Dave Clemo's World of Work

Briwax

2011-12-03T17:25:00.000Z

No I hadn't heard of it either until I got the call to go work there a few years ago.

It's funny how something on the TV triggers a memory. I was watching a programme today that involved making reproduction antique furniture and the craftsman was painting then using a rag to apply some dark gunk to a pice of furniture. Something clicked and I thought "Briwax. He's using Briwax".

I honestly thought I'd written something about every job I'd ever done and here was another one. I did a couple of spells working for a firm that made a specialist wax polish for wooden furniture. I can't remember much about the first spell. It was in Kettering in their old factory which was sited in a residential area of the town, and had been there for years and years.
When Kettering expanded from the 1880s onwards it was because of the coming of the railway. They'd always made boots and shoes in Kettering. What held them back was the poor roads, making it time consuming and expensive to export. In Northampton it was just possible to use the river to get to the sea. That was before the canals linked everywhere to everywhere else, cutting the cost of transporting raw materials and finished product to the market place.
The coming of the railways and the huge stride in technology brought the price down even further. When the streets of terraced houses were built there was a brick built outhouse at the bottom of each garden and a lot of the shoe making was carried out there. Somewhere along every street there was a large building- a shoe factory where the locals would all work. Most people walked or cycled. Work was no more than a couple of hundred yards away and there was a shop on every corner. While Northampton became the centre for shoe making, Kettering was famous for boots, including army boots. Boots that were exported to every corner of the empire.

In the midst of all this Victorian street layout a chemical company set up to make this wax polish and carried on quietly for many years. Eventually the rise of the health and safety brigade, plus the inconvenience of bringing lorries into residential areas began to tell, and the firm moved to an industrial estate in Corby, which was where I was sent to work about a dozen or so years ago.

I was involved in the packing end of the production line, although I did work in other areas. The various ingredients were mixed and heated until they formed a liquid. I would then load the belt with empty tins and the liquid wax was poured into them. The tins then travelled along the belt, through a cooling tunnel and then to where I was standing ready to put the lids on and clean any splashes from the outside.
I was having some building work done at home and the firm kindly let me have a dented tin for free. My studio now has some nicely waxed dado rails and architraving.

I'm not sure what the complete list of ingredients were, I seem to remember one of them was toluene. My "O" level chemistry taught me that that was potentially very flammable, so it was no surprise to read in the paper a few years later that there had been a huge fire and explosion at this factory and that it had smashed every window across a huge area, leaving a nice hole in the ground where I once spent a happy week temping.

Charity bags

2011-06-17T22:18:00.000+01:00

I've just been reading back through the posts and realised I hadn't written about the time I worked for a clothing charity. You know the sort- they put a bag through your letterbox and ask you to fill it with your unwanted clothing and leave it out a couple of days later.

I worked for this firm a couple of times. The first time was when they were still based in Kettering and I was asked by my temp agency if I'd do a few shifts shunting the vans as they returned to the depot. The drivers would return to the depot and park the van in a side street. I'd collect the key, drive the van around the block to the loading bay, put the van on the weighbridge while full, then back it up to the unloading bay where a team would unload it. Once it was emptied I'd drive it back to the weighbridge to be weighed, then fuel it and park it in a compound. Repeat until all the vans were empty of goods, full of diesel and parked.
It wasn't too strenuous although it was sometimes stressful getting thirty vans into a tiny compound. It was just possible if you turned all the wing mirrors in and squeezed through the tiniest gap between the vans. Sometimes I was sure I'd miscalculated and wouldn't get the final van away and the gates locked, but somehow I managed to park them all. Once the vans were parked I could go (and still be paid for the full shift) so there was always an incentive to work quickly.

I was offered a job driving a van but turned it down. There were better jobs going at the tims, but a few months later I was offered the work again. By now the firm had moved to Wellingborough and I had to drive there and get there by 6 in the morning, pick up the van and assistant (who sat in the passenger seat all day without exchanging a single word in conversation, listening to Radio 1 at full blast- o joy!)and then drive to the town where we'd be working.

I'm not sure how many vans there were. I guess there were at least thirty. The firm had a contract with a large charitable organisation, and the bags we distributed all had the charity's name printed on it. We'd drive to a town, buy an A-Z street map in order to keep tabs on where we'd been and where we had to return to, and then we'd start work.

Our brief was to distribute 1000 bags to homes in the morning, have a break, then drive around the streets where we'd left bags two days beforehand, pick up any bags that had been left out, and then drive back to the depot. Simple? Er, no.

Some towns were easy to work, especially those with street after street of terraced houses. In some towns there were over a hundred houses in a street, and you'd soon polish off a thousand bags. But once you'd covered those streets you'd move into the more up-market estates where the houses were set back from the road, and there were fences between the gardens. These streets took much longer. Once you'd done those houses, then you'd move on to the detached houses with the long drives, then to the villages surrounding the town....

Unfortunately the person who allocated the work would tell you that you had say, three weeks to cover the town of Hereford, except that there aren't that many houses, and you'd be scratching around after two weeks. You were expected to return to the depot each night with a full van, and some areas were easy, but others were very hard. I remember being told to distribute 1000 bags a day to Ross on Wye and all the surrounding area. I drove to the area, bought an A-Z and found that there weren't more than a few thousand houses in the whole of the county! There were more sheep than houses to be honest.

Urban areas were good, but the yield from rural areas was always very poor. Why was that?

I expect that people who live in rural areas shop more often. They probably buy more clothes and therefore fill their wardrobes more quickly. Every few months a charity bag drops through the letterbox and the householder sees a way of easing the clothes storage problem, while making them feel they are doing their bit for chariddeee.

My experience would bear this theory out. I was sent to Walton on Thames to cover for a sick colleague, and by the end of the afternoon it was hard to get any more bags in the van, it was so loaded. It really was rich pickings compared to deepest rural Herefordshire.

What else did I learn? I loved the different archtectural styles in the old building wherever I travelled, but I'm sad to say that the new builds were all depressingly similar. I'd walk down a street on an estate near Colchester and realise that I could be anywhere. All the houses looked the same. In a lot of cases they were decorated the same, with the same front doors in the same colours. I really could be anywhere. And that's a shame.

In the end I had to pack it in. The money wasn't bad for temping through an agency, but the firm wanted me to work for them direct, and to be paid according to the tonnage I collected. I'd seen enough to realise that the area they offered me (half of Essex outside the M25) would never yield as much as the area within the M25 , so I declined. I was also fed up with the 13 hour days. I was leaving home at 5.30 in the morning, leaving the depot at 6.00, driving for anything up to 120 miles before starting the rounds, walking for three of four hours, then driving around picking up bags and then driving back to the depot, arriving back sometime after 5.30 most nights.
By this time the work arrangements had changed so the drivers were now responsible for weighing and unloading their own vans and then parking them. They were also responsible for fueling them and washing them, and I'd not get home until after 7 at night. That's lot of hours and a lot of miles for minimum wage.

I did a couple of days driving to charity shops collecting bags of unsold clothing. That may come as a surprise to you, but charity shops rely on new stocks coming in every day or week, and they don't keep stock for more than a few weeks at most. If it's unsold after that time, it's bagged up and sent back to the depot.

I recall one journey where I had to drive to Brighton and collect some bags. I arrived at about 9.30 and found the shop. Once I'd loaded up I then drove across country to Tunbridge Wells, then on to Whitstable. My last pickup was supposed to be Minster, but I chose the wrong one and ended up driving around Sheerness instead of further east near Canterbury. By this time it was late afternoon and I still had to drive back. I got back at about 9 o'clock, fifteen hours after i'd set off.

One of my colleagues would drive from Wellingborough to Penzance, then to Falmouth and Plymouth and back- almost every day! He'd be on the road for 15 or sixteen hours a day. There's no way I could do that week in week out. Of course there's nothing to stop a van driver driving these hours- there's no tachograph and so no driver's hours regulations.

Looking back I must admit I enjoyed my time on the charity collections. Although there are many shady operators, the firm I worked for did a good job and performed a useful role in keeping people's wardrobes just empty enough to fit a few new clothes in. The clothes we collected were sold on to Eastern Europe and Africa, providing needy people with good cheap clothes and making a few pounds for the charity in the process.

Did I tell you about when I used to

2011-05-07T22:32:00.000+01:00

Did I tell you about when I used to work as a washer upper in a hotel restaurant kitchen? I've had so many different jobs over the years it's hard to remember which ones I've described. So forgive me if I repeat myself.

When you work as a temp there's a dead period over Christmas that lasts up to four weeks. All the factories would shut down and if there was no work, there was no pay. In 1997 or 1998 (I can't remember now)it was fast approaching Christmas and the job prospects looked bleak. A family friend worked in a local hotel and through her I managed to land a job as a lowly kitchen porter on minimum wage.

I remember my first day there. It was obvious that no-one had been taking the cleaning seriously for months. They did just enough to get by, and that wasn't good enough for me. The front of house plates and cutlery were ok (but the cutlery should have been polished to remove the water marks. The kitchen utensils were a different matter. They needed a good scrub, but all they were doing was to put them through the dishwasher. It took a few weeks but I eventually got rid of all the accumulated grease and stains from the pots, pans and platters. We then looked at the deep fat fryer. It was obvious that it may have had the oil changed but no-one had dismantled it for years. There was so much grease and sludge it was hard to tell what it was...

One of the drawbacks of working in a kitchen is that you work a split shift. I would get to work for about 8.00 (someone else had cooked the breakfasts). I took all the deliveries in and put them away (taking care to rotate the milk so that the old stock was used first- something i'm not sure was followed before I got there) Then I'd clean up the breakfast things and completely clear the backlog of washing up. By then it was time for the lunchtime serving. There are periods of intense activity followed by times when the restauant is empty. That's when you need to get ahead. I would peel sprouts. A 28lb net of sprouts takes about an hour to peel and cut a cross in the base.
I'd have a couple of hours off, which is not really enough time to do anything and then it was back for the evening shift.We'd have a full restaurant plus a Christmas party in the ballroom.
When there's a party of 150 all wanting a Christmas dinner at the same time, you need to get ahead. For a couple of hours it's crazy, then it's a mad rush to clear up and get home before it's too late, and then it's back the next morning to do it all again.
I think I got six weeks work in all, then it was back to the agencies. I managed to get the kitchen and all the equipment shiny as new before I left. I wonder how long it stayed that way?
The first jobs they found me were as a kitchen porter at the local college, then as a-
kitchen porter in a local factory.
Eventually some driving work came through and my spell in the catering corps came to an end.

Job mobility

2011-04-30T22:08:00.000+01:00

It was Norman Tebbit who encouraged the unemployed in the 1980s to get on their bikes to find work. In the 1960/70/80s it was not uncommon to move around the country as part of your career path. I moved my family 150 miles from Northamptonshire to Somerset when I changed jobs, and then moved them back again three years later. It was the accepted thing back then. In the retail sector, Marks and Spencer made a point of relocating their managers every three or four years, and often from one end of the country to the other. It was how one gained the necessary experience.

So much has changed since then. I would be very reluctant to uproot my family just for a job, when there is no longer such a thing as a job for life; or when loyalty to a particular firm is no longer held in esteem by the employer or considered a good career move by the employee. So what has changed?

Salaries for a start. Back in the mid 80s I was earning about £9k as a shop manager. I bought a house in a town close to where I worked for just over £23k.
Today I'd be lucky to earn 20k (if that), while the same house will now fetch over £130k. My wife was able to stay at home with our children until she found an evening job waitressing. It was (just)possible to manage on one salary.
A man with a young family just can't make that kind of move anymore, without also finding a job for his partner.
Then there is the regional differences in house prices. Kettering is historically one of the cheaper parts of Northamptonshire. A similar size house as ours in say, Northampton would cost £50k more to buy. The further south, the more expensive. This means that I could not afford to relocate any closer to London or the South East, so that means that I have to stay put. If I lived in Stoke (one of the poorest places in the country) there would be now way that we could afford to move to a more expensive area when wages have not kept pace with property prices.
I'd love to live in Cornwall, but house prices are more than double what they are where we live, and salries are much lower.
People are no longer as mobile as they were because of the imbalance between salaries and house prices.
And I fear it will get much worse.

Temping today

2010-12-21T19:28:00.000Z

No I'm not about to go back to temping.. It's just that I've had a couple of conversations recently that tell me I wouldn't be able to get a job even if I wanted to.

One of our clients is Polish. She works at a fruit & veg processing plant owned by a large retail chain. I recall working there a dozen or so years ago before it was bought by the current owners. At that time most of the staff were Portuguese and were bussed in from Peterborough every day. I mentioned this to my Polish friend and she confirmed that there were still a lot of Portuguese there, along with (I think) Somalis and the inevitable Polish. But no British staff.

