Track 5 - The €652,34 Engineer

Pumps aren't symbols. Systems aren't flowcharts. And institutional knowledge is walking out the door.

Jun 02, 2025

The €652,34 Engineer

My first job out of engineering school? Private, 3rd Battalion, Greek Army Ordnance Corps. Net salary: €7,62. Just enough for smokes and tsipouro to make the first two nights of guarding a derelict fence bearable.

My second job paid €652,34 net.

I made twice that DJing at half-empty bars in Psyrri in 2013. Plus free beer.

Triple, tutoring teenagers in STEM in 2010. Plus decent espresso.

But I took the factory job. Because I was lucky enough to be able to afford it.

My parents helped me cover gas to visit Athens on weekends. My best friend’s family let me stay in a single bed room at their hotel, free of charge.

A tiny balcony overlooked a backyard thick with climbing jasmine and potted genovese basil. Just wide enough for a cigarette and a flowchart cram session.

For the first time in years, I could hear myself think.

And that’s how I ended up in a queue outside accounting, waiting for someone to hand me €326,17 for two weeks of pretending I knew what the fuck I was doing in grease-streaked overalls.

A jeune premier straight out of my mother's favorite Greek film.

In the 1966 classic "My Daughter the Socialist", the factory owner's bourgeois daughter returns from studying in the UK full of idealistic theories, only to fall for the union leader who's studying Mechanical Engineering at night while working the line during the day because he's poor.

Except this wasn't a romantic comedy, and I wasn't the handsome love interest with noble working-class dreams. Well, I like what I see in the mirror, and the person who matters tells me I'm handsome. But I digress.

This was a Friday, and I was the certified chemical engineer wiping orange concentrate off the floor because the Greek economy had collapsed and this was what was available to someone who dropped out of college to play punk rock and went back to school in a different country.

I was living the film's opening scene in 2015.

Waiting to get paid in cash. In an envelope.

In Nafplio, at a juice plant stuck in 1966.

My grandfather was a line worker in a tobacco factory. His son — my father — picked fruit in fields and tutored rich kids to put himself through medical school. And here I was, the third generation, somewhere in the between.

The queue moved forward. Someone called my name.

I walked up to the window, signed, and received my envelope. I asked the lady about her perfume; "La vie est belle". I liked it and hated it.

I lit up a Marlboro Red as I walked outside, awed by my capacity to fuck up my life. It was my fourth month there, and the experience had been equal parts humbling and fascinating.

I didn't know that it was the beginning of the education I never knew I needed.

— — —

The first thing that hit me wasn't the heat — though the temp on the floor was north of 40°C even on the night shift. Look up July in Nafplio.

It wasn't the humidity, thick enough to swim through.

It was the smell.

Orange concentrate smells like someone mixed honey with excrement and turned the volume up to 11.

By hour three, I smelled like a rotting fruit basket. By day three, I'd stopped noticing. Or thought I had.

The fluorescent lights felt like strobe lights at a rave I never wanted to attend. Every surface was sticky. The polyester coveralls they'd given me clung to my skin like a wetsuit made of regret.

More than once, I had to run to the portable WC to vomit from the smell. Sometimes I didn’t make it to the WC.

I wouldn't understand why my whole body shook in that hotel room every night for another eight years. Why the noise felt like an assault. Why I instinctively reached for sunglasses I couldn't wear because nobody took precautions in this place.

Manolis, who worked the station next to mine, had one brown eye and one light blue eye. I thought it was genetic until I realized he didn't notice when I approached from his left.

A splash of the caustic soda we used to wash machinery had burned his eye.

He still didn't wear protective gear.

Nobody did.

My engineering degree earned me one privilege: a green cap instead of the hair net everyone else wore. Only mastros and engineers got green caps. I wore that thing like a crown, even when it reeked of concentrate. I still have it, orange stains and all. I have no idea where my engineering diploma is, but this cap is the first thing I pack every time I move houses.

"Follow me," Mastro George said that first morning, cigarette hanging from his lips. "We're doing maintenance on a pump."

I walked with him across the factory floor until we reached some shade where machinery was laid out. He stopped.

"Where's the pump?" I asked, looking around for something – pump-shaped?

He pointed at a contraption the size of a bathtub, built like it came off a Cold War sub. I laughed. He laughed with me.

To me, a pump was a circle-and-triangle symbol on a flowchart.

Reality, it turns out, takes up space.

