Lo! I am Become Heavy Metal

"Yeah, she's a fat tub of shit," the man said, adjusting an old overhead fan attached to the bulkhead, pointing it directly at his face. Clearly, I would need to whittle my thousand questions down to less than five.

"General Electric?" I asked, ignoring the crudeness of his comment.

"Yeah," he replied without taking his eyes off the fan, his tone flat, as if the topic was mundane.

"Is it set up with the two-stage turbo on the intake?" My voice probably sounded eager, like a ten-year-old asking about their favorite toy at the factory. I tried not to betray the less than basic level of  knowledge I hold on diesel engines, but by some weird quirk I knew why they did this. 

"Well, I'm not exactly sure," he admitted, wiping sweat from his bulging neck with a red handkerchief, his voice carrying a note of uncertainty.

"And are the drives DC?" I continued, pressing on, feeling a growing curiosity.

"Yes," he confirmed.

"So, it's a variable frequency system and not an inverter. I would've thought a volts-per-hertz AC system would have had an efficiency edge."

"No, no, it's all DC. Most… well, all of the new power being laid out these days are," he said, his tone less annoyed than I had expected, almost as if he was relieved to talk about something familiar.

I nodded, realizing that this was about more than just efficiency. "The game is, among other practical factors, about needing to hold constant torque at times," I mused aloud accidentally.

"You an engineer?" he asked, finally turning his attention away from the fan.

There it was again: "engineer." A term thrown around so easily these days, yet one of the most misunderstood and overused titles in modern English.

I giggled for a second, shook my head and let my self out of the cab and down the ‘armor yellow’ rail of the locomotive to ladder #2 and back to reality.

I have worked very hard to over the past few years to ground myself in a reality that builds on my strengths and omits the mistakes I’ve held over myself for, well, longer than I care to disclose. But an undeniable part of that reality is that I have been and engineer in one capacity or another more than a hand full of times. And in those positions, when I wasn’t getting pissed off and walking away from them, I learned that while I liked writing software, designing motion control systems, hydraulic controls or automated gizmos of whatever kind, I loathed the industry as a whole. And I mean that in a quite literal sense; there are to this day, companies, products and services that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I flat refuse to patronize them in any manner. Not that I have an axe to grind, (well, once upon a time I did, but that’s another story) I just saw most of what that sector had to offer as helping humans, as a whole become ‘more supider’ for profit.

And of the formally trained engineers I’d been made to ‘play nice’ with, I would let exactly two of them mow my lawn and neither actually perform any service the mower itself. In no circumstance did I wish to count myself among them. Ever. 

But there was an axe to grind; one with myself for not loving the work enough or caring for the profit that it brought. For keeping that spark of idealism alive in the face of the realities that gravitate to us all as we grow and for not embracing a path to an easier life because it would have been boring and filled with annoying ass kissers, lot lizards and related sycophants.  And as time passed, I actually started to see intelligence as a sort of burden and for what I see now as some very shallow reasons. But opportunity has a way of fluttering a way when we don't feed it and seldom does it return to roost.

I applied for no less than three hundred jobs this year and when none bit, my darkness deepened. Nearly divorced and out of touch with every corner of reality, I would have done anything to get my foot out of the trap I’d crafted for myself. But sometimes one has to push on the sides of the box to make the people inside it remember that the world has greater bounds. Whether I was inside or out of that set up is certainly open to interpretation, but it seemed that the stubborn tenacity that I come by quite honestly would not be of any use in this round; I could wad it all up with my certs and resume and burn them while the world marched on in total indifference to my plight. 

Just after my wife’s birthday in May, I received a call from a long shot of a laborer position that I'd responded to and before long, I committed my summer to (literally) jumping hoops for a position with the railroad. Apparently, an essay that I'd written that leaned heavily on the fact that my great grandfather was a brakeman and conductor with Union Pacific after the depression and how I'd be honored to bring that heritage back full circle, turned some heads. Now I can say that after my personal depression, I am a brakeman and conductor for UP, that my baby grandson with have the UP shield on his little overalls and my wife and kids will be well taken care of no matter what the days to come have for us. 

And yes, one day soon I will be an engineer and finally the thought makes me giddy; I suppose I should have been wider in scope with that loose, over used moniker.