I mentioned working at Gilson's Bakery. She had friends there. It was almost all Polish staffed now.

A few weeks ago I met a friend who used to run my Agency. He's now working in Wellingborough. Most of his workers when he was in Kettering were Polish. Once the workforce reaches a critical point where the majority speak Polish, it's not long before everyone must speak it in order to work there.

So I will have to consider learning Polish if I want to work in our local food production factories.

My Agency manager friend was very gloomy about the future. Apparently the EU have introduced a new law that takes effect next October, where temporary staff must be paid the same as permanent staff, with the same rights and benefits. The Law of Unintended Consequences will mean that temporary work agencies will close up, as firms will not hire short term staff at an extra 25% (at least)above what they pay for permanent staff. Another Unintended Consequence may well be that that all staff will become temporary (as in Spain).
The exact wording of the Regulations have still to be decided, but one thing is certain. It will be harder to employ temporary staff, and therefore, harder to find temporary work.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/employment-matters/strategies/awd

Cleaning

2010-11-02T13:51:00.000Z

I was walking through the hospital corridors this morning when I saw a man wielding a dust sweeper, painstakingly collecting every fibre of dust along the margins of the corridor, and it reminded me of the time a dozen or so years ago when I worked as a cleaner at Whitworths in Irthlingborough. I'd worked there a few times in the production area doing various jobs. Sometimes I'd run a packing line, where we'd run a machine that put pre-packed bags of sultanas or other dried fruit into the cartons. Easy and repetitive (as long as the machine behaves itself). Another time I worked on the dried apricot production line. When the apricots arrive at the factory they are well and truly dried into a hard mass. They are soaked in a weak acid in order to separate them and soften them. Funny enough, I haven't fancied one since then.
Then I worked in the pepper and spice department for a shift. I was on the floor above the packing line. I had to keep the pepper flowing through a hole in the feed hopper where it was gravity fed into the little pots that you buy in the shops. I used a broomstick.
Such variety! Those little packs of casserole mix? Packed them. Currants, sultanas and raisins? Packed them as well.

Then there was the small matter of disposing of all the cardboard and packaging that the raw materials came in. I worked on the baler for a few shifts before I reached the pinnacle of my time there. I joined the cleaning team.
We cleaned the wash areas and the toilets around the factory. We kept the rest rooms and canteens clean, sweeping and mopping. We emptied the ashtrays in the smoking areas, we picked up any rubbish lying around.
And we spent a long time hiding away, because with all the will in the world it only takes fifteen minutes to sweep and clean the restrooms after the mid-shift breaks,and the rooms weren't dirty anyway. We found an empty office in an old part of the site and made ourselves scarce for an hour at a time. It was a big site and they just assumed that we were working at the other end. The place was spotless, so if we didn't do even the little bit we did, then you'd soon notice.

So we squirrelled ourselves away, reading books and doing the crossword, waiting for the next foray with mop, broom and bucket.
I drove past the site last year. It's gone. All the buildings demolished, with no trace of the busy and bustling enterprise that employed hundreds of staff over three shifts just a decade before. They're going to build houses, but where will all those potential buyers find jobs to pay their mortgages?

Back to work

2010-11-01T12:23:00.000Z

I started writing this blog while I've been off work having treatment for leukaemia. I've more or less finished listing the jobs that I've done over the last 43 years, and I'm having my hopefully final appointment with the specialist this week. Whatever the outcome, I'm back to work from Wednesday.

I've been blessed in that I'm working in a small independent solicitor's office, and they've kept my job open for the past 13 months. I was also lucky in having critical illness insurance cover, and that has now finished after 12 months of paying our mortgage. We, like everyone else I know, can't afford to live on only one income, so I have to go back to work.

That small fact is one noticeable change over the last 40-50 years. back in the 60s a man could earn enough to have his wife stay at home and run the household. Not any more.

Twenty five years ago I worked as a retail manager and earned about £10k. When I left the retail sector fifteen years ago that had risen to just under £20k.
I did a lot for the money. I recruited and trained my staff, ordered all the stock for the shelves, did all the merchandising, handled all the cash and bankings and was responsible for the security (yes I even arrested shoplifters and confronted and ejected louts who'd congregate in my shop).

These days the job pays considerably less. Why? Because the job has shrunk. The manager is now nothing more than a glorified key holder. EPOS takes care of the day to day ordering. Head Office allocations take care of the rest. 90-95% of my takings were in cash, nowadays it's far less. There's no doubt that the job has changed and the industry is far more centralised.
My friend used to work in a major booksellers. He was employed on the national minimum wage (which is also the national maximum wage in some jobs). Part of his job included being a keyholder from time to time. That's how far the job has changed.

It's quite hard to find a job that allows one to use one's initiative. Jobs are micro-managed and all creativity is stifled. It may be because the product/service demands uniformity of delivery, and it may be because the quality of staff is such that they can't be trusted to use their heads. The downside is that we have produced a generation who are almost incapable of showing initiative, of using their heads.

Red tape and regulation has chaged the workplace. There is a thing as The Law of Unintended Consequences. Take Employment Law.

It was originally introduced to give employees some protection from unscrupulous bosses who could sack you without notice. That is a good thing.
The Law of Unintended Consequences (LUC)kicked in, and now bosses won't hire anyone for fear of being unable to get rid of him or her.
Health and Safety was once a matter of common sense. Some aspects of the Law are reasonable, but LUC has made over-regulation a barrier to employing staff.
Maternity leave and sick pay sound great, but LUC has made these a major barrier to bosses taking young female staff on.

I could go on. The workplace is not what it once was.

I learned a few things down the years. I discovered very early on that the staff who make themselves indispensable and never have a day off or take holidays are 9 times out of 10 on the fiddle. This has been born out time and time again.
A friend of my boss ran a two-branch business a few miles away. A couple of years ago he bought new accounting software as his business was booming. It immediately showed a discrepancy in the books. He initially blamed the software, but after a major investigation it uncovered a long lasting and systematic theft by a senior and trusted member of staff amounting to thousands. He has since gone out of business.

About twenty years ago I was asked to manage a different branch of the bookshop chain I worked for. I hated it. I hated the journey. I hated the fact that the shop was in the middle of a building site and it was impossible to keep clean. I walked in one day to find a piece of the concrete ceiling had come away and brought the false ceiling down.
But what I hated most was the discovery after just a few days that my assistant manager was on the fiddle. The shop floor staff knew it but he'd intimidated them into keeping quiet. My predecessor and the area manager were oblivious to it.
They didn't believe me when I broached the subject. It was difficult to convince them, because they should have picked it up but hadn't. And yet it was obvious to my trained eye and years of cynical experience.
He confessed once he was confronted and was dismissed. Once he'd gone the staff told the whole sad and sorry story. Of how he'd walk out with armfuls of videos on the days when he managed the store. He was taking cash and stock and it took an outsider's pair of eyes to notice.

Luckily these incidents are few and far between.
But every system that's ever been set up and declared foolproof will always tempt someone to cheat it.

Fork Lift trucks

2010-08-14T09:22:00.000+01:00

I first used a fork lift truck back in the 70s when I worked on the night shift at Tesco. I had no training or elfin safety in the use of the reach truck. my options were simple. I needed a pallet from the top of the racking and there was no-one else to get it down but me. I'd watched a few people use the machine so I worked out what each lever and pedal did, and then jumped on. It was a hair-raising experience, and I guess it stayed the same even when, many years later I'd taken my test and was passed fit to be allowed loose on one.
There are a number of different types of forklift but the two main types are reach and counterbalance. For the scientifically minded a folk lift truck is a lever, (just as a shovel is)and if you try and lift too heavy a weight, or put the weight too far in front of you, the truck will lose stability. It also helps to have good eyesight and co-ordination, as I found out quite quickly.
A reach truck has a long wheel base with the front legs positioned in front of the forks and to either side. My truck had a single steering/driving wheel beneath the driver's seat, which makes it quite manoevrable, as it can turn almost in its own wheelbase length. It's very stable but not as fast as a counterbalance truck, which relies on a solid ballast weight at the rear of the truck to counter the weight of the object carried. You can always tell if the truck is overloaded as the driving wheels come off the ground and it becomes a seesaw.
One evening I was taking a pallet of coffee from the top deck of the racking and failed to notice a supporting cable between the rack and the roof. I drew the pallet out, reversed the truck and very neatly skimmed the top layer of coffee jars off the pallet and crashing down around my ears. This creates a dilemma. Do I sit tight and be covered in coffee powder and broken glass or do I get off the truck and risk being hit by full cases?
As I grew in confidence (albeit not much confidence) I used to be called to move pallets for other people, and even to unload lorries (once I'd transferred to days), and the regular forklift driver was on lunch. Eventually I moved on to other jobs and careers and left it all behind.
Until the turn of this century when I found myself at a distribution warehouse dealing in tenpin bowling equipment. This time the truck was an ancient battery driven counterbalance truck that wasn't quite up to the job.
I lost count of the times my heart was in my mouth as I unloaded a full pallet of bowling balls that overloaded the truck by at least 50%. Or the times I held my breath as I tried to retrieve a very heavy pallet from the top of the racking at the limit of its capacity. I worked there for three years and never had an accident, but it was a close run thing on more than one occasion.
There's something utterly buttock clenching about inching across the warehouse floor with a very heavy pallet of very expensive machinery on the forks, and the rear wheels having only the most tenuous contact with the floor.
And then knowing that this is only the first pallet and there's a whole 40ft container still to unload.
When that job ended and I was back in the market place I had another qualification, namely a current fork lift licence. And yet it was the last job I wanted.
I recall going for an interview at a distribution company as a progress chaser, but not getting through the interview but finding myself undergoing an impromptu fork lift driving test in the warehouse. I was awful. I took ages to do the simplest task. My nerve had gone. I didn't get that job either, and I'm glad about that.

While on the subject of forklift truck driving, my son left school at age 16 with ten GCSEs and an utter contempt for the education system in this country. I got him registered with my main employment agency and he was soon earning a man's wages. He saw that he could earn more than the basic minimum wage by training to get his forklift licence, so he paid over £200 to take it. At that time the basic agency hourly rate was £4.50 per hour, while a forklift driver could expect £6.50 because they were in short supply. My son actually held a forklift licence before he passed his test to drive on the roads.
With the rising number of unemployed looking for work, the Jobcentre started sending them on forklift training courses. (Sending people on courses is the main way the Jobcentre keeps the unemployment rates down. If you're on a course, you're not seeking work.)
The consequence was that within a year or two there was a glut of forklift truck drivers and they no longer commanded a higher wage. The last I heard, the basic hourly rate at the local agencies was approaching £6 per hour, but forklift rates were still at £6.50. You have to speak Polish as well.

It's good to know that the law of Supply and Demand still holds good.

Call Centres- inbound

2010-08-09T23:24:00.000+01:00

I've already written about my time in outbound call centres but I also spent some time working in inbound centres as well. I've already written about my time at the Ricoh service centre in Wellingborough and how my career prospects (ha ha) were determined by the application of some arcane nonsense called psychometric profiling, surely the worst HR nonsense to be dreamt up.

When temping it was my custom to do the rounds of the employment agencies at least once a week. This was firstly to keep my name and face uppermost in the minds of the bookers, and secondly to sniff out any possible jobs before the others.

One day I was contacted by one of the agencies to ask if I fancied working in Market Harborough in an inbound call centre. I suspect that I only got the job because I had a car and would be taking three others with me, but hey, it's a job.

The job involved sitting at a computer terminal wearing a telephone headset. The computer was working the AS400 software, so no surprises at all. It was a busy office with about 50 workstations in quite a small space.The company handled magazine subscriptions for many publishers and their profitability depended on answering as many calls as quickly as possible.
The problem was to do with a weekly part-work magazine that had a choice of free gift on the cover. Except that it wasn't. The buyer had to ring up to say which gift he wanted, and the extra calls were slowing the operation.

The training was quite good. Yes we had a day of training!
Initially we had to write out each call rather than directly input the details, and give the completed form to the supervisor who then arranged for the evening shift to enter the call onto the system.
Over the course of a few days the amount of onscreen work increased, until we'd reached an acceptable speed and standard to be left on our own.

Although the room was crowded it was a lonely existence as chatting to your neighbour was discouraged. I worked there for two separate spells and never knew half the names. The breaks were also very short and there was only just enough time to get from the call centre to the canteen, grab something to eat and drink before heading back.

My co-temps were much younger than me, and would chat away happily among themselves while I drove them to and from work. I felt excluded (but that was mostly through choice- I wasn't following the latest twists and turns of soap operas and celebrity culture.)

