Questions I never got asked

Are memes dead? If yes, hooray! It’s safe to go blogging again.

I took part in memes once or twice, but cringed while doing so.

Not because I think they sucked like so many chain letters that promised good luck if passed along and eternal damnation if you didn’t, but because the questions posed either didn’t interest or didn’t apply to me. Many were aimed at 16- to 30-year-olds living in some suburb somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA and packed with questions about tattoos, the local mall, school, dating, your parents, God, baseball, and your last holiday in Jamaica. In other words, written with a separate species in mind.

So here’s a meme I never took part in, because it never arrived my way. An expat meme, with questions I might have answered had anyone bothered to ask them. Now it’s too late.

How long have you lived away from your home country? Going on 20 years.

Do you still feel like you’re just visiting? All the time. I’m serious.

What do you notice the most has changed about your home country when you go back for a visit? More American influence in media, language and culture in general.

If you were to move again, would it be back to your home country? Without a doubt.

Do you ever get homesick? Only in the run-up to a holiday back home. You can tell right here because I start to write memory-laden posts about the old days.

If you read the news, do you read it in your native language or that of your host country? English mostly, but German and French as well.

What do you like the most about Germany? The amount of free time I have. It’s something I value very highly. That and no Sunday shopping. One day a week where consumerism has to hit the brakes.

What grates you the most? Whiners who bitch and moan about Germany but refuse to leave, offering up a dozen excuses for not doing so. Get the hell out if you don’t like it. What are you waiting for? Someone to decide for you?

Did you speak the language of your host country before you arrived? Not a bit.

How long did it take before you felt comfortable speaking the language? I’m still not completely comfortable unless I’ve had a couple glasses of beer.

If people switch to English when you speak to them in their language, how do you react? I like it! It means they’re reaching out for a connection, which is good, so I usually say something back in English to see how far it will go.

What has been the biggest change you’ve had to make in leaving your home country? In Hamburg, I can’t go hiking in the mountains.   There’s no skiing or mountain biking worth getting excited about for a thousand km, and I can’t just drop by a tennis court anytime and start playing.

If there were a button to improve anything about your expatriate life, what would it say on the button? For free flights home, press here.

**So, that’s it.  You are not required to pass this on.  You may, however, look closely at that photo and tell me what’s weird about it.  Aside from the guy on the right.

three drabbles

A while back I started going to an informal writers’ group here in Hamburg.

One evening someone mentioned the drabble, a story form I’d never heard of.

The word itself at first glance seems too close to dabble to take very seriously, though once you start on one you’ll see how difficult it is to do.

A drabble is supposed to test the writer’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.  These ones are all true stories on the same theme, each as close as possible to 100 words long.

Con artist escape

He approached me at my table, sat down, and soon was calling me friend.

We will have a good time at the party tomorrow night, he said.

Just let me call my mechanic to see if my car is ready.

Bad news, he said. It needs a new clutch, and I’m short of cash. Will you lend me $80 until tomorrow?

It sounds like a great time, I said, but I have to go back to my hotel to get the money.  Will you wait for me?

It would have been fun to go that party, had there been one.

Lies at the office

We don’t pay overtime here, the boss said.

Little did he know I knew where they kept the bills.

Sure enough, he’d sent the client an invoice for overtime he didn’t pay us.

He was lying to us, lying to the client, and pocketing the difference.

I was so pissed off, I gave notice the next day.

Telling colleagues the score gave mixed results.

Two more quit like I did, but others resented me.

I guess some would prefer not to know.

Lies all the time

I asked my married friend why she never wore a wedding ring.

Because I lost it, can’t find it, and my flute playing! It gets in the way.

She went rigid telling me, eyes fixed, voice robotic.

This from someone who’d told me she was a good liar.

The ride back was filled with meaningless words.

When she left I said: I don’t know when I’ll see you again.

I did my best to make sure I never did, and it worked.

Do I miss her? In the way a recovered cancer patient misses his tumour.

If you screw up, you could kill someone

By the time I was 19 and started training in McBride, BC, for my summer with the Canadian National Railway, I’d already racked up a long list of jobs from house-builder to ferry deckhand to supermarket stockboy, but none so far boiled down to this: If you screw up, you could kill someone.

That point was hammered home my first day of training with a jovial, red-faced, pot-bellied, silver-haired gent named Jim, who told me the story of why being precise in everything you do on this job was a matter of life and death.

In 1950 the Canadian army was sending troops over to fight in the Korean war.  The troops were often sent west to Vancouver by train, but one of those trains never made it.  It slammed head-on into a passenger train, killing 17 soldiers and four train crew.

Here’s how it happened, or rather, here’s how I heard it, because there are different versions out there.

The train order operator’s job was to pass messages from the train dispatcher to the trains, either at the station before the train left, or as they were rolling past stations down the line, so the train crews knew where they’d be meeting trains coming the opposite direction.   Much of Canada’s mainline train traffic is now double-track, but back then most areas were single-track, with sidings every few miles to pull off and let opposing trains pass.

