How My Six Months Working on the Railway Changed My Life | Hacker News Reader

How My Six Months Working on the Railway Changed My Life

theatlantic.com

113 pointsqkeast69 comments

Beautiful writing.

I know the nostalgia of your first tough job. Mine was certainly not as blue as the oil fields of Alberta, nor the railways, it really wasn’t even blue collar. But I did find it tough. I was a food runner in a kitchen built to serve 90 that served 450 + catered events.

The chaos and heat was overwhelming. My most active day was doing 30,000 steps during a 5 hour lunch shift, half of which were walked with a 40+ pound tray being carried just over my shoulder (on the shoulder was not classy enough). The kitchen was easily 110 degrees and had a single comically small fan that did absolute fuck all. The steam from the washing machine blasted you every time you went to grab bread, the chef was a maniac who makes “the bear” look really chill in comparison. And even without him every person in that kitchen was ready to explode at any time.

Fortunately I make quite a bit more now than I did then. I’ve made it to the other side of the dining car window, so to speak. But I really do miss it. Especially the chaos. If you spent 30 seconds in that kitchen, you’d be confused as to how a single dish ever made it out the door. And yet we consistently served 2k+ people on our busiest days.

It was the best job I’ve ever had and likely will ever have.

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..

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 did scaffold building exactly one day. I knew why I had to absolutely start taking my opportunities more serious at the end of that day.

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.

Oh, and 3 or 4 times, someone was convicted by court to do social work and help me out for a few weeks. These were always interesting characters. We once had a girl in her mid-twenties who attacked and beat up her friend in a fit of rage because she stole her boyfriend, and was convicted to a few months on probation and to 2 weeks doing my job. Surprisingly, she greatly enjoyed the work and often told me that it was much less stressful here than in her normal job. She worked full-time at Aldi, and although it seemed to pay good money, she had recently been diagnosed with stress-induced heart arrhythmia after some years of working there.

This is so fascinating. I would totally read it if you expanded this into a full blog article on your specific experience at the time.

Another vote for this -- I'd read it as well!

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 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.

I waited tables for a few different places, none of it fine dining, but I did try to choose places with good food.

Two of the best were a homestyle italian place; I learned that smoked gouda is the best cheese for BBQ chicken pizza, and not too much sauce!

The other (my first restaurant work) was at a Turkish restaurant with homemade light brown whole wheat bread, cooked on a real stone oven. The owner, Kazim, was a bit of a wino whose stunningly beautiful wife was a PhD at the CDC in Atlanta. Opposites attact. Lamb and feta pizza is amazing.

The kitchen guy was a young-20s illegal from Mexico who hadn't seen his family in 18 months, and sent the money back. Juan was such an impressive human being. He taught me the Mexican version of the N-word, and said, "Do not ever say this." And I won't, but I remember it to this day.

And, that mezze plate was the best shift food ever, besides maybe that BBQ pizza.

Thanks for the nostalgia. Yes, I don't miss that kindof hard work, but the experience was invaluable, and I always tip well. It's an easy bit of good karma to put an extra smile on someone's face because we shared our hard-earned cash with them in appreciation for their difficult and oft-underappreciated work.

There's a lot of talk around here lately about 'vibe coding' but I'm far more into 'vibe living' where we consciously create good vibrations in the people around us. There are so many people in this world spreading their negativity who should instead take us service-oriented folks' understanding of service to humanity as a societal baseline. Not all of us who graduated out of low-level jobs retain our humility and humanity, but it makes those of us who do better, more caring and considerate citizens.

Great points. I love the idea of 'vibe living', and just being nice to people and showing genuine interest in how they are doing.

> 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.

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.

Here's the Union Pacific's management recruiting video.[1] They're up front about it being a tough job in miserable conditions. The video opens in a railroad yard in Chicago in a snowstorm at 5 AM.

The CEO started in track maintenance and worked up to driving a train.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMViWazEYoc

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...

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

"As it happened, one of my father’s sisters, Aunt Irene, was a vice president of the Canadian National Railways" kinda says it all.

Put on "Common people" by Pulp in the background when you read this article.

the part on the sandwich made me stop reading.

