How My Six Months Working on the Railway Changed My Life

Mine was as a Domino's delivery driver in Angel, London. The long nights zipping in and out of cars on my moped, the generous tips you got on Saturdays, the non-descrit unmarked doors between two shopfronts that lead to an entire hidden luxury housing estate, the raucous office parties led by clearly coked up execs, and the not rare occurrences where you're invited up into someone's flat to hand deliver a pizza to their bed.

Nostalgia glasses fully on, it was best of the times.

I've had a few odd jobs before 'settling' as a software developer but while I appreciate the experience and diversity and sometimes think back on the simplicity of at least one of them, I don't really consider them the best jobs. I did a paper round (6 days a week, took about an hour), manufacturing (most brain-turn-off job ever), scaffold building (heaviest job, also because it was the height of summer), DIY store floor work (great part time job to do alongside an education), vegetable packing, that kind of thing.

Nowadays I rebuild front-ends over and over again. We're doing form fields again.

I believe everyone should work a service job at some point in their life. It gives a perspective you won't find anywhere else.

Your story brought back my memories of being a server in fine dining restaurants before landing my first programming gig. It was (mostly) controlled chaos with everyone on edge dealing with some of the most unreasonable people you could ever imagine. Did I also mention that I worked every single holiday?

It wasn't a restaurant attempting to be as regimented as The Bear, but similar story lines played out. Chefs yelling at each other, yelling at me, wanting to go out and yell at customers for ordering lamb well done, etc...

I wouldn't say I miss working in restaurants, but I do miss the finality of each service. When the last table left, that day was done. There was nothing to take home and stress about.

No nostalgic feelings here: I was conscripted when I was 19 and did my alternative civilian service in a home for Alzheimer patients for roughly a year. Although I was not directly involved in care (I managed the kitchen, gave food to the patients, did smaller repairs, cleaned), it was, by a large margin, the hardest job I ever had. It was the first time I became clearly aware that there is a part of the population that cannot even publicly complain about their workload because they are too tired in the evening to even hold a basic conversation.

Although the home looked nice and clean, and there were some sweet moments, the place in general was crazy and frightening to newcomers and visitors. Patients wandered off through the fire exits, they fought with each other, they died, they went to the toilet in the corner of their rooms, they were sexually interested in each other, grabbed breasts and ran around naked, they fell and injured themselves, they got panic attacks because they wanted to go home, because they suddenly thought they were in a bomber attack on Berlin in 1944 and had to go to the bunker - I could go on and on. One patient, a sweet old lady, was convinced that I was her fiance who died during their flight from Danzig in 1944. After a few weeks, she was convinced I had an affair with another woman, and her feelings towards me became more hostile. During my first week, an old, huge WW2 U-boat sailor became convinced he was in a bar fight and started attacking people. We had to lock him into his room.

My major responsibilities, lunch, breakfast and dinner, were usually complete chaos: imaging a room full of adults who behave like 2 year olds. They tried to eat their drinks with a fork, fell into their soup plates, threw their food onto the floor, complained about the food, refused to drink, cried, choked on the food, wandered off, all while a single patient who didn't even recognize her son anymore loudly proclaimed poems she learned in school as a little girl.

Dealing with relatives was also challenging, because they usually refused to accept the state their loved ones were in. We had one wife who repeatedly wanted us to get her husband to read Plato and Aristotle again, because "he loves doing this". But her husband, a former professor, couldn't even read or write his own name anymore and was mainly interested in trying to get female patients naked.

Other highlights include the time I confused the liquid for our industrial dish washer with a container of hand soap (they looked exactly the same) and flooded the entire kitchen and dining room with a 10 cm carpet of foam. Also, I once worked the late shift for 11 days straight, without a single free day in between. I am sure that wasn't even legal. Afterwards I couldn't remember what I did on individual days, it somehow all blurred together.

All for a pay of around 300 EUR per month (40 hours/week, back in 2007). I was so glad when it was over. But the experience greatly helped me in my later jobs, to put the workload into perspective. It was a humbling experience.

guess i'll share.

I spent my late teens driving a weed eater walking behind tractors mowing highways and state parks in North Texas. 100+F many days in the summer and required to wear work boots and eye protection (very hot), I still have scars from sunburns on my arms. Most of my family on my mom's side are West Texas oil hands and ranchers. My grandfather, all of my uncles, and most cousins are dead or their bodies broken to the point they can barely walk or stand up and live in constant pain. Widows are very very common in West Texas.

I think i'll keep my office job.

> The kitchen was easily 110 degrees and had a single comically small fan that did absolute fuck all.

I worked as a server at a Golden Corral (large all-you-can-eat buffet here in the States). One summer Sunday, the AC went out early afternoon. By the shift change, I was already literally soaked, other servers called out, so I decided to help out and work a double. Note that this was Sunday, so the church folks (nice but hardly the best tippers, as GC is cheap American grub) were more interested in buffet eating than the insane heat, so it was still packed!

But the best job I ever had was walking security routes (not for intrusions, but for spotting safety problems like leaks or smells or a worker in distress, none of which ever happened) on ships in local shipyards, including a massive BAE one. We'd walk the routes and tap the RFID tag-dots with the wand, twice an hour.

