The Joys of Working for UP

Aaron has worked for Union Pacific for almost three years now and while the hours at times leave something to be desired it's been a really nice job for all of us. I hear a lot of stories from work that crack me up. There is a guy there that they call UP poopie because he gets out of working a lot to use the potty. There are also the stories of things they've run over or found on the side of the rails, you wouldn't believe our collection of random stuff in the garage that Aaron found out at work. They are mostly lumps of coal for Christmas presents, old rail ties for kicks, and tools way too large for anything any normal person would use. For various reasons unknown to people like me he gets discounts on all kinds of things because of his UP employment. The biggest one was our car. Back in February of 2006 we decided we needed a second car and bought our 2006 Ford Escape and because Union Pacific moves Fords we got a nice discount and 0% financing.

Now we come to the picture and our most recent UP love fest. Aaron and I were doing laundry last year and we both checked his pockets and both missed the same pocket and we washed his cell phone - bummer doesn't cover it. So he went back to a ghetto phone that was already grossly out of date. Last week for some reason unknown to the world my phone shut off and would not turn back on or charge at all so we decided to spring for new phones. We've wanted them for a long time but haven't had the money. We still didn't have the money but needed them anyway so we went online and found these. They have all the features we need and with the Union Pacific discount we got both of them FREE!! I'm so jazzed I can't even tell you. I got the purple one and Aaron got the black one. Our phone numbers are the same we just have A LOT better reception and a fancier thing to hold while we talk.

Aaron's favorite selling point is that it has a 1.3 Mega pixel camera so for those frequent UP derails Aaron has something to take pictures with. I don't know if I'm excited about that or not the camera is nice but the derails are always scary for me. He's derailed I think three times since he's worked there, one of them he was hanging on the outside of the train as the engine and cars in front of him went off, scary! Other times he takes pictures of other peoples uh-ohs and I'm better with that. This is a picture from the old phone (before we washed it) that didn't have the best camera feature in the world. You can tell it's a derail but the details are a bit fuzzy. This happened 1/28/07 and the switch apparently had ice in it and some of the cars made it onto the new track and others did not. This is the one he was on the side for. You can see the line in the snow where the track is supposed to be and where the track is bowed out now.

On another random train note Spencer has gained further appreciation for trains lately. He's always liked them but now he understands that Daddy plays with them when he's not with us. Whenever Aaron's off to work Spencer will say, "Daddy at work. Daddy go play trains." Yesterday Spencer and I were chatting on my bed and he was telling me all he knew about trains. The best parts were, "Trains scare excavators and cars." and "Trains no run over my toes because I good good" which makes me wonder what he thinks will happen if he's not "good good".