Transit – Responsible

Why is it responsible for me being where I am today?

Well there are 2 reasons.  The first reason is that I learned a lot and did a lot of growing up.  It’s a pretty unique place and while it’s not perfect if you are ambitious transit has the ability to do a lot for you.  In my previous post “Transit – The Good” I summarized this.  The second reason is because transit is where I learned what my calling was.  I interview and didn’t get the MIS assistant position in January of 2005.  I still feel I was the most qualified of all the cantidates, but I didn’t necessarily represent that well enough in the interview, so I’ll give Adam a pass.  But this is not what’s important, what’s imortant is that preparing for this interview did something to me.  It made me realize that working in technology was what I wanted to do.  I had always kinda wanted to do it, I was always good with computers, and I was always good with logic.  But I was a little scared and I was a little unsure if I was really of the caliber of a computer programmer or a system administrator.  The preparation for this interview helped re-awaken my love of computers.  This interview is what inspired me to go back to school and try and get into the CS major.  Then when the job came up again I interviewed, got it, and ran with it.  The 2 years I spent working in MIS are also responsible for me being where I am.  I can honesly say after spending a year at a real software company that the lessons and the growing pains from 2 years there prepared me well for working in the industry writing software.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my 3 part 2346 word explanation of what transit has meant to me.  It was a big part of my life for 4 years, and ended up being responsible for so much more than any other single entity (not named Vanessa) in college.  Times wern’t always good, but as a whole transit had a profoundly positive effect on me.

Thank You Umass Tansit Service.

Transit – The Good

Why was it the best decision I ever made?

Well lets start with the obvious… Vanessa.  Yup, that’s right, I met my fiance (only for a few more months) at transit.  I remember driving to work one day to a dispatch shift in the rain.  On my way I saw this training bus coming in the opposite direction. Now the signs on our training busses say “Training” as you would expect, then they change to a secondary sign that says “No Passengers”, and those 2 signs just rotate through the whole time.  This bus had some issues with the sign however and with the left panel of the sign out, and it was raining mind you, the “training–no passengers” sign turns into, yup you guessed it, ”  raining–  assengers”.  So there she was, my future wife coming toward me, in the rain, whilst I was heading in to be her dispatcher, in a bus labeled “raining assengers.”  Gotta love it.  Of course I didn’t really remember her from that day because when she came in from training she just threw her clipboard on the counter and kinda stormed out because her ex boyfriend was kinda stalking her and that was putting her in a bad mood.  But that topic is neither here or there.  <~~ love that!  The real anecdotal story of how I actually met her has to do with the fact that a) the day she met me she thought that I was just a meat head and b) our first conversation went as follows:

Me: Hey, nice you meet you, … filler small talk …

Me: you should come apply to work at transit

Her: yea, I kinda already did, I actually just finished training today

Me: Ohh *smiles, kinda embarasses*

and from there, the rest is history!

