LEWISTON — If you think the road flaggers don’t see everything you’re doing in your little car, you’re wrong.

Revving the engine, inching forward, cursing them or throwing Skittles at their head because they made you stop?

They see you.

Texting on your phone or even playing Pokemon Go as you drive past?

“I even saw one guy go by eating a sandwich with both hands,” said flagger William Thiboutot, 47, of Farmingdale. “That means he was either steering with his knees or he wasn’t steering.”

They see it. And while they may not react or may just smile at you dazedly, they’re paying attention to you and your car.

They’re paying special attention to your license plate, and if you’re driving too aggressively or not paying attention, they might just share what they see with the local police.

It’s nothing personal, it’s their job — their low paying, dangerous job.

“It gets crazy out here,” he said. “I’ve had people just scoot into other lanes just out of impatience, not wanting to stop and wait their turn. But they can’t see the cars coming from the other direction. It’s just an accident waiting to happen.”

This is Thiboutot’s fourth year as a road construction flagger in Maine, and he’s seen a lot. He’s been chased off the road by swerving cars from Biddeford to Bangor, been called every name in the book by rage-filled drivers and has even been hit — once.

“Flaggers are the low man on the totem pole,” said Mark Burns, managing partner of Project Flagging, one of the larger suppliers of roadside flaggers in the state.

“The responsibility that goes with the job does not warrant how they are perceived, what they are paid or what they have to put up with,” Burns said.

The way Burns sees it, flaggers are the last line of defense in keeping lackadaisical drivers from traffic disasters. He and his partners are trying to lift the profession up by its steel-toed boots, with more thorough training, better equipment and better pay.

“You can put them out there with a vest, a flag , a hard hat and minimal training,” Burns said. “Some just hand their guys a video. You can do that and just put them out there. But if the guy does something wrong, it comes back to you.”

Maine’s standards for flaggers are pretty simple. Flaggers must wear reflective gear and carry a paddle with a “stop” sign on one side and a “slow” sign on the other. They must be trained, and that can mean something as simple as watching a 20-minute video.

Burns said his company, Maine Staffing Group, began offering job placement for flaggers in 2007. Today, it employs as many as 300 flaggers out of three offices — Biddeford, Bangor and Presque Isle — through its subsidiary, Project Flagging.

“The biggest thing we sell to our clients is reliability,” said Project Flagging partner Rick Holden. “They expect the number of people they need to be there on time every morning when they are ready to start. And we are very good at doing that, for the most part, day in and day out.”

Part of that is better pay. Project Flagger’s employees start at $9 per hour, not the more common $7.50 minimum wage. That can increase up to $15 per hour, depending on the location, as they gain experience.

“We know the more you pay people, the better caliber of people you can expect,” Burns said. “When you start thinking about putting your safety in the hands of a minimum-wage person, you should consider that. So, it’s been painstaking for us, paying our people a little bit more. But we’ve started seeing some good results with the people we are bringing back.”

Another part is the equipment. Project Flagger requires its employees to wear reflective pants as well as reflective vests, steel-toed boots and hard hats and to carry walkie-talkies. The company provides everything except the boots.

But the biggest part is the training, Burns said. All of the company’s flaggers must take a three-hour course before they are cleared to go out on the road and then come back for hourlong refreshers each year.

“We do a full classroom setting, with white boards and demonstrations and the whole nine yards,” Burns said. “They get a certificate that lets them go out on the road. And then, on a yearly basis, they get an update on their training because we are trying to raise the bar.”

But while a good portion of the course is devoted to state rules regarding traffic control during construction, public relations is just as important. They teach their flaggers not to react to angry drivers.

“When they pave a road it takes longer because the job site gets stretched out and the people get angrier,” Holden said. “We teach the flaggers to be polite, to not verbally engage. Don’t get into an argument with them. We spend a lot of time talking about how to deal with a whole bunch of scenarios.”

Burns and Holden know firsthand how it goes. The company had only offered flaggers as a service for a couple of years when they landed a job that required more bodies than they had available.

“We had everyone from the office, including some of the ladies from the office and their husbands,” Burns said.

They all trooped off to Ellsworth and took up positions along Route 1A.

Holden said drivers were horrible, throwing food at him when he made them stop and calling him names.

“It really opened our eyes to what our flaggers go through,” Burns said. “We saw how rude the drivers really are, how unresponsive they can be, how they jockey for position and how dangerous it can be.”

They all have stories about bad drivers.

Monica Garland, 39, a Project Flagger employee for four years, said she was nearly hit at Exit 15 in Yarmouth. She’d stopped two lanes of traffic while the flagger on the other side let his traffic go. But a driver behind her got impatient, pulled into the oncoming lane and shot past, narrowly missing her.

“I had to lift my leg out of the way, or I’d have been hit,” she said.

There’s not much a flagger can do, except take down the license plate number and report the driver.

“Flaggers will tell them they’ll record the license plate, and they’ll say, ‘You can’t do that,'” she said. “Oh yes, we can.”

Thiboutot was hit last year in Portland.

“I was standing on the curb and the lady was mad because I motioned for her to slow down,” he said. “She darted right at me and clipped me with her mirror as I was trying to get away. It was minor. She took off, but we got her plate and they caught up to her.”

staylor@sunjournal.com