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Show 193 ON TRAINS The summer before my last year of graduate school I took a job at the train yard. The position I applied for was "electrical engineer," and on my resume I presented myself as qualified by suggesting that, having worked with the telephone before, I had experience in the field. The interviewer called me out on this. "You have an impressive educational background and work history, but what experience would you say you have in this field?" Since I knew I had no hope at the job I just treated the situation as though it were an opportunity to talk to someone knowledgeable about trains. I talked about the train stations in Utah that I was familiar with, starting with the one in Helper; I talked about the invisible labor that had built those railroads in the first place. I talked about the glitzy saloon towns that had sprung up across the state during that time and how people today sometimes moved into the residual, now-abandoned houses when they were down on their luck. I rambled off everything I knew through reading or experience about trains. It was the only interview in my life in which I didn't embarrass myself. Something I said impressed him-that or there just weren't any other applicants, because he hired me. Since I wasn't qualified to do much of anything, I was essentially hired as a custodian of the railroad tracks. My job was to clean |