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

That's true, but failing was never going to have an effect on him, which is sort of the point of the song (which is really good).

Probably losing a leg would've.

facts

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

Oh my god, this is amazing. Thank you!

And Shatner is utterly perfect for it, in a very, very strange way.

William Shatner and Ben Folds Five? William Shatner and Ben Folds Five. I have always loved this cover so much.

Who started as a wire operator and rose from there. I don't think "she was a VP" has the implications that you seem to be giving it.

I had a boss once who told us why he got serious about school:

His dad had him work in the lumber mill one summer. He noticed in a few days that none of the old timers still had all 10 fingers.

----

An old relative told me why the source of hens frugality: The summer hen turned 10 was spent mowing lawns around his small town. At the end of the summer, hen spent all that money in a few hours at the fair.

----

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.

I moved a three-foot-high stack of 4x8' sheetrock from one section of strip mall through the gap in the uncovered metal studs to the next one over, maybe 10ft away. Sheetrock is heavy and unwieldy. Such mindless (but necessary) work. Unforgettable.

So, yeah, I've got much respect for our hard working brothers and sisters, even if I only did it for a summer.

But I have even more respect for you, friend. Trying to help troubled kids is infinitely more difficult and, I imagine, draining. I hope you feel the joy of your (perhaps rare) successes in helping another human being feel like someone cares about them.

My father, after retiring from his outstanding 21yr enlisted Navy career, finished his teaching degree summa lum laude. His student teaching semester was in a "last chance" high school, where a student got in his face one day. He took his degree and got a job driving heavy equipment like graders for a construction firm. He was/is far too old-school for that shit.

Peace be with you, friend.

Are you referring to something other than a female chicken?

swedish neuter pronoun

Thank you!

This reminds me of something Jimmy Carr said.

Oh! gender neutral elder, oh! gender neutral elder, what’s a joke?

YOU ARE!

"They" would have been a lot less confusing here...

I'm baffled by why one would use a Swedish pronoun in an English text. We live in a strange world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swenglish

Not uncommon for Swedish-first speakers - just accidental language bleed, as is the case with most other second language speakers.

(As for "strange world" - have you looked at the etymology of most English words? :p)

I'd guess its similar to Danish and hen meant "he" here, Han in Danish

Is this a new neo-pronoun I'm not familiar with yet?

It was first coined in the 60s and has been floating around since, but it's really only seen regular use in the past decade or so.

It probably should be "when I turned 10".

"The summer he turned 10 was spent mowing lawns around his small town."

Well, thats how I imagined it. A hen mowing lawns and spending at once. Still impressive for a hen

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.

I have to ask: what did you get for a lawn at that time? My lawn mowing career started maybe five years later but I remember 7 dollars being good pay.

On the other hand I mowed some gigantic areas for that pay, and sometimes extremely high grass. That was sometimes hours on very steep ground

I can't remember now, but I want to say less than 5 dollars. I do remember that one of my customers with a fairly large lawn paid 2 dollars an hour, which I was very happy with.

As everyone here seems to recall their blue-collar jobs, let me list some of the difficult or bizarre jobs I worked:

* Aluminum factory. Lots of acidic vapor from the bath where aluminum pieces are washed before painted. Large heaps of aluminum pieces are carried by hand between stations. Your back is breaking by the end of the day so much so it's hard to lie down straight in bed.

* Roofing materials factory. I worked in the section that made and portioned sealant. The day consists of eight hours of putting a ten liter bucket on the scales, opening the faucet, waiting for the bucket to fill, and then putting it on a pallet. Add to the whole experience the fact that the factory is in the desert where heat reaches 40 degrees Celsius most days during summer. Your clothes are permanently wet and display large sediment of salt. Rephrasing WH4K, your clothes break way before than you do. Any shirt, boots, pants will disintegrate in a matter of weeks.

* Bakery. I was hired to help baking doughnuts for Hanuka. 16 hour shifts. Start 5 in the morning and 9 in the evening you crawl home to try to get some sleep. If it wasn't so cold, I'd probably just sleep on the bench in front of the factory.

* Walking a bear cub (it was in a circus). Not physically difficult but scary as hell. Also the smell...