One thing I did find better than subsequent postings was the acceptance of male workers by the female staff and management. In one call centre I was made to feel an intruder in an all female clique.

Sex discrimination cuts both ways.

Making Bread

2010-07-13T20:30:00.002+01:00

A dozen or so years ago I was temping and was offered some shifts at a bakery that had just opened in the town. It was owned by Budgens and they'd relocated from Slough to be near their distribution centre in Wellingborough. Apparently the Factory Manager had chosen Kettering over Wellingborough because staff costs were cheaper. That didn't bode well for me, but I turned up on the first shift at the unearthly hour of two in the morning. I was given an overall and hairnet, shown the toilet and canteen and then we made our way onto the factory floor.

I've worked in a lot of food factories over the years and it is my assertion that our hospitals would not have anything like the infection rates they currently or historically have had if they had to observe the hygeine rules that apply to food production. I regularly see hospital staff walking around town in their work uniforms, even in theatre green gowns.
Anyone leaving the bakery premises for any reason had to remove their overalls. Food contamination is a big deal. So why are hospitals so lax?

I was introduced to my supervisor and was given a job to do. I think it was passing baking trays through a scrubber/greaser. Any bake waste was cleaned off and a film of oil applied. The bakery got through thousands of trays in a shift and some may have been used more than once.

The bakery produced loaves and rolls, plus doughnuts, apple turnovers and hot cross buns. They also produced "part bake" french sticks that, as the name implies, were part baked and then frozen. They were then delivered to the store and finished off in the instore bakery. Sometimes the smell of fresh baked bread isn't always what it seems.

The bakery had two types of oven. One was a conveyor belt when the "raw" loaves were loaded in one end and the baked loaves taken off at the other. The work work was very hot and potentially dangerous. I still have a scar or two on my arms from where a hot tray touched aginst my bare arm.
The other ovens were turntable type. The product was wheeled into the ovens on rolling racks and then rotated until they were baked. Each oven held three racks. I made sure I never worked these ovens. It was far too hot, the racks were too heavy, and it was too dangerous for me.

The reason for my early start became apparent. Each product was produced on a production line. The raw ingredients were loaded into a huge bowl which was then mixed and loaded into a hopper. The machine then extruded the dough according to the specifications and the dough passed through the machine, being neaded and rested until it emerged at the other end where the individual rolls dropped onto the greased trays. These were then loaded onto a rack and then into a proving cabinet. After a while they were ready to bake and they went through the ovens and on to the packing area. It took about 5-6 hours from raw ingredients to packed product.
The main bottleneck was the ovens, hence the staggered starting times. The roll plant started at two in the morning and the bread plant at six.
Over the next few months I worked in every department of the bakery, always as a temp, despite their overtures to join on a permanent basis.
In the run-up to Easter we made so many hot cross buns I was sick of the sight of them. I was working on the packing line loading the trays ready for despatch and we'd be packing them for hours.
Another time I worked on the Part-Bake line. I also worked on the conveyor oven, the bread plant, the doughnut plant, packing the frozen french sticks into boxes. I even worked in the despatch area, picking the individual stores requirements.
My favourite (?) job was when I was asked to produce a product called "Bun Rounds"

They were similar to the illustration except they were covered in icing and topped with a glace cherry. I had to do every part of the process. I loaded the dough into the moulds, into the prover, into the oven, then applied the icing and the cherry before packing them, labelling them and taking them to the despatch.
It was hard work but I enjoyed the challenge of having a deadline to work to.

I can't remember how or why I came to leave. I'd been working on and off for almost a year. I must have had a better offer, or went on holiday and came back to find someone else in my place.
That's what happens when you temp.

Call Centres- outbound

2010-07-13T19:43:00.001+01:00

Call Centres. Don't you just love them. Don't you just love it when you get a phone call just as you're sitting down to dinner. You pick the phone up and for a few seconds there's silence. Eventually a voice comes on the line and asks to speak to the owner of the house (and usually in a foreign accent).

Welcome to the world of Call Centres. I've worked in several over the years and basically there are two sorts- inbound and outbound.
Of the two, inbound is probably better. The customer rings you. With outbound you ring the customer.
I've done a couple of temp jobs in outbound call centres.
The first was a part time job while I was recovering from a shoulder injury. In hindsight I shouldn't have taken it because I got into trouble with the DSS and lost my benefit for a few weeks. Although the rules stated that you could work up to 16 hours a week without losing your benefits you have to get their permission first. The problem is that they are slow in reaching a decision, and the job has gone before they come back to you. So I went ahead and took the job.

It was awful. Soul destroying. Four hours of torture for minimum wage.

The job training was of the "you'll soon get the hang of it" variety. My tools were a telephone and a well thumbed local business directory. My task was to cold call local firms on behalf of an agency that tried to find placements for young people. My firm got paid for every appointment I was able to make for the agency rep.

Well for a start half the numbers didn't work. Most of the rest when they could be bothered to answer the phone weren't interested and it took less than a week to work through the directory. I was promised another database of businesses to work through but that never happened. In the end I gave up, thoroughly discouraged.
What a crap job.

I have every sympathy with call centre operators who ring to try and sell me cavity wall insulation or whatever it is they're trying to sell. It's a thankless job with no end product and no job satisfaction.

I did another spell working in an outbound call centre. This was slightly different. I was working for a domestic shower company making appointments for engineers to call to fix leaking showers. So in essence it wasn't really cold calling as the client had already rung in to report the fault.
My job was to make an appointment for the engineer to call.
Each engineer was allocated a territory and we had to manage his appointments so that he made best use of his time. Sometimes the engineer would have to travel a couple of hundred miles to get to all his calls so it wasn't possible to set an exact time when he would arrive. The best we could promise was either morning or afternoon. Sometimes I'd have to phone a client a dozen times before they answered the phone, and then there'd be negotiations because the day or time wasn't suitable.
Once again I have every sympathy with the operator when I have to ring to make an appointment for an engineer to call. They can't just drop everything and come at your beck and call.

I went for a couple of interviews for outbound call centre jobs, not that I was interested in getting the job mind you. Sometimes you go to an interview just to keep your agency happy.

I recall being sent to an interview about twenty five miles away, way outside the distance I was willing to travel for a job at minimum wage. I was told that it was an inbound call centre but when I arrived it was outbound.

It was a short interview.

Another time I was sent to a new call centre that was being set up. They were trying to get local builders to sign up to a builders only credit card. It was a sound business idea with soild financial backing.
When I arrived I found the same management team that I had for the first job I described above. Not a good start.
There were a dozen or so candidates and we were given some team building tests followed by a face to face interview. During the preliminaries we were told about "open" and "closed" questions, and to use open questions where possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-ended_question

I had my interview with the personnel woman and she asked me if I knew the difference between an "open" and "closed" question? It was with great delight that I answered "yes" and said no more.

Apparently I did enough to be offered a job, but the hours (Mon-Fri 2-10pm)were against me. I was playing a lot of music and attending meetings most evenings so it was no go. Still, I'd have enjoyed the challenge.
I've no idea if the credit card got off the ground. It depended on getting the local builders merchants to accept them, and getting enough local builders to sign up. In the end I expect the recesssion killed it off because I've never seen it advertised anywhere.

Multi Drop

2010-07-06T21:25:00.001+01:00

About ten years ago I was working in a distribution warehouse and discussing the rise of the internet. I made the sweeping statement that town centres were doomed because of the rise of out of town shopping centres and the internet. I went as far as to say that one day we would either be warehousemen or white van men. Either picking and packing, or delivering goods ordered over the net.
Nothing I've seen has changed my view. You can go shopping at Iceland and they will deliver your shopping for you. You don't even have to go to Tesco or Sainsbury's, just click on the website.
After I left the retail sector following redundancy about fifteen years ago I've done all manner of jobs including warehouse/distribution and multi-drop deliveries. Yes I've been a white van man. And a white 7 1/2 ton lorry man.
I drove a C15 fridge van around East Anglia for a meat products firm. My round extended from Peterborough in the north to Clacton in the south, from Ipswich in the east to Hitchin in the west. In the eighteen months or so that I worked there I averaged 2000 miles a week and went around the clock at least once. I wore out several sets of tyres and broke down and had to be towed home a few times as well.
I must have driven along every road between the A14 and the A12 looking for a way past traffic jams and making up time. Every customer wanted his goods first thing and you can't be in Peterborough, Cambridge and Colchester at the same time.

Another time I drove a 7 1/2 ton lorry delivering goods to schools in Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. There were always too many deliveries and I'd always run out of time and have to bring some back. I was working for an agency so I'd only get an odd day here or there and I never ever went to the same school twice. I recall driving through rural Oxfordshire full pelt, trying to make up time, with my map on my knee and trying to get to the other side of the valley. I turned down a country lane that appeared to connect the two roads only to find it narrowing at the bottom and with no way to turn around. I decided to continue and forced my way through the trees overhanging the road. The sides of the lorry were quite scratched and there was branches and foliage all over the road.
Another time I managed to spill a tin of emulsion paint all over the floor of the van. What a mess. I talked my way out of that when I got back to the depot.
I wasn't so lucky a few weeks later when, as I drove past some roadworks, a digger suddenly turned and caught my wing mirror with its shovel, shattering the glass.
I took the van back and explained that it was a genuine accident.
I don't think they believed me because I wasn't asked back.

Another time I worked in a distribution centre unloading the night time trunkers. You've seen the vans driving around the place delivering catalogue goods. Back then they were festooned with three flying ducks along the side.
We worked from about 9.00 until 6 or 7 in the morning. A trunker would pull up and back up to the loading bay. The tractor would detatch the trailer, hook up to an empty trailer and go back to the hub. He'd return later with another full trailer, unhook and take the by now empty trailer away. And return a couple of hours later with a third.
The back of the lorry would be opened and the goods would cascade out all over the floor. The constant motion of the journey put paid to any stacking of the goods. It looked as though the trailer had been loaded by a hopper chute through the roof.
Our job was to take each item, look at the delivery label and place the item by the back doors of the delivery vans, anything up to 40 of them. There were all kinds of items from clothing to hoovers and garden tools, in fact anything you could order from a catalogue. Our small team worked away and eventually emptied the trailer. Then we had a short break and started on the next one which had just arrived. It was all go and we earned our money.
It was still preferable to driving the delivery vans. Each driver was expected to deliver 60 or more items to household addresses often miles from the depot. If there was no-one home he had to go back later and try and deliver it and get a signature.
I worked as a driver's mate delivering large bulky items that couldn't be handled by one person. That wasn't too bad as the drops were well spaced out and there weren't as many, but I always declined any offers to work on the delivery vans.
That was a hiding to nothing.

More Rubbish

2010-06-29T13:01:00.001+01:00

One of the many jobs I did in the late 90s was to drive a furniture lorry. I passed my driving test in the 70s, and my licence allowed me to drive any vehicle up to 7 1/2 ton without any extra training. These days you have to go on a training course.

The lorry was fitted with a tachometer and it was a job to remember to fit a disc and then set it correctly. I've lost count of the times I drove miles while it was set for a mealbreak, or took a break while it was set to drive. The discs were stacked up in the despatch office and I never saw anyone ever look at them.

Two or three times a week I'd deliver furniture around the area. I had a mate who'd help me carry the items into the houses, and we had fun getting overstuffed sofas through narrow doors. Sometimes we had to take the doors off, or remove front windows. I noticed that the newer houses were much smaller than the old ones, and a suite of furniture that looked nice on the showroom floor would completely fill a living room. There was room for a sofa, one armchair and a TV set. Maybe that's all people need these days.

When people bought beds we'd offer to take the old one away. It cut out the hassle of getting the council to collect it, and cut down on the amount of fly tipping.We'd take the beds and suites back to the yard and stack them up. When we had a lorry load we'd take them to the tip.

These old beds and sofas were classified as trade waste and had to be taken to a depot in Northampton where there was a weighbridge. I spent a couple of hours loading old saggy, wet and mouldy beds and sofas into the van. There was a certain amount of covered storage at the yard, but the other staff wouldn't be bothered to stack the beds under the shelter but just leave them where they fell. Once I'd loaded up I'd drive the fifteen miles or more to Northampton and I'd pass these enormous open top container lorries heading in the opposite direction.
Upon arrival at the Waste Transfer Station (to give it its proper title) I'd get the vehicle weighed and drive up the ramp to unload in a cavernous dusty and smelly building. I'd back up to the heap of rubbish and throw all the beds and sofas out. A large digger would drive up and flatten everything and then scoop it up and drop it down a chute into the lorry waiting below.
I then returned to the weighbridge to be weighed again, this time empty (plus me in the cab of course) and then they'd charge me for the difference in weight. Once I'd settled up, I'd then drive back, following the lorry that now contained all the crushed bedding that I'd unloaded.

