built around them is fascinating, if a little voyeuristic.
Still, some corners of the internet are taking a kinder view. One X user argued it’s actually great that "regular working joes have groupies."
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Even the most underappreciated jobs deserve a fan club.