A lot of space.

George was in his mid fifties then, had been working this factory since he was sixteen with only a two-year pause for mandatory army service. You could hear his knees every time he crouched down to work on something.

"This used to be a good job, you know," he said, picking up a wrench longer than the length from my shoulder to the tips of my fingers.

He called it "The Killer" — the only thing that could move bolts welded shut by concentrate turned to caramel carbon from an overheated pump. No one touched The Killer. Not even the other Mastros.

You don’t earn “Mastro” with an exam. No thesis. No panel. It’s an honor and a duty bestowed — and if you call “Mastro” someone who hasn’t earned it, you’ll be corrected. Unpleasantly.

"Fifteen years ago, line workers could buy houses. Send their kids to university. Thank God me and the missus got hitched young. Now..."

He shrugged, lit another Marlboro Red.

I'd switched to his brand to be able to offer him cigarettes he actually wanted. Obsessive research, like everything else in my life.

In my first week, he asked me to screw on the pump’s motor bolts while he told me army days stories.

I grabbed the first bolt, started to tighten eagerly. He spat on the ground; I knew this meant stop.

“Christaki”, he said, using an affectionate diminutive for my name -

“What happens when you tighten one while the rest are in the air?”

"The whole thing warps. When you tighten the rest, the pressure is uneven. When you put it to work, the fucker breaks, and then you have to call Mastro George.”

Mastro George taught me that you tighten diagonally. One screw a quarter turn, then the corner across, then the third, then the fourth. Then repeat the pattern.

"You have to build the pressure evenly.”

He paused, wiping grease off his hands.

"Factories are the same."

I was exhilarated the first time he sent me across the factory to fetch The Killer from his tool locker.

I didn’t mind the talking down he gave me for running on the floor. You don’t run on the floor.

I worked the morning shift with Mastro George. By the afternoon shift, I'd be on the line with everyone else, watching the same flowcharts I'd memorized play out in a completely different reality.

Half the pipes were out of commission. The accumulation of custom products for new customers over the years meant the factory operated mostly on ad hoc connections — an ever-evolving network of hoses and prayers.

The system on paper bore no resemblance to the system in practice.

Mastro George knew a lot more than how to tell me where not to put my fingers if I wanted to keep playing guitar.

Old timers like him knew every workaround, every shortcut, every way to make the impossible work.

I didn’t know, and neither did management, that all this knowledge would be walking out the door with them as they retired one by one.

— — —

Four companies and six years later, I was trying my hand as a Product Manager at efood.

By that time, I had developed my personal onboarding framework.

Excavate all the documentation I can find. Read every obscure industry relevant blog. Shadow every back office position.

My Miro board at efood? Magnum opus.

I had every system mapped, every data flow charted. I created spaghetti flowcharts that tracked every physical and digital journey from customer to vendor to dispatcher to rider to payment gateway.

Solid lines for manual action, dots and dashes for triggers and automations. Everything color-coded.

I knew how it worked. I knew what our systems could do.

I also knew I didn't know shit about what actually happened on the streets.

So in my third week, I found myself sweating inside a bicycle helmet while freezing my ass off, riding through downtown Athens with another George —evidently Georges teach me things.

“You want to ride with who?” the area manager asked, eyebrows doing push-ups.

"The smartest cat in your courier fleet. Ask him if he'd be cool with me tagging along for a few shifts."

The incredulous look on his face told me that even though I had no clue what a Product Manager actually does, I could make a difference immediately.

George the Courier gave me a run for my money. My belt buckle dug in — lockdown weight. He ignored the GPS entirely. He knew the real routes.

We'd started the shift with me explaining the beautiful logic of our route optimization algorithms.

"Yeah," he said, checking his phone, "that's not how this works."

By hour two, I understood why.

The flowcharts showed one reality. The streets showed another.

Restaurants that were "integrated" into our system but operated on completely different logic.

Coordinates that existed in our database but not in physical space. Payment flows that worked perfectly until they didn't.

George didn't know everything — it was a new vertical, and the scale was completely different from the contained chaos of a factory. But this was how he made a living, so he'd figured out some workarounds that mattered.

Which restaurants actually started cooking when they got the order versus which ones waited until he arrived. Which streets to avoid during rush hour because the GPS didn't account for construction that had been going on for three years.

Just like Mastro George with his pumps and hoses, this George had built a parallel system of knowledge that kept the machine running.