So why couldn't I just drive the bedding to the landfill site instead of a pointless thirty mile round trip? There's a weighbridge at the landfill site and both sites were operated by the same company.
Whether the beds were collected by me, collected by the council or flytipped, the probability is overwhelming that they'd have ended up in the same landfill site eventually.
There's money to be made from rubbish. All those road miles moving the rubbish around may be bad for the environment, but they're good for business.

A dozen or more years later and the fleet of lorries still travel between Northampton and the landfill site near Corby. They use a different route these days but I still recognise the vehicle livery and the huge trailers that look like forty foot containers with the roof sliced off. They pass close to a windfarm the receives subsidies whether the wind blows or not (it seldom does. It's estimated that the farm is no more than 7% efficient). Plans for an electricity generator powered by burning rubbish keep getting turned down on environmental grounds.
Any methane gas that is given off by the tons of rotting matter in the landfill is burnt off rather than collected and used to generate electricty.

It's all rubbish really.

Rubbish

2010-06-28T23:33:00.001+01:00

When I was temping a dozen or so years ago I was happy to take any job offered. Some weeks I could only work for a couple of days due to my music commitments, so I was happy to take the odd one or two day assignments.
One May Bank Holiday I was asked to do a day working on the Domestic Refuse Collection at the basic minimum wage, but at double time for a Bank Holiday otherwise I'd have turned it down. It was hard and heavy manual work for someone in his late forties, but I gave it a go.
I turned up bright and early at the Council Depot, climbed into the Refuse lorry and we drove to a neighbouring town where we were to do our round. There were three of us, the driver and two mates who worked on opposite sides of the street. You've all seen how they do it. It's quite hard and there's a knack in getting the bin onto the hoist and then getting the empties away. The lorry is constantly moving and you have to watch out for traffic. You very rarely sit in the lorry and you're always on the go. I wouldn't want to do the job for minimum wage.
We drove up and down the streets which were quiet as it was a Bank Holiday. As we drove down one street in a rough part of town a man came out of a house, saw me and started effing and blinding "Who you looking at? I'll smash your face in", etc etc. Charming man, charming neighbourhood.
After an hour or two the lorry was full so we climbed in and drove off to the tip. This journey comprised my morning break. We returned to carry on the round and filled the lorry twice more before we finished the round in the early afternoon.
I politely turned down other offers of odd days on the bins at single time. The job is worth more than that.

A few months later I was offered a couple of days work at the landfill site that we'd dumped the household refuse. It had been very windy and paper and other rubbish had escaped the netting surrounding the tip and had to be picked up. So I spent a couple of days litter picking from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. I turned up at the gatehouse and they gave me a roll of black bags and told to get on with it. The netting that surrounds the tip is very good at catching any paper or plastic that blows around, but if too much sticks to the netting the net becomes a wall and the rubbish is lifted over the netting, so the first priority was to clear the netting. Pick the rubbish off the net, put it into a black bag. When the bag is full, drop it into the tip. Repeat until all the rubbish is collected. Once that was done I cleared all the rubbish inside the boundary of the tip, then all the fields around the tip for a quarter of a mile or so.

Plastic takes forever to degrade. There's a wood a short distance from my house that is the site of an ironstone quarry. The overburden (the soil and rock that covers the iron ore) was removed with a mechanical shovel and tipped so that it formed ridges and valleys known as hill and dale. These were planted with trees and the gullet was eventually filled with household refuse. It's possible to walk through the woods and see the site of the gullet, and also see old washing up liquid bottles sticking out of the ground and showing no signs of decomposing

I spent a couple of days clearing old plastic bags from the fields and hedges, enjoying the open air and being inspired to write a song or two. The only downside was the fact that my trusty Doc Martens finally gave out and began to leak water after a year of hard use, in factories and three months walking the streets pushing charity bags through letterboxes (but that's another story)

The driver of the Refuse lorry told me that when this landfill tip was opened it had enough capacity for over thirty year's worth of domestic rubbish. It had been in use for just over fifteen years and was almost full, such was the increase in the local population and the amount of rubbish they were throwing away.

Since then the council has introduced a two weekly refuse collection and recycling for domestic customers. We're quite happy to sort out our rubbish, with different bins for garden and household waste, and boxes for glass, paper, metal and plastic containers. What I'm less happy about is this.

I'm responsible for making sure my firm's rubbish is collected. It's a small firm with only a few staff, but even so we can produce a lot of cardboard and waste paper, drinks cans etc. I called the Council to ask if they had any facility to separate the recycleable stuff from the rest of the rubbish. They said that hadn't and had no plans to extend recycling to business customers.
Our business rubbish is collected in blue plastic bags that currently cost about £1.60 each. If I separate out the recyclable items I'm left with one or two blue bags that we have to leave out overnight as the binmen go by before the office opens. At the moment we don't have an urban fox problem and the rats are well fed from the rubbish left outside the many takeaways at the end of the street.

I can see the benefit of recycling. I've worked as a binman and I've worked in the landfill site. I'm happy to separate my household rubbish so that the council can sell the cardboard, cans and paper to offset the cost of landfill.
What I don't understand is why the council can't or won't extend the recycling scheme to their business customers.
I suspect that it's more to do with taking money from businesses than recycling.

World Cup Cricket

2010-06-05T20:48:00.002+01:00

I was watching the cricket this afternoon and it reminded me of the time I worked in a call centre selling tickets for the 1998 Cricket World Cup. The main centre for getting tickets was at Lords and it was soon apparent that they couldn't cope with demand. People were hanging on the phone for hours trying to get through, and there was a real danger that the matches would be played before the tickets could be sold. Something had to be done.
I had a call from an agency asking me to turn up at a location in Market Harborough where I would be trained ready for going live the next day.
This was the first time I'd worked in a call centre so I was interested to find out how it worked.
The computer programme was fairly straight forward to use and we were soon up and running. The phone would ring in my ear and I'd find out what match the person wanted tickets for. Tickets were finite and many matches had sold out. We mostly had games featuring the smaller nations like Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and Holland in provincial grounds. All games featuring England and India were sold out and we had only one Pakistan game with unsold tickets.
I won't bore you with details of how the process worked. I've worked in a number of inbound call centres since then, selling magazine subscriptions and booking engineers for photocopiers. They all use versions of the same software, so if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

I did learn one important thing regarding Indians and Pakistanis. I'm not being racist, just telling you what happened.
If someone rang asking about a game featuring India and they were told that it had sold out they expressed dissapointment and rang off.
If someone rang about a Pakistan game and I said that it had sold out, they wouldn't accept it. Are you sure? You don't have one or two left? I can pay a bit extra etc, etc. It's as if it's built into their culture that tickets can always be obtained with a little backsheesh.
They wouldn't take no for an answer. If I said there weren't any tickets they would take it as a personal affront, as if their money, their offer of backsheesh wasn't good enough.
There was one Pakistan game that had some tickets. We were told that tickets were limited to two only per caller, so we had the spectacle of the buyer asking for ten or twenty tickets and being told no. Then they said can my brother/sister/auntie have two tickets? I checked and was told that they could if they came to the phone and ordered them in "person". So another voice would then buy two tickets for his brother, another voice would buy two for his sister, then his auntie/uncle/cousin/grandmother all had two. Once he had his ten or twenty tickets they'd all be paid for with one credit card.
Specially obtained to buy tickets for the World Cup.
The tickets were specially printed with the buyer's name, but when people in the same family are called Hussein or Ahmed or Mohammed who knew if the tickets were genuinely for family members or to be touted outside the ground?

We never had this problem with the Indians, only with the Pakistanis.
Maybe if there were tickets available for Indian matches I might have a different view but my opinion of the two nations was definitely shaped by my time selling World Cup tickets.

Trolley pushing

2010-06-05T15:20:00.002+01:00

I went shopping in Morrisons for the first time in months (due to being housebound with my leukaemia). Seeing the lads and one girl pushing snakes of trolleys back to the trolley park reminded me of a time 33 years ago when I did just that.
I was working at Tesco Weston Favell. At that time it was the biggest supermarket in the country. People would travel from all over the county and from as far away as Milton Keynes to do their shopping. We had over 30 checkouts and at times every one was busy, with long queues at every till. This meant that we were always out of trolleys.
I had a small team of lads and our job was to keep the trolleys moving back to the trolley park in the entrance. When it was really busy we'd wait while a customer unloaded their trolley into their car and almost snatch it out of their hands, such was the demand for trolleys. We had one goods/passenger lift that would take twenty trolleys and many times I'd ride up the lift, open the doors and twenty or thirty shoppers would descend on the left, take the trolleys and rush into the store. We hardly ever had to empty the lift! It didn't matter how many trolleys we had, there were never enough. We had a team with a van and trailer touring the local estates rescuing trolleys from alleyways and ponds, and we had a contractor come in every couple of months to repair the trolleys and steam clean the really dirty ones.
Like the time a woman left her young child to soil itself while sitting on the baby seat. It was everywhere. On the mesh, on the floor. As we rushed over with a mop and bucket she never batted an eyelid, just scooped the child up, left everything and went and got another trolley and started again.
There's an art to pushing a row of trolleys, especially when the ground slopes as it did under the Weston Favell Centre. It was possible to push twenty trolleys without them breaking away if you kept them pointing upslope slightly. Once you were at full speed, a flick of the wrist would point the trolleys downhill onto a ramp up the kerb. You soon learned when to stop pushing so that the row of trolleys would stop just in front of the lift. We were out in all weathers, and apart from one or two very lazy lads who's rather argue than push a trolley, we kept the trolleys rolling, and thereby kept the tills ringing.
Now that every town has two or three supermarkets we will never see the levels of business that we had back in the seventies and eighties.
When we lived in Somerset our nearest Tesco was either Bristol or Yeovil. Now there are Tescos is Shepton Mallet where we lived, and in Wells where I worked.
In the early eighties the nearest cashpoint was in Bath, more than 30 miles away. Now even our local newsagent has a cashpoint machine.
The banks have closed branches everywhere. There will come a time when banks will be as rare as cashpoint machines were in the 80s.

We seem oblivious to one consequence. Every cashpoint machine has contributed to the loss of a person's job.
However, they'll always need someone to push the trolleys.

The Net Book Agreement

2010-06-03T21:20:00.000+01:00

One of the many temp jobs I did was at a local print works about ten or so years ago. They needed some extra pairs of hands with a huge print run of magazines. It was all very clean, light and airy and the work wasn't too strenuous. Pick this up, put it there, and so on. There were frequent stops while they worked on the machines and our small gang of temps were moved around the works as required. All in all an interesting couple of days for a couple of reasons.
It wouldn't have happened at all a few years before that. The printing trade was 100% unionised and any non-union labour would have had them out on strike. We can all remember the scenes in Wapping when News International moved production of their papers out of Fleet St.

I drove past the site of the print works the other day. It is no more. The buildings are demolished and the concrete floor is a car park for the local hospital workforce. The other printworks where the local paper was edited and printed was knocked down about fifteen years ago and production transferred to Northampton. It's inevitable that that print works will also close as more and more people get their news on-line rather than from a newspaper.

I thought about this as I was browsing Ebay looking for books by a particular author. This week it's Kurt Vonnegut. I have a dozen or so and I'm looking for more of his books to take on holiday. As I browsed the lists I thought about the Net Book Agreement, which was in force when I managed Volume One Books in Northampton twenty years ago.

According to Wikipedia
"The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a British fixed Book Price between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public.
It came into effect on January 1, 1900 and involved retailers selling books at agreed prices. Any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question.
In 1962 the Net Book Agreement was examined by the Restrictive Practices Court which decided that the NBA was of benefit to the industry, since it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less widely-read authors using money from bestsellers."

I was made redundant in 1994 when the Goldsteins foresaw the end of the NBA and put the company into administration. The new owners and I didn't see eye to eye about how the books were ordered, etc and I was made redundant. I was happy to go. Within a few months the Net Book Agreement was no more and Sunday Trading had been forced through. My employment contract would have been changed for the worst. I was glad to go.

I was a firm believer in the Net Book Agreement. Books are not baked beans. You don't read your Dan Brown or Nick Hornby or whatever your favourite author happens to be, and then pop down the supermarket for another one. Each book is unique. They take time to write. The most prolific authors only manage about three every two years. They are a premium product.

