“Quick! Write something experimental about transport.” said Kill Firby in an email to me, this morning.
Pyjama-clad and still nursing the first coffee of the day, I blinked bleary-eyed at the screen. How had we got here again? Oh yes, my mentioning of my previous job as a transportation data analyst. “Analyst” sounds like I did something much more impressive than watch videos of traffic junctions and put together spreadsheets based on the direction of said vehicles. “Analyst” suggests I actually made sense of the data and put them into pie-charts and presented them in MS Power-Point to some important-looking folk and wore a lab coat. I didn’t do any of these things. I drank cups of tea and put numbers in a spreadsheet, and I never really questioned what it was all for.
Sometimes, we transportation data analysts would work on outdoor surveys. This would involve getting up at 4am to drive to Hexham train station (or somewhere) and stand around in a high-visibility jacket until 6pm handing out surveys. It would also involve being harassed by the public about train times, fares and any manner of other things. Apparently, wearing a high-visibility jacket turns you into some sort of knowledgeable authority figure. Most of the time people would ask us about train times. We’d just shrug and say we had no idea and then brandish a survey that they would refuse to take. Sometimes there wouldn’t even ask a question – but simply grab you by the shoulders and shout “YARM?!” with a frantic yet quizzical look on their face, presumably wishing to know where they might catch the train to Yarm. One woman even reported an abandoned car that had been on her street for two weeks. Despite my protestations that I really couldn’t do anything about it as my job was handing out surveys, I eventually found myself reassuring her that I’d get someone to sort it out as soon as I got back to HQ.
Sometimes, we’d conduct road-side interviews for a traffic census, and they would usually be on the coldest day of the year. We’d stand in the road, nothing but an orange cone protecting us from oncoming traffic, as the police pulled cars into the layby. Then we’d politely ask the driver five quick questions about their journey.
Me : Where have you set off from?
Driver : Home.
Me : And where is that?
Driver : [gives address – usually struggles to remember own postcode]
Me : And where are you going to?
Driver : Work.
This was a pretty standard response. Usually, people would be as vague as possible, perhaps not realising that surveys with ‘home’ and ‘work’ written on them would be of no use to anyone, anywhere. Sometimes we’d get more obscure responses and sometimes we’d never made it to the fifth question.
Me : Where have you set off from?
Driver : Home.
Me : And where is that?
Driver : India.
Me : Wow. You’ve come a pretty long way this morning.
Driver : I’ve lived here for ten years.
Me : Okay, but where have you travelled from today?
Driver : I have all of my papers.
Me : Where have you set off from?
Driver : Home [gives address]
Me : And where are you going to?
Driver : I’m going back home – this is the only way I can get my baby to go to sleep. [indicates sleeping baby in back seat]
Sometimes people were rude. Sometimes people were incredibly rude. Sometimes people would give me a little speech about how “this sort of thing” (presumably the traffic census) was everything that was wrong with this country and how their taxes were paying my wages – on and on they would rant “And you can write that down!” they’d say, tapping my clipboard. “Oh, I am.” I’d say, doing my best pretend writing.
Needless to say, some of the surveys went back with fairly inaccurate/desperately unhelpful information. Not that it made any difference to me – I just wanted to make it through the day without getting frostbite or hit by a car. It was a pretty obscure job, but certainly not the worst I’ve had. I’m not sure how much I learned about transport, but I did learn that high-visibility jackets suggest to people that you might have information they need, that driving around in the car might make your baby go to sleep and that people really, really don’t want to be interrupted when they’re travelling anywhere.