The first ship I walked (for $8/hr) was one of only four transocean cable laying ships. It had two huge vertical cyllindrical wells that stored the cables that would be fed out the back as it laid them. Getting to see the entire ship, walking up and down the ladders, into the engine room and around the bridge and those two giant wells was sooo cool.

Other ships I got to work on were a navy ammo resupply ship being decommissioned, a cruise ship, and, best of all, a huge container ship with a geek-salivating bridge whose engine room was massive and clean and spacious. I got to see it all, and be paid to exercise.

And seeing a pair of guys wrangling a huge elbow pipe section out of its very tight space using chains and pulleys to inch the giant (meter in diameter with inch-thick steel) up and over using hand-crank lever things was impressive. The connections were ringed with maybe inch-thick bolts, just massive.

I often poke my nose into my daughter's all-metal-gear Singer 503a sewing machine's top to get a whiff of that industrial grease to remind me of that badass engineering room smell.

Another great assignment was for a smaller shipyard that did small yacht repairs. It only had room to do one at a time, but the part of the walk that went through their office had a little living room-style waiting room that had a coffee table with a coffee table book on it that catalogued the Dodge brothers' (founders of the automobile company) use of their profits to build and sail luxury yachts on the Great Lakes. Those early 1900s ships were gorgeous. Those engine guys did well for themselves (I believe they built the original engines for Ford).

The key to the job, however, was I got weekly overtime at 1.5x, so I'd pick up any shift I could, as all hours >40 were $12/hr. One week I worked 64 hours, including 20 straight! My wife and I would sometimes literally just see (or just miss) each other as she got home from her restaurant work, and I would be going to the shipyard.

Thanks for the inspiration, friend. Yes, times used to be far simpler, and in many ways more enjoyable in that simplicty, sweat, and smells.

You write well. I loved my days in restaurants, and you capture it way better than I ever could. I wish I could go back, but its impossible..

It isn't like he was given some hard-to-get, high-paying, cushy office job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ainyK6fXku0

the part on the sandwich made me stop reading.

That is a good ad. Makes me want to work there. Seems quite tough.

Before working on Cayley/Magma, back in the day, I worked cattle stations in high school, mining during university breaks, with two days a week kitchen handing during term time.

My eldest son started rail work and is still doing it a decade later .. it does keep you well grounded: https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/eleven...

Are you referring to something other than a female chicken?

Same here. The summer I mowed lawns in 1973, I spent all the money on pinball and pizza in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Some of the older pinball machines were still a nickel.

In my country every kid had to do some internship as a teen (from school), I remember carrying half a ton of tiles into the third floor with no elevator while my collegues told me about doing nothing in their boring office jobs.

At least I learned how to lay tiles in bathrooms.

It wasn't as if I didn't plan to study before, but this gave me some respect for those doing that kind of construction work. It was hard, but mentally it was harder to work with troubled kids.

And going in a circle is fine. If you do arrive back where you started, you’re a different person because of the experiences you had along the way.

I’ve recently changed career in the UK — I’ve gone from web dev to a passenger train conductor/manager. The conditions are excellent, the money is terrific for the work involved, and overall the experience is very rewarding. I couldn’t be happier.

I'm assuming Biden was actively lobbied by many, many interests to stomp on the railway worker strike a couple years ago. Do you think there's any weight to that?

What does "preemption" mean in this context? (I know what crossings are.)

> Coca-Cola delivery

The shipping and handling of liquid is something I've become acutely sensitive to.

I must say that with Coca-Cola, it may be junk soda, but at least you weren't delivering beer or liquor. Among legal jobs it must be a moral struggle for some guys to deliver thousands of gallons of the stuff. At least bartenders and restaurants have discretion to stop serving customers, but delivery is just a middle-man, no-questions-asked thankless job.

I used to shop and ride the bus home, and so instinctively I avoided large quantities of liquid because they were too heavy and the cost/weight/benefit ratios favored substantial food or everyday items I could really use.

Shipping liquids seems to be a huge logistics problem overall. Instacart began charging me "heavy item fees" and a lot of drivers really hated lugging any liquids up the stairs here. And even a restaurant delivery with fountain soda[s] seemed troublesome, for many reasons! No wonder they began to steal all of my drinks!

I was trying to chase down some food-grade H2O2 and realized Amazon wouldn't even ship it here because of HAZMAT regulations, and relying on taxis isn't much better. I need to be concerned about heavy glass clinking together, how to secure bottles upright in random strangers' trunks.

There is a reason that "milkmen" and milk delivery services used to be ubiquitous in urban America. Solving the logistics of shipping cold, perishable liquids in bottles and bringing them direct to customers was a huge marketing and engineering win.

Once I had a sizable shipment of organic juice in glass bottles which was held up at the USPS station. At the counter, they told me that the bottles broke and it was a huge mess and they had to clean it up and didn't even want to show me. I have no doubt that it may have happened that way and they were enjoying the remaining bottles on my dime... can't blame 'em!