So why pile them high and sell them cheap? Why reduce your margin and even sell them at a loss? Waterstones opened at midnight to sell Harry Potter at half RRP.
Two things. Either the RRP was wrong or they sold it at a loss. All that work , all that expense, all that aggro and they sell it at a loss. They're mad.
Secondly, the books were printed in China and shipped over by the container load.
Hardly any books are printed in the UK now. Since the NBA was scrapped the publishers can't afford to. So all those printer's jobs are gone forever. When they close the print works or shoe factories the machines aren't scrapped. They're sold, boxed up and sent to factories in the far East where they are used to print books or make shoes that are sold back to us.

Cheapest is dearest. Always.

Working for the Government -part two

2010-05-30T12:01:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I was employed as a temp to enter all the flood defence data on to the National Flood Defence database. I've explained how I was recruited at short notice from a local employment agency, despite the fact that the EA had contracted with Reed International to supply all their temporary staff. I also explained how unworkable and unsatisfactory the arrangement was, as Reed offices are usually in a different town to where the job was situated, meaning that local staff were unlikely to be given the job.
I was employed on minimum wage and I had no spare time or money to travel to another town to register for work (at minimum wage). In reality the national minimum wage is also the national maximum wage. You can't run a household and a car on minimum wage, so having a national agreement in place is the worst possible option when trying to get people back into work and getting work done and meeting your own targets.
Reed had to take up my references, but I argued that I was already working at the EA anyway, and had been for some weeks, so why shouldn't I continue to work there? Then there was the small matter of the deadline for uploading all the data, the reason why I was engaged in the first place.
So I went back to work at the EA while my references were checked out. In the meantime the agency had sent a new temp along to help. He was considered the very best they could find. He was useless, but then I was biased. However, he was unable to match our work rate even after a couple of day's training. As I said, the job required tenacity, accuracy and intense concentration and my co-worker was sadly lacking. It didn't help that he lived miles and miles away and his transport was unreliable.
(Back to the same problem of paying minimum wage. There's no money for keeping your car up to scratch. Yet another disincentive to work.)
As the days passed, we began to see the light. The pile of work slowly began to diminish. We were going to upload all the data in the time required. My boss rang around the neighbouring regions to see how they were doing. Their answer astounded me.

No they hadn't made much progress in getting the data online. No they weren't making any special effort. Yes they were going to miss the deadline set by the government. No they had no intention of meeting it at any time soon.

So much for government targets.

I now began to see how the public sector works. I began to see that setting targets is unproductive, costly and gives a totally false picture of what is actually happening.

Basically there are three options.

One is to stop doing your normal work and divert all your resources to producing the evidence required by central government that you are hitting your targets.
In the case of my little backwater of the EA, it would have meant taking all the field satff off the job of repairing and improving flood defences and sitting them in an office entering the data on to the computer. Data which is basically useless in the event of a flood. Flood defences are what's needed, not lines on a map.
Option one is the one favoured by someone looking for promotion. Look good in the eyes of Head Office and bugger the workers and the public. Produce glossy plans and charts that look good but betray the reality.

Option two was to continue to work on the flood defences, utilising the staff according to their strengths, and updating the data as and when time allowed. This also creates a false picture of the situation, but in a positive way. The defences are probably better than as marked on a plan. This is not the way to go if you want promotion.

Option three is to bring in people to update the data while the regular staff do the job they were hired to do. The problem with this approach is that the quality of staff is variable, the training patchy, and the rush to hit the deadline outweighs the need to enter the data correctly. It's also very expensive.

And the final option, one that is used over and over again. In my office there were a couple of men who were working on technical drawings for various flood defences. They worked on a draughtsman's table producing plans in the old fashioned way. I chatted to one when I had a break one day. He used to work for the EA or one of its predecessors but had been made redundant when the EA was re-organised. The re-organisation left them without anyone to make the deatiled drawings that are vital for any work to be done. What did they do? they re-hired the draughtsman, this time as a consultant at a vastly inflated daily rate. So he came back, sat at the same desk and did exactly the same job as he did before, but this time with a big smile on his face. He was his own boss, earning a fortune compared to his earlier salary, and if he fancied a day off he could take it. Nice work if you can get it.

We made the deadline. We were the only office in the whole of the UK to do so.
We were the only office to hit the government's target.
Guess which office got into trouble?

Anyway, my job was done. I heard that another department needed a temporary worker so i approached them and found myself work to last another three weeks or so.

Reed International. Useless. I'd never recommend them to anyone.

Working for the Government

2010-05-27T15:31:00.000+01:00

I've not posted for the last few weeks as there's been an election followed by week away on holiday.

And I had nothing to write about.
But that hasn't stopped me in the past so here goes.

I briefly worked for the Environment agency about five years ago. It taught me all I need to know about how the government sets targets, allocates resources and gives contracts. In short, it's rubbish.
The Environment Agency was formed from the Anglia Water Authority and National Rivers Authority amonst other agencies. It sought to bring a whole raft of differing organisations with different responsibilities under one roof. The government did a similar thing when it combined the Inland Revenue with Customs & Excise and created a body that managed to lose all the good aspects and retain the bad bits of both agencies. I suspect that the same thing happened with the Environment Agency.
In 1996 there were really bad floods in Northampton. It turned out that the flood defences were so bad as to be useless. A lot of money had to be spent putting that right and then the government called for a nationwide survey of every flood defence, and for that information to be put on a national database that could be accessed on the internet. All this had to be done in addition to the everyday work.
So how do they assess the flood defences? They send their staff out to walk the riverbank and measure the height, angle, constuction methods etc of every river bank. These were entered on to paper plans and then entered on the computer database.
As usual, the government set a target for this to be accomplished. The order went out from Whitehall that the whole country's flood defences be available to view online by such and such a date.
It was an impossible task, given the manpower available and the pressure of actually repairing the banks and creating flood protection areas, rather than merely measuring them.
You see the same problem in the NHS, in Education, the Police. All have targets that must be achieved, so the staff spend all their time filling in forms and only doing the work that is relevant to making their targets.

I'd been looking for work for about three weeks. My last job was entering data for a Supermarket chain's distribution depot. The company's promotional allocations were on a separate database to the stores orders, so I entered the quantities from one database to the other so that they could be picked and sent out in one load rather than two. It was not a hard job, but needed speedy and accurate keyboard skills, which I'd learned almost forty years beforehand.

One day I received a call from a local employment agency asking if I was available to work the next day. I was, so I turned up at the local Environment Agency offices, where my job was explained to me.
It was quite complicated, but nowhere near as complicated as working Cubase music software, so I was able to get up to speed quite quickly. I'd be given a pile of A4 sheets that related to a stretch of riverbank, then I'd download the relevant master data from the national database. I'd enter the data from the sheets to the database and once I'd completed the set, I'd upload the amended data to the national database.
I will say that not everyone can do this. It required a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail, as well as working to a tight deadline. But that was what I was used to, having come from a banking and FMCG background
(FMCG= Fast Moving Consumer Goods)
The deadline loomed ever closer. My boss and I were the only staff available to enter the data. To be honest, you could never get a man who'd spent all his life outdoors maintaining water courses to have the computer skills to transfer his data in an office environment. Any more than you could have asked me to survey the riverbanks for the data.

It was then that we encountered a snag. While it was OK for my boss to have a temp, he could only get that temp from the approved supplier, which was Reed International. I wasn't registered with them. I had to take a day off and travel to Northampton to register and be interviewed for the job I'd been doing with a great deal of success for a couple of weeks. I had to give references which had to be checked up. I went along with it reluctantly.

Here I was, a temporary worker on minimum wage having to travel to another town at my own expense to register for a job in my own town. If I wanted to work in Northampton I'd have registered there. My boss said that they'd asked Reed for temporarary staff months before but they'd been unable to find any, and yet he'd rung a local agency who provided a first class temp (me) the next day. He shook his head, saying that the government had a policy of using local business wherever possible, but that it was thwarted by their insistence of centralised accounts, who refused to allow local businesses to compete. There had to be central buying, which accounts for why a post-it pad costs ten times from the approved supplier than what you could buy it for in the high street.

False economics.
On a national scale, it may make sense for one firm to supply all the temporary staff, if all that mattered was sending out one cheque instead of hundreds. But unless the agency has an office near every government office, it is useless. If you go to Scotland or Cornwall teh problem is even more magnified. If a government office in Penzance needs a temp and their chosen agency is in Bristol, or Taunton,or Exeter, or Plymouth, or Bodmin or even Truro, they will have a long wait to get one.
The whole idea of temporary staff is their availability at short notice, their flexibility and versatility.

As usual, the government got the worst of the deal.

(to be continued)

Job Hunting

2010-05-05T12:02:00.002+01:00

I've written at length about some of the jobs I've done, so now I want to write about the bits in between- job hunting.
Until 1994 I'd only been unemployed twice.
The first time was after I'd left Town & County Catering at Olympia and signed on with a temp agency. I was hoping for a day or two off but was back working full time within a week.
The second time was when I left Telfers, having had enough of battling against the odds, doing a job I had no training or aptitude for, and hoping to "make it" with my band.
I was out of work for about six weeks that time.
My experience at the labour exchange and trying to claim any kind of benefit influenced my decision to get married a year or so later. One government agency treated me as single for tax purposes, but another treated me as married because I was co-habiting. Both decisions meant no benefits for me. Back then married couples had a tax break so in the end we got married for tax reasons. But that's another story.
After I'd been made redundant from Volume One Bookshops following a takeover (another story for another time- I'm not writing chronologically), I took a year out courtesy of some redundancy insurance that I'd taken out a few years earlier. I used the time to work on my music and record an album for a charity at our church. One thing led to another and I recorded three albums of songs in eighteen months. However, I wasn't earning enough to pay the bills, so I embarked on a ten year career of "temporary" work.
My first "temporary" job was driving a delivery van for a firm that supplied meat and pies to pubs. My route involved travelling around 2000 miles a week around East Anglia, from Peterborough and March in the North, in and around Cambridge, east to Newmarket, Brandon, Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich, south to Colchester, Clacton, Chelmsford, Brentwood and west to Harlow Welwyn Garden City, Letchworth, Hitchin and various places in Bedfordshire. I did this for about eighteen months in a little Citroen C15 fridge van. I drove more than 100,000 miles in it and went through two sets of tires and two engines. I was out in all weathers, rain , snow and heatwave. I remember having to drive at speed through fields of wheat that had caught fire in the extreme heat of that summer, and I also recall driving through some achingly beautiful countryside. Most of the time, however, I was chasing deadlines and failing.
One day my van was in for repair, and the only vehicle that was available was the boss's Vectra. I loaded the boot, packed freezer bags around the goods and set off. I was driving around the Colchester bypass when I noticed two things. One, my speedo read 105 miles an hour, and two, there was a police bike on my tail. The van I was used to driving wouldn't do 70 downhill with the wind behind it, and I forgot how fast the car could go. I pleaded guilty and was fined £30 and had three points on my licence. That is the only time I've ever been caught speeding in more than 30 years driving.
The firm kept losing contracts and although my mileage remained constant, I was carrying less and less, and therefore the turnover was dropping. I did a few days work in the coldstore and freezer, picking orders. That was cold work, and no-one begrudged us taking frequent tea breaks to warm up.
Eventually the firm went bust and I was looking for work again.

I decided to register with the local employment agencies. I didn't want permanent work because I was getting a few bookings including midweek work, and I was spending time in various recording studios. Temping meant that I could work a few days as required and from 1996 until 1999 this was what I did.
I registered with several agencies and would visit them all in turn when I wasn't working, spending a couple of mornings a week calling in to say hello, to see what work was available and to keep my name at the top of their lists.
I occasionally walk around town and I notice that many of the agencies have closed up. There are only about half the number of employment agencies compared to ten years ago, and one of my friends who ran an employment agency for twenty years painted a bleak picture.

A few years ago I worked at one of the vast car yards in Corby. I didn't stay long, I couldn't cope with the chaos which was due to the manager's failure to plan or organise. Every action was a reaction. They were always fire fighting. Every day the staff would miss their lunch breaks because of some minor catastrophe that could have been avoided if they'd plan ahead.
Even then, six or more years ago, the gangs that collected the cars parked across acres of Northamptonshire and brought them to be loaded onto car transporters were organised according to the country they originated from. There were gangs of Lithuanians, Slovakians, Poles and Bosnians, with only the gang leader speaking English. A few years before I'd worked at the same yard preparing new cars for delivery to dealers. We'd get the car from the yard and while one person fitted the licence plates, I'd check that the heating, aircon, tyre pressures etc were OK. We'd also strip the protective plastic from the wings and bonnet, make sure the lights and indicators worked etc etc. All the staff were English/British. Not any more.

It's tough to find temporary work now. I read that some factories won't employ English speakers because everyone now speaks Polish. Five or six years ago I saw the beginning of that.

But hey, the food's cheap, booze is cheap, clothes are cheap so why worry?