In both cases, no one was writing any of this shit down. In both cases, the system was getting polluted. People in the offices were working hard to build solutions. People on the field were busting their ass to make things work.

But every workaround that “worked” contaminated our knowledge. The data warehouse showed “delivered”.

“Delivered” meant George knew which streets to avoid.

And trust was deteriorating. Riders ignored good fixes. Business Ops blamed Tech. Berlin HQ was up our ass.

I was actually blissful in my conviction that I didn’t know shit. It reminded me of being 29 in that factory, learning from the Mastro.

George the Courier was around 29, the same age I’d been while pretending I was tightening bolts.

The field is not ageist.

—

Street smarts meant nothing if I couldn’t translate them. My other grandfather spoke 11 languages when a drunk truck driver left my mother on her own.

My sweet spot is scale.

So I went back to Miro —not to map how things were supposed to work, but to chart what George did well while challenging his assumptions.

That included learning how to read payloads. After learning the word payload.

It was digital hose-tracing. I had to understand what data actually flowed— not what the docs claimed, but what the servers were whispering to each other and what they wished the whispers carried.

I joined calls with markets in LATAM and APAC. The Mediterranean is closer to Uruguay than it is to Berlin.

A PM in Montevideo would mention a payload issue that sounded exactly like what George had shown me while I was spitting out my lungs up Kolokotroni street.

Only then could I write proper tickets. Not “delivery times inconsistent”—but specific integrations we should prioritize based on what actually broke the rider experience.

The devs had done great work. The migration was solid.

They had tightened every bolt a quarter turn. Now it was time for the next round.

Systems are like bolts. Tighten one while the rest stay loose, and the whole thing warps under pressure.

But I'm saving that framework for another piece. This one's about something more important.

— — —

A system where a certified chemical engineer has to take a €652,34 job is a broken system.

Hell, a system where anyone gets that pay for an honest day’s work that puts juice in our fridges, is a fucking broken system.

How about a system where a kid has to reach the age of 38 to learn that he wasn’t weak when he was vomiting on the factory floor?

That shaking in a hotel room was the normal reaction of an overloaded nervous system.

That he was extremely lucky to have the support of a loving family that didn’t have a clue about severe ADHD and autism spectrum traits masked by high energy and pattern recognition?

That’s a

fucking.

broken.

system.

But what makes the system broken is that no one onboards PMs and engineers with a full month on the field. Not a week; a month.

Let the novelty wear off.

I’m certain that I’m not the first person to experience this. I know that it’s common practice in Japan.

Maximum Rock n Roll had this publication we could only dream of in Greece: "Book Your Own Fucking Life" — a directory of venues, couches to crash on, people who'd help you survive your tour. The system wasn't going to book your shows or guarantee your meals. You had to build your own network, one connection at a time.

Mastro George didn't know punk rock. Neither did George the Courier. But they both lived its ethos.

When the system handed them someone who didn't belong — a confused engineer who thought pumps were symbols, a PM who knew enough to shut the fuck up and listen — they didn't complain about broken hierarchies or wasted time.

They opened their toolboxes. Shared their cigarettes. Slowed their pace. Less deliveries, less money.

They taught me that institutional knowledge isn't just technical — it's cultural. It's knowing when to help the new guy figure it out, even when no one's keeping score.

Ten years from now, when both Georges have moved on to other jobs or retired, someone else will need to learn what they knew. The pumps will still need diagonal tightening. The streets will still defy the GPS.

The question is: will anyone have written it down? Will anyone have cared enough to codify what actually works?

Or will the next confused engineer have to figure it out from scratch, hoping to find a mentor willing to slow down long enough to explain why the system on paper bears no resemblance to the system in practice?

In punk, the only one coming to save you is the community. Same in business; if you find who the actual community is.

You book your own fucking life. You get on the floor. You ride with the couriers. You learn what "The Killer" wrench is actually for.

And if you arrest your insecurity and walk in curiosity, I guarantee you’ll find someone named George. He'll teach you that systems, like bolts, work best when you tighten them diagonally.

I hope you’re lucky enough to have someone putting gas in your tank while you’re learning where not to put your fingers.

The rest? That's institutional knowledge walking out the door.

P.S. Mastro George and I talk on the phone every couple of years. I’m the one who has to call. He calls me Mastro Christo.

Someone should probably write that down.

False Starts And Power Chords

Discussion about this post