Random Thoughts....

Admin lady works HR here in the department.

She's kinda old (like 60) but she looks like a train wreck.

She's doing my resignation, since I'm done with this job in uh... 7 days :D.

I get my last paycheck from her.

I always hated doing anything that involved this lady because she just talks NON fucking stop. Every single time, her entire life story.

Today I go there to do the resignation. She sits me down next to her as she types some shit into the computer. She needed me for 3 minutes.

I ended up being there for 30, listening to her talk about her daughters, her brother, her father, her husband, herself.

The other day I'm grabbing lunch with my girl, and she's there just like staring at her for a good minute before calling my name out. Today she's like "I wasn't expecting you to go out with a white girl". I was like wtf, you're an old lady married to a black guy.

She also was using her calculator to do 8+4.


This shit just blows my mind man. I mean I know she means well and she probably needs someone to talk to (I don't understand why she doesn't just talk to her husband), but my god.
 
University administrators are a special kind, they deal with smart and ambitious people all the time, while they are normally not that smart and mostly not ambitious either. At my uni I have met some great characters among them, the kind you love to have a beer with, but there were also many idiots around and those mostly didn't care or played hardball.
 
This is a good point. The administrators I've dealt with have been varied, but 2 of them have been just... not very smart.

One was a terrible person. You slip up with her once and she fires you.
 
Adventure Time is the best, hands down.

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As far as kids movies go, Shrek 1 and 2 were pretty good as far as appealing to adults. How many kids are going to understand the jokes in this?
 
My transfer to Adelaide is all but signed off! Seems I'll be back by September. I'm feeling a little mixed, my 18 month tour of the NSW railways is over and it has been an unforgettable experience working with some great guys and seeing and driving over tracks and locations which just ooze history. Decayed signal boxes, old rail sidings, empty husks of locomotives condemned to sit there forever and working over tracks such as in the Blue Mountains or Goulburn, doing grain runs out West of Dubbo and Parkes, and listening to old drivers point out specific spots and recount the story attached to it. I think I joined the rail industry about 30 years too late!! I'd like to say I'll be back one day but I look forward to the challenges of working out of Adelaide and it'll be great to be able to see more of my old friends and family.
 
I think it would have helped Australia if it had one standard guage for track - three is it not, depending upon State? It is good to get the opportunity to see the country (Oz is a BIG place) and someone else is paying. Good luck in your career.
 
I think it would have helped Australia if it had one standard guage for track - three is it not, depending upon State? It is good to get the opportunity to see the country (Oz is a BIG place) and someone else is paying. Good luck in your career.

Absolutely, but all the track was laid when each state ran things their own way. Victoria chose mostly broad gauge, NSWGR went standard, QLD went narrow and SA couldn't make up their minds and chose all three.

All the interstate main line is standard and only a few remaining branch lines in SA and VIC are broad gauge and there's no money in converting them. I think QLD still run a fairly big narrow gauge network but I dont know much about that area.

It's been a great way to see the country and get paid for it. The railways arent what they used to be here and as I said it's amazing to see some of the old infrastructure, see big old abandoned yards which thirty years ago were bustling metropolises of activity and action.

Here's Delec (a very big and important Sydney depot in its day) as it looked 30 years ago:
473559_4344516020952_1577639359_o.jpg


And here it is now:
552588_4290675027137_1660181570_n.jpg

(not my photos)

So I dunno, this is just one example and it can be quite chilling wandering around an abandoned yard such as in Cowra.
 
I live about 5 minutes from there. It's sad that there is so much room for facilities there, and yet nothing much goes on anymore. Next you know they'll sell most of the Chullora side off for housing, then the people that move in will complain about the noise of the freight trains.
Hopefully once the construction of "Port Enfield" is completed, they might make better use of it. Though there's already a lot of complaints about the noise/traffic/pollution it is "possibly" going to create, and all the extra container trucks in the area.

There are already giant billboards around that advertise industrial land for sale by the rail corridor.
 