Good Buying or Goodbye

2010-04-26T22:02:00.000+01:00

I've already posted about one firm that went bust because of bad buying decisions, now I want to tell you another story about my time working in retail.
I was working as manager of a large bookstore in Northampton in the late 1980s. The store was set up by the Goldsteins when they were directors of Kingfisher Plc. They d sold Superdrug to Kingfisher a few years before and wanted to try something new. Volume One Bookshops was a new concept in retailing and a complete change from the "libraries with tills" look that characterised bookselling at that time.
Our shops were bright, had acres of space to display books with the covers out rather than spine-on, and sold videos as well. Sell-through video was a very recent concept. Up until that time videos were rental only. No-one foresaw the potential, or that legions of Dr Who or Startrek fans would buy every episode of their favourite shows to watch at home over and over again.

Volume One were one of the first to sell videos alongside books and in time the business grew so that half our turnover came fom selling VHS cassettes. We ordered our stock from a wholesaler called Parkfield. They were the main wholesaler in the UK. We could ring our order in on a Monday and it would be delivered the next day. This meant that we could keep our stockholding to a minimum and reduce our exposure to bad purchases clogging up the shelves.

Sell through video was like pop music with a very short shelf life. A film would be released on a Monday, sell for a week or two and never sell another copy. It made sound economic sense to keep our stocks at a minimum, although the margins were lower than if we had bought direct from the publisher. Using a wholesaler made such good economic sense. The wholesaler held the stocks and we could replace our sales within a couple of days. Constant stock-turn more than compensated for the lower margins. This was good buying.
We started having problems with our video supplier soon after we read in the press how they planned to become the largest video wholesaler in Europe. Each delivery would have lines missing. This went on for week after week. I found out that the firm were taking in so much stock for the Christmas rush that the staff didn't have time to pick the orders going out to the customers. The problem of short deliveries got so bad that we had to change suppliers. Needless to say the video distribution company went bust soon after, having filled numerous warehouses with stock that they couldn't dispatch to their customers.
The firm failed because of bad buying.
We used a couple of wholesalers for buying books. One of them was a small family firm on the South coast. Nothing was too much trouble. You could get in your car and pay them a visit, walk around the warehouse and choose some stock which was then scanned, an invoice/delivery note printed there and then, and the books packed into a box which you could either take away or have delivered the next day.
Our other supplier had a huge brand new state of the art warehouse, and a computer system that was unable to update fast enough to keep up with the business. Every book had a bar code, yet the warehouse lacked bar code readers to input the stocks, which had to be input manually. The stock levels were only updated each evening, so they never knew what stocks they had. The computer said one figure, but the reality was always different. We d place an order and their computer system was unable to distinguish whether the books were on the shelves ready to be picked, in the loading bay ready to be unpacked, or already picked and waiting to go to a customer. Once again we were faced with unacceptable shortages in our deliveries and we switched supplier. They went bust soon afterwards. They had no control over their stock.

Bad information equals bad buying.
Bad buying equals goodbye.

A few years ago I worked in a warehouse that supplied tenpin bowling equipment to the various bowling complexes in the UK. If you bowl regularly you will soon buy your own ball.
The technology of bowling balls is very complex.The normal ball you use when you go bowling for fun is a far cry from the highly complex balls that are used by the serious players. Everything from the shape of the core (the middle of the ball) to the type of material that covers the ball will have an effect on how it moves down the lane. Serious bowlers buy their ball from the bowling pro in the same way that the golfer buys from the golf shop at his course. When you buy a bowling ball it comes without holes. The pro will measure your hand and will cut the holes so that it fits you exactly. You can choose the weight of the ball. Years ago the serious players would use a heavy 16lb ball in order to get the swerve and power to score consistently high. As the technology developed and the players got older they found that they could get the same power and control with a 15lb ball. To all extents and purposes the 16lb ball was obsolete. My friend and work colleague was responsible for ordering the stocks of balls and although he knew as well as everyone else in the industry that 16lb balls were obsolete, he would still order "a few" each time.
Every time a new ball was introduced we would sell out of 14 and 15lb balls, leaving the 16lb balls unsold. Eventually we had a warehouse full of 16lb balls that no-one wanted. We ended up giving them away,although it might have been better to send them to landfill.
The company is no more. Bad buying contributed to their downfall.

Money money money

2010-04-13T19:48:00.000+01:00

My last post about being mugged on the way to the bank reminded me of the time that I was involved in a bank raid. I don't think I mentioned this before, but it was when I worked at the Westminster bank in about 1968. We were having new strongroom doors fitted in the basement, and being the most junior male staff member I was assigned to watch over the workmen as they drilled and hammered away.
One Monday morning at about 10.30 I was in the basement when I heard a commotion from upstairs in the banking hall. A few seconds later one of the bank clerks rushed downstairs looking a bit scared. He had an imprint of a size ten shoe on the side of his face.
I should point out that we had no security screensin front of the tills. The powers that be thought that they were an unnecessary barrier between the bank and the customer. Well, several robbers thought that a four foot high counter was no barrier to them helping themselves so they ran in, spraying ammonia everywhere. Ammonia was the bank robber's weapon of choice. It was easy to get hold of from your hardware store. You used a squeezy washing up bottle and sprayed it into people's faces, causing minimal damage as long as the victim was able to wash the ammonia out of their eyes. What it did was immobilise the bank clerks while they scooped the cash.
Anyway, one of the cashiers had seen them come in and was turning away as the thief jumped the counter, catching him with his foot. By the time he got downstairs and we knew what was happening it was all over.
That didn't stop me almost wetting myself with fear. What if they'd heard that the strongroom was open and they were coming down the stairs? We all hid where we could. It was a bit like that scene in The Life of Brian, where the Roman soldiers search the place and can't find the rebels, even though you can clearly see them behind the curtains and under the table.
After a few minutes we ventured out and upstairs. The bank had been cleared and the doors closed. The police were there within minutes- yes minutes, no more than five.
Someone from head office came and made us a cup of tea and went there, there. No-one was seriously hurt. A few people were splashed with ammonia and had stinging eyes. One of my colleagues saw what was happening and his mouth fell open, in time to catch a mouthful of ammonia. He burped for the rest of the day.
We were all sent home after lunch. The contractors came in the next day and fitted security screens. Then it was business as usual. The robbers were caught before they had a chance to dispose of the money. No CCTV, no DNA database, just good policing.

Down the years I had to handle a lot of money. Some firms used security vans to collect the takings while other firms left it to the manager to bank the cash.
I used to smile at the advice given by head office. It was all about varying the time and the route you took to the bank. However, there was one flaw. Whether I left the shop by the front door or the back, whether I took the long route or the short cut, I still ended up at the front door of the bank. Anyone wishing to jump me only had to wait there.....

After I'd been mugged in Corby the company arranged for a security firm to collect the takings each day. I still had to go and get the change from the bank, but if anyone fancied their chances at grabbing two bags of coin and outrunning me while carrying it, I'd have said, go on, make my day.

By the late eighties and early nineties I was working in a bookshop where the average sale was £5 rather than the £1 or so in a drugstore. We were taking more and more credit card payments and we'd installed EPOS and credit card terminals. However, half of our takings were still in cash, and one of the stores I managed had an annual turnover in excess of £1m. In the run-up to Christmas the turnover would increase by 50% each week, then double each week, until we took more than a week's takings each day. The week before Christmas' takings amounted to 10% of the total turnover for that year.
My day revolved around counting money. We opened the shop at nine, and empty the tills every hour or so. At about eleven my chief cashier and I would start counting the money that we'd taken from the tills. As soon as we'd finished counting, we'd go and get some more, and so on,
By Christmas Eve I was sick of the sight of money. My hands hurt to hold the notes and my fingers ached from counting them. It was not uncommon to count £15,000 in used fivers and tenners in the course of a busy day.
That store is no more. I doubt whether the firms that took over the business ever approached the levels of turnover that we achieved. The end of the Net Book Agreement and the stupidity of selling a premium product at a loss put paid to that.

That sinking feeling

2010-04-13T13:01:00.001+01:00

It's 1988. We moved back from Somerset the year before and we've just moved house again. Sue had bought a house in Kettering so that we had somewhere to live while we sorted ourselves out. It was a nice mid terraced house overlooking a park and we paid £34,000 for it, having sold our house in Shepton Mallet for £37,000. House prices were rising fast and we decided to move while we could, so, one year after we bought our home, we sold it for £46,000 and bought another one on the outskirts of the town. It was slighly larger and had a garage. We paid £48,000 for it.
It's worth noting that our house earned more in that year than I did. I was on about £11,000 as I recall.
As well as moving house, I was in line for the new store in Corby that was due to open later that year. The company still had plans to continue expanding and had a brand new state of the art distribution centre in Southampton. It was then that we began to hear rumours that the company was up for sale. The rumours were confirmed. Everything went on hold and I had to continue commuting to St Ives.
Then the news came through that the company had been bought by Superdrug.

Oh joy.

There were a few ex-Superdrug managers working for Share and none of us felt secure. We were called to a meeting to meet the new owners and I came face to face with my nemesis who by now had been promoted from Area Manager to Regional Director. I recognised a few of the Area Managers as well. Superdrug only appointed from within so they'd been managers when I was kicking my heels as an assistant manager.

After that meeting which seemed to go OK (there were no promises made that we would automatically keep our jobs) I recived a letter stating what I could expect if I decided to accept redundancy. It wasn't a lot and I'd just moved into a new more expensive house. I agonised over this for a week or two and finally and reluctantly accepted the new contract from Superdrug.
Share had already appointed a new manager for St Ives, so I was once again a spare manager. I went around the various local stores to re-acquaint myself with the systems, which hadn't changed much, only evolved and then I heard that Superdrug had taken over the lease that Share had signed on the new store at Corby, so I applied for the position and was given the OK.

Once again I was recruiting, and training staff, fitting out and stocking the store. The store opened and we started trading. I can only remember a few things about it.
One was the silly lift from the warehouse to the shop floor. It was only about 3 feet high and just big enough for one stock trolley.
Then there was the steady stream of toerags who had nothing better to do than to stand outside taunting me. They were all barred from entering, but that didn't seem to stop them. They thought it was a game. They'd intimidate the younger staff and openly shoplift unless I stood in front of them. I wish I'd had a cattle prod.
The next was the staff's accents. Although Corby is less than ten miles from Kettering, the people speak with an entirely different accent, a strange almost scottish accent. This derives from the huge influx of Scottish and Irish families to work at the steelworks in the 1930s, when the population increased from 1500 to 15,000 in a little over eighteen months.
Finally there was my chief cashier. She lived on one of the more notorious estates. She knew everyone who came into the store. OK so far, but then she didn't turn up for work one Saturday and rang in sick. This meant that I had to cash up the tills on my own and at that time we used to take the banking to the local bank and deposit it in the night safe. We closed on time and I asked a couple of Saturday staff to wait and walk with me to the bank. As we rounded the corner I was jumped from behind by a young man who tried to grab my briefcase which looked like a security case. I fell to the floor and we had a tug of war for a second or two. I managed to kick him hard in the balls but in doing so broke my hold on the case. He ran away with my case which contained my wallet, some papers and the remains of my lunch. The night safe wallet was inside my jacket, tucked under my armpit. My glasses were broken and I was bleeding from a cut above my eye. I placed the wallet in the night safe and went to a call box, rang home and then called for an ambulance. The cheque cards were cancelled before the lad had stopped running. The police later found my briefcase in the local river and no, I didn't get it back.
I rang the area manager and he arranged to meet me early on Monday morning. When I arrived at work I looked a sight. I had a huge black eye and swollen face. We sat at the checkout to greet the staff as they came in. I kept my back to each one and turned to face them in order to gauge their reaction.
Only one person didn't register shock.
Guess who?
My chief cashier.
We suspected that she'd tipped off her boyfriend and he'd mugged me. Only there was no proof.
She put in her notice a few weeks later.
Funny that.

About nine months after the store opened I was on the move again. I was asked to take over an existing Share store in Northampton.
And I went on a training course. My first proper training course since I'd left school over twenty years before. Ah, well, it's never too late to learn.