* Coca-Cola delivery. Hell on Earth. Worst job I ever worked. Stuff you need to haul, a lot of it by hand because the cart won't fit, or because of stairs etc. Nobody works this job for more than ten years, and you have to be exceptionally strong and healthy to get to that point. Most people start having back problems after a year or so.

* Picking. Picking avocado was a fun one though. I got to climb the trees, which was fun. Most picking is miserable though.

> 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!

The modern railway jobs, thanks to Hunter Harrison and PSR, are terrible by modern standards. Extensive over-work, safety issues, and constant cost cutting pressures while making longer and longer trains. Even while I’m searching for jobs currently, getting involved in that industry again is appalling. Source: worked at a railroad safety engineering firm (preemption and crossings)

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 know someone who did the same in the Netherlands and he couldn't be happier.

Who on earth would downvote this comment?

If I could choose a social media with no downvoting, I would. It always starts with good intentions and ends up with "this comment pisses me off and rather than reply I'm going to pretend this is a distracting take".

Off-hand downvoting seems to simply double the popularity effect of voting and exacerbate reduction in diversity of opinion. Daily I see flagged comments where I can't think of a single reason why a comment was flagged outside of unpopularity. Daily, posts that flagrantly violate the rules hit the front page. Plus, I can't say the ranking of comments actually does anything positive for the site. Ordering by most responses would likely be as effective. After twenty years of trying to justify scoring commentary I simply give up.

This isn't a commentary on moderation, btw—dang is excellent. this sort of forum is just essentially broken at a community-consensus layer. I have just come to seriously resent downvoting. I don't think it does anything positive for the site and mostly acts as a wet blanket for opinions unorthodox in silicon valley. I certainly don't see it as the bulwark between us and civility.

Downvotes help clear out false but emotive posts.

The sort of "gangs of [minority] on murder spree in [town]" posts that get so much traction on Facebook.

Even if most people dismiss it out-of-hand, it's so inflammatory that the gullible are much more likely to interact and you get exponential spread.

Maybe HN is just better than that, but I see it as a major differentiator of Reddit vs Facebook.

Slightly surprised by this as I don't associate it with higher pay (although is it ASLEF?) but I do associate it with the risk of dealing with late-night customers. I guess these conditions bother different people to different extents.

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.)

And then you finally find yourself on the other side of the window, only years later to think only about being back on the ground once again. Nostalgia, wisdom, or just humanity's constant search for something different - even if just leads you in a circle.

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.

Very much true, but your experience carries you up a level, so it's really an upward spiral.

I like to imagine that the sun is hurtling around the galactic center so the Earth is tracing a spiral around that giant black hole out here in the near-emptiness of the outer rings of our Milky Way.

https://archive.ph/gsF1Y

I'm a young software developer only 5 months into their new job (after graduating for a year, sucks out here). I feel privileged and guilty for coming out of a single parent household in one of the poorest counties in NYS without ever working one of these jobs. I only ever have respect and admiration for those that work grueling, long hours in blue-collar, hospice care, restaurants, etc.

This reads like someone who knew they'd never have to work a day in their life. At least they had the spine to admit it.

That was a great read- what an experience to have lived through

Posh kid larps as working class and learns valuable lessons about life.

railway can also be scary, 3 deaths on the night shift team in one year

TLDR: the author applied for a hard, physical job and he didn't like it, so he decided he does not want to do hard, physical job in future. Terribly fascinating.

Instead, the author decided to go into graphomania and made sure nobody published in the journal, where he was an editor, reports of molestation against Epstein. Nice.

well, that got really dark.

For anyone who was also curious about the last part:

- https://archive.ph/2XYxp - Why Didn’t Vanity Fair Break the Jeffrey Epstein Story? (Feb 8, 2022)

- https://archive.ph/iW4xi - Graydon Carter on Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Epstein and an editor’s power. (Jul 19, 2019)

- https://www.siriusxm.com/clips/clip/951fcb1d-f631-3120-4bd7-... - Vicky Ward: Jeffrey Epstein and Graydon Carter cut a deal (Audio, Jul 9, 2019)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com