We’d bang out messages – called train orders -  onto a form as the dispatcher dictated them over the wire, and repeat the order back to him.   The dispatcher would then give the OK that what we’d typed out was correct.  After the dispatcher was sure that all trains had their meeting points planned out, he issued a clearance to attach to the orders and we’d hand it over to the crew.  Back in 1950, even the high-traffic mainline trains between major Canadian cities were still being run this way.

One day an operator, after repeating back a train order, noticed he’d made a mistake, so he threw the order away and typed out a new one.

Unfortunately, he made two critical errors.  He not only wrote the wrong meeting point on the new order he typed out, he failed to repeat the order back to the dispatcher.  Had he repeated the order with the mistake back to the dispatcher, he and the other operators listening in to the repetition would have immediately spotted the wrong meeting point, and he’d have had to go back and type it yet again until he got it right.

As it was, he passed a message along to the passenger train to meet the troop train one station beyond the point the dispatcher thought they would meet.

So the troop train and the passenger train met in the middle – head on, around a curve, in the middle of the Rockies.

The train order operator, a young man only three years older than I was when I started my training, was charged with manslaughter.  In the trial, his lawyer argued that the man was actually being used as a scapegoat, and that the real culprit was the shoddy way the railways were being run.  Standing up in the courtroom, he held the railway rule book high over his head and ripped it to shreds, saying the rules by which the railway was then running trains were unsafe and must be amended.

That’s why on the rule book I was issued it said: Uniform Code of Operating Rules, Revision of 1962 on the cover.  They completely re-wrote the rule book based on that one disaster, resulting in a daily routine for train order operators from then on:

All train orders had to be letter perfect.  All times and all place names had to be spelled out letter-by-letter in the operator’s repetition back to the dispatcher.  And if a mistake were made, you could be charged with a criminal offense if it were found that you’d passed the order to the train without having first repeated it back.

The operator’s lawyer, by the way, was none other than John Diefenbaker, a man who later became Canada’s Prime Minister.

Caveat: I’ve re-told this story as I remember it being told to me.  When looking up for information on what’s known as the Canoe River disaster, you come up with several variations.

Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a trainspotter.

The railway that’s in my blood.

Exactly 30 years ago today I stepped off a Via Rail passenger coach in the middle of the night in McBride, BC, to begin training for a summer job with Canadian National Railways.

They say once you’ve worked for a railway, you might leave the job, but the job never leaves you.  The trains get in your blood.  I believe it.

I even shoot videos of them.  Here’s a westward CN train at Redpass, BC, taken on our last family trip to Canada in 2006.

Although it was mostly office work, a vital part of the job involved standing right alongside the tracks facing an oncoming freight train exactly like that one.  As the engine got close, I’d reach up and pass messages attached to a long pole to the engineman leaning out of the cab.  Once the 100 cars or so had rolled by, I’d pass a copy of that message to the conductor standing on the back steps of the caboose.

The job was called Train Order Operator.  On the CN, it doesn’t exist anymore.  The implements we used to perform it are now in museums, and some of the buildings we showed up to work in are themselves being used as museums to display them.

The caboose is also long gone, replaced by a beacon that sends vital information about the air pressure in the train’s brake system by radio to a display up in the front-end cab.

So is the first office they sent me to work on my own.    Sixty miles up the hill east of McBride in the middle of the Rocky Mountains on the edge of Moose Lake near the headwaters of the Fraser River, I’d sit in a cramped, fly-infested cube wedged between the mainline tracks running between Vancouver, BC and Jasper, Alberta, and the branch line tracks that started at Redpass Junction and ended about 550 miles west on the coast at Prince Rupert, BC.

Right on the spot you see in that video.

Wedged at the bottom of a valley surrounded on all sides by some of the finest Canadian parkland wilderness you can find, I’d sit completely alone at the height of summer in my overheated little cubbyhole and type out those train orders on a manual typewriter as the dispatcher dictated them.  Once he issued the order, I’d repeat it back by spelling out every place name and every number letter-by-letter, bundle the order in a string along with a clearance – an OK from the dispatcher that the train crew had all the messages it needed to get down the next stretch safely – and pass it along to the train.

The trains would roll by the mainline tracks about once an hour on busy days, but all I’d do is step out of the office and watch the wheels go by.   If there was a smoker – a wheel whose bearings had drained of grease or otherwise heated up so hot it might melt and fall off – I’d get on the line and tell the dispatcher in Kamloops, so he could radio the train to stop and have the crew check it out.

I had no messages to pass to them because the trains on the high-traffic main line were all controlled by a dispatcher hundreds of miles away using a centralised traffic control system installed in the 1960s. But on the low-traffic branch line they still used train orders, a system whose roots reach back 100 years to the beginnings of railroading, when the only way to communicate was by telegraph.

Aside from this post about falling asleep at the wheel, I’ve been waiting 30 years to write about my time on the railway.    This is the first of an occasional series.  Expect delays, derailments, and trips down side-tracks.