Complete stress...or...how I survived this long....

Good Evening everyone and thank you all for taking the time to read this, the next installment in my blog. I appreciate your being patient while so breathlessly awaiting the arrival of each new post.
I'd like to take tonight's post to continue something I was talking about today. I sometime forget (probably on purpose) things that have been sources of stress in this life. One such source of stress has to do with some of my years working on a railroad. I had been offered a promotion which was going to more than double my salary. Let me say before going on that I'm not money hungry, but I did have a family to support and wanted to do the best I could in that. I therefore took the promotion and began training. If I remember right, I trained for the new job for about two months but should have been given 4 or 5 months of training. My new job involved sitting in a seven story tower and directing most of the operation of a freight yard. Quite an undertaking for someone experienced, but almost an impossibility for someone so new to the vocation. To make a long story not so long I'll explain like this. The over all freight yard was made up of smaller specialiy yards. It broke down somewhat like this: fourteen tracks to receive trains, fifty six tracks to classify (break down) each train, two forwarding yards that included all together twelve tracks to rebuild each train with different freight cars. The biggest source of stress was in defying the mathamatical possibilities of such an operation. For example, when one had fourteen tracks to receive trains and twenty trains showed up.....well...you get my drift. In order to get all of the trains in the yard one had to remove a train from one of those fourteen tracks, then bring one of those extra trains into the just opened track. Sounds sort of easy, but wait. Not so easy. In order to open up those fourteen tracks one had to classify each train received, or switch each train into the next yard in the line called the classification yard. The problem was that of those fifty six tracks most were full. Now to the crux of the problem and the mathimatical impossibility. One can only put rail cars into a track until it's full, and at that point it will absolutely, positively NOT hold any more. Now....all of this for eight to sixteen hours a day and with your bosses (plurel) standing behind you screaming profanities to make more progress. Oh yeah, add one thing, the guys working for you can only go so fast. Asking them to speed up was pretty much asking for trouble. Trouble like, injuries or even fatilities. Ok...All of this went on a lot like this for about fifteen years before it slowed down any. By the time it had slowed down I was pretty much past recovery. One of the ways I survived was by taking very short breaks at my desk. Usually thirty seconds to a minute. On each infrequent break I'd close my eyes and suddenly I'd be back in a quiet and serene surrounding. Something like, standing on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier when we weren't flying the planes, and listening to the swishing of the water as it swept by one hundren feet below. That was pretty much the only thing I could hear, but I'd also look once again at the moon and stars and how beautiful they were shining over the ocean. Or....I would sometime go back to growing up on a farm. On Sunday's we had free time and many is the time I'd go into the pasture and lay down in the shade of a tree and just listen to the quiet sounds of the insects as they busily went about their daily activities. Sometimes I'd lay like that for two or three hours. Yes...those were two of the things that kept me from being anymore insane than I already am. Complete stress. Overcome by memories of a better and quieter time. I look back at those stressful years and sometime wonder how I survived it, but then....I'm not so sure I did. .......and so it went.......