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Absolutely, but all the track was laid when each state ran things their own way. Victoria chose mostly broad gauge, NSWGR went standard, QLD went narrow and SA couldn't make up their minds and chose all three.

All the interstate main line is standard and only a few remaining branch lines in SA and VIC are broad gauge and there's no money in converting them. I think QLD still run a fairly big narrow gauge network but I dont know much about that area.

It's been a great way to see the country and get paid for it. The railways arent what they used to be here and as I said it's amazing to see some of the old infrastructure, see big old abandoned yards which thirty years ago were bustling metropolises of activity and action.

Here's Delec (a very big and important Sydney depot in its day) as it looked 30 years ago:
473559_4344516020952_1577639359_o.jpg


And here it is now:
552588_4290675027137_1660181570_n.jpg

(not my photos)

So I dunno, this is just one example and it can be quite chilling wandering around an abandoned yard such as in Cowra.

Reminded me of some Battlefield 3 maps.
 
Those also cater to the adults, The amazing world of Gumball aswell, to a lesser degree.*Insert blathering about ponies here :p*

Absolutely, but he is 3 years old! I feel like he should not be able to enjoy or follow something like that, or maybe I am just underestimating kids. :lol:
 
She also was using her calculator to do 8+4.

I do this - not because I can't do it instantly in my head - but because I've gotten so lazy with having a calculator around all the time that I use it for the simplest calculations, like x+1. Essentially, the calculator's replaced my thought processes, it's become my brain. I don't think, I type. I haven't done any mental arithmetic in nearly a year now.
 
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What happened to your railway?

Aircraft and road trains perhaps?

I would think carefully about your career if I were you, OK for now but if the railways are not expanding then may be an issue in the future when you are married and need more money for a house and sprogs. You see what I am saying?
 
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I'm not sure but I would guess that privatisation is what happened. The need to become more streamlined and do away with big depots such as Delec, Everleigh, etc. Take the picture above. There's I dunno, 30 locomotives sitting idle, and for every minute they're not hauling freight they're losing money. Old drivers lament the passing of those days but they were unsustainable. A scene like that can't happen anymore, of our fleet of 119 NR class locomotives, nearly all of them are in active service at any one time, with just a few that are undergoing maintenance. Further reading

Crippling drought was another factor. No wheat meant no trains on the branch lines, so they closed. ARTC (semi private organisation) are flat out maintaining the interstate mainlines without having to spend millions to fix up some old branch line that wont give the returns it needs. The company I work for (PN) took a gas axe to a lot of their rolling stock as they figured it wasn't worth maintaining, and GrainCorp closed many of their silos in western NSW, unlikely to reopen.

At the moment, the company is doing ok. We're securing new contracts and the Newcastle/Whyalla steel contract just got renewed which was an important win. Coal in the Hunter Valley is also a big money earner, as is the good wheat seasons of the past couple of years. We're buying new assets and employing more drivers, so at the moment times are good. It wont always be the case, there are challenges ahead, the carbon tax (which will cost the company $23million this FY all of which will simply be passed onto our customers and ultimately me and fellow Aussies), a flat lining retail industry, drought, etc.

I'm not immediately worried, I think we're pretty right for the forseeable future. I work as a mainline driver so as long as there's containers to move between capital cities I'll be ok. The rail industry will always exist in some form or another, and unless I screw up and get the sack (always a possibility I'll admit) I dont think I have much to worry about. It's just a case of whether I still want to be doing this when I'm 40 or so. Probably not.
 
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They found here after the Beaching axe that as the branch lines went, each and every one not economically viable on their own this affected the main lines as you could not get the goods to near enough to the depots so all the traffic was affected.

Privatisation here was a disaster in one way whilst they were faffing about no orders were placed for rolling stock and lots of manufacturing completed their order book and ran out of work so shut.
 
I know very little about rail operations in the UK and Europe, I'd say we're more modelled on the system in North America (ie, big countries with big cities very far apart). I guess it's fair to say privatisation has been handled a bit better here than in the UK.
 
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