Now on to the important, but slightly less so stuff.  I have the kind of personality that if I have a goal to attain, I am going to attain it, and you should probably not get in my way.  I worked my first shift 4 weeks before the end of the semester, and yet managed to work 207 hours earning me a point toward seniority that semester.  Transit has system that was setup for me to succeed.  There are many promotional positions (i. e. many goals for me to attain), plenty of hours for people to work (plenty of opportunity for someone to give of themselves for the good of transit by taking that open shift that goes to 3 am on the tail end of what will end up being a 13 hour day), recognition for the people who do well and sacrific for the team, and (what was best for me) plenty of opportunity for supervisors to see how god of a worker you are.  Whithin 4 months of the day I got my license I was selected, quite out of the ordinary, for dispatcher training.  In my head at the time this was a tremendoud honor because this was the position that only the top 30 (out of about 150 or so) drivers were in at any given time.  Inspired by this I made it my duty to be the best at every aspect of this training, and show everyone at transit just how good I was.  Yes, a little cocky, but as it turns out I was justified in feeling this way.  The skill portion (parkign school) I nailed with flying colors… So much so that I was asked by the person who ran it if I wanted to be one of the leaders of the bus washing crew later that semester.  The dispatching part of the training I was also good at.  On a scale of 1 to 5 for a set of competencies I consistently scored at least 4 and usually 5 on almost every one.  This gave me a sense of pride, and fueled my desire to succeed in any meritocracy.  I finished the training in 3 weeks (faster than anyone at the time could remember someone finishing, and faster than I saw anyone finish in the next 4 years after that), and was the first person in my training class to work an actual RO shift.  I finished so fast in fact that I ended up having 3 people from my training class observe me while I was working actual shifts and they were finishing up their training.  At this point I want to take a break and mention that I am not trying to pat myself on the back.  I was a skilled and competent dispatcher, but was still green, brash, and far too cocky.  But I got a taste of promotion, I got a taste for what it was like to be looked at as someone who exceeds even the other people who were ahead of the curve, and I got a taste for what it was like to push through the crown and take what you deserve.  At this point I was hooked.  I made Uldeder, Trainer, Field Trip Driver and later Coach Driver, Eventually (after an incident I will talk about in a second) I made it to DS which was a position reserved for only the upper eschelon of dispatchers and signified that you were a person whom the staff trusted as one of the top role model dispatchers.  Finally after about 2 years of working at transit I made it to student staff which was the highest position a student could obtain without a bachelors degree and a full time commitment to work at umass.  More on that later.   Another thing I learned at transit was to tame my ego, and not be so cocky.  One day when I was uleading I was irresponsible and forgot where the bus was parked.  As was always the case with me, since I knew I was good and I knew I would never hit anything, when I would take off from a stop in a bus I just gunned it.  This was a tried and true technique that was taught to me when training to ulead, but that is still no excuse.  Another thing I didn’t do was fix my door side mirror, once again because I didn’t need it.  The combination of not fixing the mirror plus me not remembering where I was parked plus tinted windows plus the practice of flooring it whenever I went froma stop equals a ten foot gouge in the side of a bus from dragging it along a column in the garage.  This event may have been the single most important thing to happen to me, as a worker, in my life.  I was stripped of my ulead duties for the next 9 months (ulead was my favorite promotion too), I was no longer looked upon as being untouchable, and TR-100 (the number of the bus) was a black mark that I would catch shit for for the remainder of my time at transit.  In one moment gone was the brashness, gone was the cockyness, and gone was the recklessness.  I spent the next year as a good little worker bee, worked my driving shifts, trained my trainees, did well by my dispatch shifts, but mainly tried to stay out of the spotlight.  It was also at this point where I started to develop some inspiration in life.  Ya see after that semester where I moved up through the ranks at transit, I started to care less and less about school.  The fall of 2004 was the culmination of thislack of caring wher eI went a perfect 5 for 5 failing every class.  Not because I was stupid and not because I couldn’t do it, but because I just didn’t care anymore about school.  I was enjoying my time at transit and, as far as I could tell, this was a pretty good life to live.  Work hard all day, drink hard all night, wakeup, and do it again.  What could be better?  Well as it turns out, that gets old.  I took the spring semester off and thank god I was able to finagle umass into retroactively withdrawing me for the fall semester (mainly since the last class I went to was in September).  That spring semester taught me a lot.  No classes meant that I could utilize all my time to work at transit.  Yup, all of it, 50 hours a week, driving busses, $10/hour, woo hoo (this is sarcasm, but it looses a little bit in print).  This was the time where I realized that working 50 horus a week for $10/hour… well it kinda sucks,  I was bringing home good money relative to any other point in my life, but in the end $1600 a month after busting your ass doesn’t goo too far.  By the end I was burnt out.  I found my inspiration… I was going back to school and, no matter what, I wasn’t going to live my life like that.  I followed that semester with 14 credits@3.7, 18 credits@3.85, 8 summer credits@4.0, 16 credits@4.0, 12 credits@4.0, and could finally say that I had learned something in school besides how to get drunk on $4 and enjoy it.

Transit – The Bad

Why was it the worst?

I was entering my 4th year with 74 credits (16 credits behind) and I was taking a fairly difficult coarse load of 3 upper level Math/CS courses, a course I wanted to do well in because it was taught by the chancellor, and a jokingly easy french class.  I came into the semester determined to succeed because of a terrible spring semester the year before where I managed only a 2.3 and my cume was stuck around 2.6.  The problem is, I didn’t have any direction.  I went to school to be a math teacher, and I was frustrated that I was taking all these calsses that I woudl never use.  High school students will never be taught advanced number theory, yet I had to take it to be able to teach them?  After about a month I started working at transit, and once I got that big fat $300 paycheck, it seemed like a good idea to take that extra shift in-stead of going to class.  What’s one class?  What’s that, they have more opens, and they’ll give me overtime–I’m there!  After a few weeks of training I got my license on October 12th and started driving shifts on October 14th.  Then I had a goal… 180 hours by the end of the semester and I would get a raise next semester, and an all important seniority point.  Fast forward to January, I got my raise (worked 207 hours I think), I managed a 0.9 GPA that semester (A in french even thought I skipped the second test, the final, and hadn’t gone to a class since mid October), and I was well on my way to becoming a transit all-star.  Problem was, I was also on my way to failing out of school.  After that semester my cume dropped to 2.3, and I had no desire to be a math major anymore.  I dropped to a half time student and focused on making transit my home away from home.

Transit – Introduction

I was a bus driver in college.  I started in September of 2003 at the beginning of my 4th year in Amherst and, at the time, the decision to work there was both the best and worst decisions I had ever made and is probably the decision most responsible for me being where I am today.  Transit was the first time I had made over $8/hour and, at 8.80/hour + overtime, it gave me the ability to bring home what was, for a college student, a pretty decent pay check.  I was living off campus and that paycheck was enticing.  In addition I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life; I didn’t have any direction.  Transit was able to give me direction, albeit in the wrong direction at first.  It, along with the people who worked there, was able to be my teacher, mentor, father, priest, savior, entertainment, disciplinarian, and about anything else you can think of all rolled into one.

Over the next few days I’ll explain what I mean by the best, worst, and most responsible.  To give each of these adequate time they’ll ge ttheir own posts and to give me time to write them I’ll spread them over a numebr of days.

And as always thus far: Without this, I wold not be the man I am today.