On the move again

2010-04-07T21:13:00.002+01:00

I worked for Superdrug and Share drugstores in the late 70s and 80s. Both businesses used the same model of having a central distribution centre where suppliers delivered, and minimal stocks in the branch. We kept accurate stock and order records (this was pre- EPOS and computers) and we ordered what we needed every week.
It meant that the companies didn't have their cash tied up in slow selling stock in the branches, which was the downfall of Lewis Meeson's.
I left Meesons after they'd been taken over by Martins and moved up the High Street to Share Drug Store, a company in the same mould as Superdrug. It was a brand new shop, and I was sent to another store for training while the builders fitted the store out. I enjoyed working there, it was a much better atmosphere than Superdrug, and they were expanding.
We'd been living in Somerset for about three years. I loved our house but the towns were all a bit small for an ambitious retail manager. After a succesful Christmas I was ready for a change.
Share had about 140 stores, mostly in the southern counties, with a distribution centre in Southampton. One day I was looking at the list of branches when I noticed thatthey were proposing to open a branch in St Ives. It was a few weeks after we'd been to Cornwall on holiday, and we'd spoken about the possibility of moving down there. In the end we decided against it, because of the lack of alternative employment should the job not work out.
Suddenly the company was opening a branch in St Ives. I looked long and hard and then realised that it was St Ives in Cambridgeshire!
We'd lived in deepest Somerset for three years, and the locals were only just acknowledging our presence. I'd always treated the move as temporary, and we'd visited every tourist attraction within 30 miles, so I was ready to return to the Midlands.
I talked it over with my wife and we agreed that I should apply for the post. I heard back within a few days. I'd been successful. All I had to do was train my successor and I could move up in time to recruit the staff and fit the store out. However, the company would not be paying my relocation costs.
We put our house on the market. We'd been there for three years and had turned a very run-down property that lacked a kitchen or central heating into a nice comfortable end of terrace home with a very large garden, not overlooked, on the edge of town and with views out over the Mendips. We'd paid £22k for it 9in 1984) and sold it for £37.5k in 1987.
However, it still wasn't enough to buy a house anywhere near Cambridge. St Ives was about ten miles from Cambridge and the most we could afford there was a tiny two bedroom quadrant home. We decided to move to Kettering and I would commute, although the A604 wasn't the best road to travel on.
I moved up to stay with Sue's relatives and began the job of getting St Ives store open. She rang me one day to say that someone had agreed to buy the house. I said that she should get in her car and come up and buy us a house in Kettering.
So she did. She put Chris in the child's seat, sent Jayne to school and drove the 150 or so miles to Kettering. She walked into an Estate Agent just as a couple were placing their house on the market. She had a look around and did the deal there and then. She then drove back home and told me what she'd done when I rang her later that night.

Sue packed everything and arranged the move while I worked to get the store open. She moved on the day I opened the store. We had to stay in her parent's spare bedroom that night, as we couldn't get the keys until the following morning.

St Ives was a succesful store that made money right from the start. We had a good team of staff and we all got on well. It was a bind travelling 35 miles each way each day, with only the last few miles on dual carriageway. I began to look around for somewhere a little closer to home.
As luck would have it, the company had signed a lease on a shop unit in Corby, just down the road. I was all set to transfer there when the news came through that the owner of the company had put it up for sale- and the new owners were- Superdrug.

Four years on and I had come full circle. I was going to be working for Superdrug again.
Oh bliss. Not.

Psychometric testing

2010-04-07T19:53:00.005+01:00

I'm no fan of psychometric profiling. In my experience it's only used in firms where the management are remote from the workforce. Rather than interview the staff themselves, they employ intermediaries called Personnel, or the even more arcane and forbidding Human Resources.
When I worked for Superdrug and Volume One a few years later, I was interviewed by the Managing Director and he employed me on the basis of that interview lasting half an hour or so.
Recruiting staff is like weather forecasting. No matter how sophisticated or expensive the methods used, the results are statistically no more accurate than pine cones or seaweed.
In my long career I've interviewed a lot of potential employees, and attended a good few interviews as well. There's an old saying- "First impressions last", and psychometric profiling is a poor substitute for a face to face interview. When a vacancy occured in one of my shops I interviewed the applicants with an eye to what the job entailed and how they would fit in with the team I'd assembled. When I was in retail the staff turnover averaged about eighteen months, that is, you'd have a new member of staff in every position every eighteen months or so. This meant that the manager would be forever recruiting and training staff, knowing full well that they'd only stay for a month or two. This often meant that he spent less time training his staff and that brought even more problems. So the answer lay in keeping your staff for as long as possible. In my experience profiling was no more effective in achieving this, and cost a whole lot more.
For the record, my last management position was as manager of a bookstore in Northampton. I was there for five years and when I was made redundant by the incoming owners, more than 90% of the full and part time staff had been with me from the start. That was way, way, way above the industry average. My record of recruiting and training and retention of staff speaks for itself.

The first time I encountered profiling was when I was interviewed for a management position with Lewis Meeson, a subsidiary company of Barker & Dobson, maker of Everton Mints. I was working at Superdrug and anxious to get out. I'd been there too long and my reputation meant that my career was stalled. I'd just got married again and we were happy to move almost anywhere in the country in pursuit of my retail career.
I saw the advert in the Grocer and applied and in due course went for an interview. I passed that initial interview and received a profile test in the post. The test involved answering a load of stupid questions, most of them variations on the same theme. I had to fill it in and return it before my next interview with the Managing Director at head office in Liverpool. I can't remember everything the profile was supposed to reveal about me, but they went ahead and hired me anyway.
The salient point was that the profile test was as an adjunct to the two face to face interviews I undertook. The face to face interviews took precedent, and the profile was just background.

Fast forward twenty years and I'm working as a temp in a call centre. A good temp has to be able to walk into any job and pick it up straight away. I'd done a lot of call centre work, both inbound and outbound. I prefer inbound, where you respond to calls from customers.
This call centre was run by a large photo copier manufacturer and distributor. Everyone has used a photocopier at some time, but my recent jobs hadn't involved any contact with them. All of a sudden I was answering calls from customers whose copiers had packed up. I'd identify the customer and the machine using the AS400 software on the computer in front of me, and I'd try and find out what the fault was. Some faults can be cleared over the phone. I had diagrams and photos of the various models on the computer, and together with the customer we'd try and find the fault. We had a couple of skilled engineers that we could refer the difficult calls to, and if all else failed we'd get an engineer out to them. The object was to keep their copier working, although that wasn't always possible if some burley policeman had broken the glass while trying to photocopy his private parts (It happened more than once).
After a week or so I was approached by the call center manager who had been listening in on my calls and monitored my success rate. He wanted to know if I wanted a permanent job.
I was temping because there were no permanent jobs around, so I said yes. As part of the interview process I was given a psychometric test to complete.
One look at the form and I despaired. It was more psychobabble and arcane nonsense devised by people who don't like dealing with people face to face. I completed it and handed it in.
Up until that moment my joining the firm was cut and dried. I was good at the job, good with customers, good telephone manner, good clear up rate.
The call centre manager never mentioned my joining the firm again. I stayed as a temp for another couple of months. Other people, less able joined the permanent staff while I continued as a temp, so why did I not get the job?
The answer had to be the profiling. The company, a huge Japanese multi-national had several sites in the UK, with a head office in Feltham. The Human Resources department were based there. I never ever saw anyone from that department at our site. They had worked out the requirements for the job and devised a profile. My form arrived on their desk and it didn't match their profile, so no job for me.

In time I came to realise the short-sightedness of profiling.
If a company only recruits staff according to profiles, it means that there is no possible career path, no opportunities for promotion in that company. It is impossible for someone to join the company at the ground level and work their way up. Their profile wouldn't match the junior jobs if they were executive material, and individual job profiling would prevent them advancing through the company.
If every company adopted profiling it would mean that your job was assigned to you when you entered the job market and all you could expect was to do the same job in different offices for the rest of your working life.
That's my idea of hell.

And all those heroes of business who started at the bottom and worked their way up? Forget it. It would never happen. Profiling will squeeze every ounce of creativity and originality out of a company. In time companies that employ profiling will not have the talent to adapt, to be original, to spot new ideas and opportunities and will ultimately fail.
Good.

Good buying

2010-04-06T18:08:00.000+01:00

I worked in retail for about twenty years and I learned that good buying is much more important than good selling.
I moved to Somerset in the mid 1980s to open and manage a 3000 sq ft CTN (Confectionary, tobacco, news) in Wells. I was responsible for most of the buying, with the exception of the promotional items. The company used a separate firm to negotiate deals and import goods from the Far East.
Less than eighteen months after joining the company the buyers had destroyed the company, one that had a history going back over 100 years.
Some examples.
Easter Eggs. The company decided to take on Tesco and Woolworths and sell Easter Eggs at silly prices. Bear in mind that most of the shops were small newsagents less than 1000 sq feet, that is, a fraction of the size of an average supermarket, with a correspondingly smaller number of customers, no advertising budget and tiny windows to display your goodies.
Not looking hopeful is it?
The company were persuaded that it was a good idea and we went ahead. We received deliveries of eggs that filled every nook and carnny of the store. We pile the eggs high and sold them cheap. Come Easter Monday we'd sold thousands at great expense of energy and stress. However, we still had thousands left over, so we had to reduce them in price still further in order to clear them.
Then we sat down and worked out how much profit we'd made by selling all those eggs at give away prices.
None. Nothing. Zilch.

Then there was the toys and fancy goods. Every month I'd drive up the country to a presentation where the buyers would show us what they'd bought for us. They made a great play of how much margin these goods would produce. (assuming that we could sell them).
Then the goods would arrive. Lorry loads. Every shop had more stock than it could display. Each month we'd remove all the unsold items from the previous month's special promotion and put them in the stockroom along with all the other unsold items. Each month we'd get more stock and the backrooms would be bulging with unsold goods.
The ultimate insult came in 1985, when the buyers decided that we should be selling Acorn Electron computers. Just the hardware. There was no software available. I received ten of these misbegotten follies to sell and set one up on the counter. Remember that this was a W H Smith type of outlet. We sold newspapers and magazines, greetings cards, tobacco and confectionery and some toys and gifts. We also sold records and cassettes and outsold the Woolworths next door. Wells is a tiny city of about 5000. There is a tourist season but the winters are very quiet. And I had to sell computers without software and without any training. I'd never seen a computer let alone operate one.
I went without saying that the company's financial situation became dire. We were on stop with all our suppliers,and had to pay cash on delivery for cigarettes. The margin on cigarettes is tiny, less than 5%, so it was clear that we couldn't survive.
And we didn't. We were taken over by Martins, part of the Guiness empire at that time.
I hated working for them. In some respects they were worse than the other shower. But at least they had their buyers under control.

I learned that potential profit margins are only potential. Until the cash in in the till, the product is either a liability or an asset. Good buys are an asset, bad buys are a liability.

I left the company in 1986 after about two years. The new management treated us like criminals. It wasn't the fault of the store managers that the buyers were out of control, but we got the blame. I kept a tight control of the items that I was responsible for buying. I kept waste to a minimum and kept a close eye on the shrinkage. I sacked one member of staff for underringing on the tills and that dissuaded the others from trying it on.
What did it for me was when the chief executive of Guiness awarded himself a 10% rise. The Martins staff got 5% and those of us who'd been taken over after our firm had gone bust had to be content with 2%.
It was time for a change again.

Good and bad bosses

2010-03-24T12:46:00.000Z

I've had a few bosses in my time. I've worked alongside a few, and I've been a boss as well. Here are a few of my observations down the years.
When I worked at the bank the manager was a seldom seen figure who occupied an office and hardly ever emerged. He left the day to day running of his branch to the deputy or assistant manager, who then delegated down to the various department heads. It worked well. Because the business was run to deadlines, the overriding concern was to getting the job done to the highest possible standard in the shortest possible time. Once everything was completed and the assistant manager gave the OK, we could go home. Because it took a long time to progress to branch manager, and because there was a well defined career path, one rarely encountered a ruthless, devious and ambitious individual trying to short cut his way to the top by fair means or foul. One did, however, encounter a bunch of bank clerks who had reached the limits of their ability and whose career path lay in a series of sideways moves.
My lack of ambition caused me to be transferred to the various sub-branches of the bank, along with the other no-hopers, and each day was spent in doing the work as quickly as possible so that I could go home.

It wasn't until I worked in retail that I encountered an environment that rewarded ability rather than length of service, and these observations are based on my retail experiences.

The first thing I noticed was how some managers would employ tactics that kept their subordinates fighting each other. Divide and rule. While your departmental and assistant managers are fighting each other, they're not fighting you.

Then I noticed that some managers rule by fear, while others by encouragement. In every business the manager needs to stand out. He need to be head and shoulders above the rest.
Some managers do this by kicking their staff so that they are always on their knees. The manager is the only one standing.
However, the best managers that I worked for and with would encourage and equip their staff, making them strong and able to stand tall- with the manager carried on their shoulders.
As I travelled from branch to branch, either assisting or training managers, or relieving them for days off or holidays, or taking over from them and managing their store, I noticed another difference between good and bad managers.
Some managers would deliberately hold the store back, rather than allow turnover to increase to its full potential. They would hold the store to the level that they could manage,and not allow it to grow any further. Success brought problems to them. A bigger turnover meant more stock had to be ordered and handled. A busier store brought problems of staff training and retention. It brought security and shoplifting problems. If turnover was held to the rate of inflation, it meant a quieter life.

