Good day and looking into career change

Nope, I am just a white-collar guy who, for the first half of his career, got out in the field and got dirty and beat up with the welding and operations crews. You can't design and engineer stuff if you've never actually put eyes and hands on it.

 

It's fairly thorough, but none of that is surprising to me. I'm at an age where I've been through enough baloney to not agree with a lot he claims to be problematic. The only issue I see as being critical is my security since there is only so much I can do and a lot I would not expect.

 

Not sure where you're picking up that whole ego thing or if that's being perceived in my context. I don't see how I'm projecting that. Funny enough, I think that was really the problem with me in my career. You really need to be uppity and a bit overbearing to excel in the technical fields and I find I am not able to be like that to others. My welding crews always thought I was too nice and goofy to be doing what I was doing with all my "please" and "thank-you's". Not kidding.

FWIW the ego goes both ways. I've had a fair number of tradesmen get all snooty with me because "you're an engineer so what would you know about anything in the real world of work". I'm not bothered by it but it confused me a bit since we were all supposed to be paddling in the same direction to get to the same destination.

Just to be clear, I consider my background irrelevant. I have none with actual truck driving/operation. I couldn't even tell you what a typical trailer tires' pressure should be other than it'll be heaps more than what a car tire is. Knowing a bit of math on flatbed securing doesn't qualify me to do much of anything outside of that in the industry. The only thing my background does give me the confidence in confirming that I don't want to get into doing that sort of specialized transport.

 

I gotcha. No insult intended. I say the same about people who don't know what a good weld looks like and how to get it like that. I learned heaps on that sort of stuff when I started attending operations with the help and input from my hot work foreman. Dude was a marine combat medic and was super insightful into things I'd not even thought of. My hope is that I can take to trucking well enough and figure it out over time in the same way I got to be good at that previous job.

 

I've worked (not in trucking) at 3 terminals (City Docks, TX Terminals, Industrial Terminal) and those are busy places. Areas in/around the railheads are particularly crazy with cranes, forklifts, and trucks zipping around. It all seemed a bit higher risk from my vantage point on the ship. Yeah, my stuff was bigger/heavier/costlier, but it was usually a one-off deal that took a day or more to do whereas the trucks and whatnot were just a-zipping along like angry bees! Head on a swivel. Watched one guy stop a runaway empty deck railcar with his FEU picker forklift. Just got in front of it with his counterweight facing it, matched the speed, then started slowing. Kept the car from sailing off the dock and into the ship channel. Oh boy. Nobody except me and the truck driver near the ship at the docks' end even noticed. He aborted his loading and backed the heck away from that whole show. He was a 100% cajun dude and we laughed at the whole debacle because what else can you do! He made fun of my crappy french and I made fun of him calling the bow the "pointy end". Good /bad times!