I was a pioneer rather than a settler. I preferred the challenge of taking an empty shell of a shop unit and fitting it out, of recruiting and training my staff, of ordering the stock and filling the shelves, and the bustle and excitement of opening day. I enjoyed working hard and growing the turnover week by week and following it through a complete year, with the Christmas build up and climax, and the post Christmas doldrums. After about eighteen months I was ready for a new challenge.
I was lucky in that most of the firms I worked for, namely Superdrug, Share Drugstores and Volume One Bookshops operated at a time when it was possible to open new shops in town centres, that there were new markets to break into, and big profits to be made.
As a manager I opened five new stores, and assisted in the opening of several more.
I trained many a new manager, some of whom went on to greater things.
I got out of retail at the right time and have never looked back.

The greasy pole, or the onset of ambition

2010-03-23T16:57:00.001Z

I've never been particularly ambitious. My form teacher at my first grammar school wrote on my end of term report that I was over inclined to rest on my laurels and time has proved him correct.
I do just enough to get comfortable and only move if bored or threatened, or if I suddenly get ambitious.
I've already posted about my ambitions for 1978. Learn to drive, new house, new job. I started work at Superdrug and found myself surrounded by ambitious people with differing levels of ruthlessness. When Superdrug started in 1966, it was a very hands-on set up. The Goldsteins did everything and as the company grew they recruited like minded people to take the company forward. They never once recruited an area manager. On the retail side, everyone started at the bottom, as a trainee manager. They learned how the company worked by doing the work. Those with talent got their own store very quickly. They were expanding at a steady rate, without having to go into debt and keeping all expenditure under control. There was never a penny wasted. As the company grew they needed an area manager and they appointed someone who'd been a manager at the very start. He then became a Regional Director as the company expanded. It was said that if you cut the arm off a Superdrug area manager, you'd see "Superdrug" running through the arm, like letters in a stick of rock.
I wasn't into such naked ambition. If it was a case of "compete or retreat", I'd leave them to it.
And that was how it was for two or three years.
Then I reached thirty and I decided I'd better get a move on. I decided to pull my weight a little more and improve my performance. I even asked to be considered for any new shops that might be opening. My bosses were gobsmacked. They'd got used to me doing just enough to stay out of trouble and there I was, bright as a button and looking for promotion. A few months later and I still felt the same way. I was based in Northampton but travelling to all the stores in a forty mile radius. I even transferred to Peterborough for a while, and commuted daily.
This went on for a year or two. I was getting more and more frustrated, and my bosses were digging their heels in. I had to get another job and I didn't care where.
Some people are naturally ambitious, but remain affable. My ambition made me angry mean and nasty. I was not nice to know.

Unpaid work part one

2010-03-18T22:14:00.002Z

I've done a bit of voluntary work over the years, depending on work and music commitments. In the early eighties my band had folded and I struggled to get another one going. It was always a bind finding suitable reliable musicians, and when we relocated to Somerset I just decided that it was too much trouble finding musicians, agents and venues so I retired from music for a few years.
My father was an engine driver and I'd always loved steam railways. I got the bug quite badly in the mid-late 70s. Whenever we played a weekend booking in Leicester that involved playing both Saturday night, Sunday lunch and Sunday night I'd visit the Great Central Railway at Loughborough during the afternoon and ride on the railway. I even drove the 90 miles or so to Didcot to volunteer to clean up and help restore one of the scrap railway locomotives there. After a while the travelling got too much and when I heard that there was a small group restoring a steam engine not far from where I lived I decided to pay them a visit.
For the next few years I spent most Sundays up to my armpits in grease and muck, cleaning and painting an old steam locomotive. It was great fun and a great sense of achievement when we finally steamed it and it moved under its own power.
Soon after that we moved over 150 miles away, but all was not lost. There was another steam railway a few miles away and after spending some time getting our new house in order I put in an appearance there. Our little quarry tank engine was dwarfed by the huge 9F freight loco that I worked on. I climbed in the firebox (when the fire was out) and could stand up inside it with my hands outstretched. I had to sweep it clean and apply a limewash to the metal in order to protect it over the winter. I did a few other jobs but nothing as glamourous (!) as that.
After a few years we moved back to Northamptonshire and I rejoined my friends with the little saddle tank engine. They were about to move to a new greenfield site. When I saw the new site there were four wooden pegs in the ground to signify where the museum would be sited. Over the next year or so we levelled the ground, dug pits and foundations ready for the building and rails.
I learned that you have to dig deep if you want to build high.
It was almost a year before we were able to move our engines into the museum but it was great fun and the perfect antidote to the day job.
Sometimes a change is better than a rest.

Superdrug

2010-03-16T16:31:00.002Z

Superdrug was set up in the early sixties by the Goldstein family. Ralph (the father) had sold his chain of supermarkets to Tesco and his sons Peter, Ronald & Howard were looking for a new venture. They opened the first Superdrug in Putney High St in 1966. They found the premises, fitted it out, stocked the shelves and manned the tills. They grew the business from humble beginnings and there wasn't one single aspect of the business that they hadn't done. They knew it inside out.
I was interviewed by Peter Goldstein at the Northampton branch of Superdrug and he offered me a job. The company was growing, opening new stores almost every week and he made a point of telling me about the opportunities for promotion that existed within the company.
One thing convinced me to join Superdrug.
It wasn't Tesco.

I wasn't prepared for the culture shock when I turned up for work on my first day.
For a start, it was very formal. All the management staff called each other Mr.... No first names.
No fraternising with the staff. Inappropriate behaviour with a female member of staff was a sacking offence. It was like being an officer on a ship of the line.
Then there were the hours of work. The store opened from 9.00 to 5.30. I was expected to start at 7.00 to unload the deliveries and to stay until at least 6.00 each night. I was used to having the odd Saturday off. I couldn't even have the Saturday off before my annual holidays. My band were playing about three times a week and they'd have to wait for me to finish work before driving off to the venue. I'd change from my work clothes in the van and grab a sandwich and perhaps a short nap. I weighed about 11 stone and was built like a racing snake.
My job title was Trainee Manager. This meant that I did everything from opening the store to unloading the deliveries and packing everything in the warehouse. I also made lists of the stock that had been sold during the day and picked the goods for the female staff to price. I also kept the store neat and tidy and dressed the windows. Every evening we'd face the shelves up, bringing all the stock forward to give the appearance of full shelves. We'd count the stock every week and place and order with head office. This was delivered two days later. Superdrug ran a very very very tight ship. There was no waste anywhere. The cardboard was separated from the rubbish and sent back to the warehouse, where it was baled up and sold for recycling. This was at least twenty years before recycling became fashionable.
We cashed up the tills every day and banked every penny. The cash had to balance to the penny. If it didn't there was an enquiry.
We carried out staff searches at least twice a week. The reasoning was that if the staff expected to be searched then they wouldn't try anything stupid. It mostly worked, although I did catch a saturday girl with a bag full of sweets and no receipt. She lost her job.
We took stock three or four times a year. We didn't have a stocktaking team as that would have cost too much. The area manager would oversee the stocktake and it was conducted like a military exercise. Every staff member had to come in, or stay behind after work to take stock. We never closed, not even for half an hour. During the day we'd count the warehouse and the backup stock and as soon as the door shut we started counting the stock on the shelves. We were only interested in monetary value. One person would count the stock and write the amount on a piece of tally roll, and another would follow along, spot checking and recording the amounts on a master sheet. These were gathered together and tallied up and it was possible to arrive at a provisional stock result within three hours of closing time. Woe betide if you had a bad result.

Superdrug didn't have a training department. They expected their trainees to have had some formal training at their previous jobs. I hadn't. The company estimated that a trainee manager could relieve another branch manager after a few weeks, and be able to manage his own store after three months.
I struggled. Boy did I struggle. I tried to find another job but there was nothing doing. It was 1979 and the country was in a right mess. I had to stick it out.
For all my different jobs, I'd had no experience in management or leadership. I sullenly followed orders and became the area relief manager. I'd travel to the various Superdrug stores within a thirty mile radius to cover the manager's days off and holidays, and I tried to keep a low profile.
Two things kept me sane.
One was my music. I'd formed a top40 group in 1976 after my rock band had folded, and we played the pubs and clubs within a thirty mile radius of Northampton. It was the one constant during all the years that I was with Superdrug.
I'd achieved my ambitions for 1978. New house, new car, new job. I'd married my long term girlfriend in 1977 and we were working hard doing up the house that we'd bought together.
I can't say that I was happy though. We were predictable and safe, like an old married couple.
Then a new chief cashier started at Superdrug. She only stayed for a few months but she changed my life. After she'd left the company the rules about fraternising didn't count and we became friends. After a couple of years we became lovers. We've been married for over twenty five years.
I was a stubborn and slow learner. It took me ages to feel comfortable giving orders. I'd always been one of the workers. I had to learn to be single minded, not to be distracted and have clear objectives. It took a long time.
One defining moment was during a particularly busy time. I was on the shop floor, rushing around trying to restock the fast moving lines. There I was, with my head down, price gun a blur, and my staff standing by watching me. I suddenly realised what I was doing and everything changed in an instant. From now on, they would be the ones with their heads down working, and I would be watching them.
I stayed with Superdrug for nearly six years before moving on. As fate would have it, I was back with them within three years. A lot had gone on in the intervening time.
Looking back I really admire the Goldsteins. They were innovators, pioneers. They were hard but fair. A few years after I'd left Superdrug they offered me a chance to join them on another pioneering retail venture.

The birth of ambition

2010-03-15T20:24:00.001Z

1978 was the year for change. At the start of the year I resolved to do three things: firstly to pass my driving test. I grew up in London and never needed to drive, not when there were three different bus routes and two tube lines within easy walking distance of home. I did get a Honda 50 when I was seeing a girl who lived in Hillingdon. I missed the tube one night and it was a long walk along Western Avenue, more than ten miles before I got a lift. I bought the bike soon afterwards. But even a bike is a bind when you live in a bedsit, so I sold it to my dad.
Living in the suburbs of Northampton was a culture shock. No buses and taxis were prohibitively expensive. I was still in my drinking phase so my girlfriend learned to drive, and our roadie used to pick me and the other guitarist up and take us to Milton Keynes, where we would rehearse and also store our kit.
So passing my test was one priority. The next was to buy our own house. In 1978 the average price for a victorian terraced house in Northampton was about £7000. We opened a savings account and I put all my gig money in it. We saved £500 in a matter of months, found a terraced house in Abington for £7200, got a mortgage and moved in during the autumn.
The third resolution was to get a new job. As a department supervisor I fancied myself as management material, despite my reluctance to impose my will in any situation. I was already considered too old to be a Tesco trainee manager (that's what they told me), so my future lay elsewhere. But where?
I needed a clean driving licence for a start. I'd had a bit of practice driving our car with my wife/girlfriend in the passenger seat, so I could control the car. I need to learn how to pass the driving test. I had five lessons and put in for my test and passed. I don't know who was more surprised, me or my wife. She needed two tests and a lot of lessons.

So that was two down, one to go. I saw an advert in the local paper looking for trainee managers for a drugstore that was opening branches everywhere. I applied and was asked to an interview.
I must have said something right because I was offered a job at a higher rate than I was earning, so I put my notice in at Tesco and prepared to move on.
By this time I was managing the wines and spirits section and I didn't have a clue what to order for the Christmas rush. There were no records and the outgoing manager had had quite enough of Tesco and wasn't going to help.
I disliked the new general manager intensely. He was arrogant and sly. He's stand on the shop floor eating the stock, and would bawl out anyone who even thought of doing the same. The top man at Tesco was Ian Maclauren. When he called in to look around he was the model of courtesy. The same could not be said for his underlings. The regional manager would visit along with the area manager. The regional manager would walk around the store and publicly bollock the area manager if something wasn't to his satisfaction. After he'd gone, the area manager would drag the general manager around the store and publicly bollock him about the same thing. He'd stomp off and the general manager would call the departmental manager over and publicly humiliate him. The the departmental manager would do the same to whoever was nearest.
Why didn't they cut out the middle men and have the Regional manager bawl out the saturday boy, and give us all a break?
Working at Tesco had its compensations, namely the fifty or more checkout girls, plus other female staff scattered around the departments. Getting off with one or more of them was almost compulsory. I did untold damage to my marriage when I worked there, but hey, that's rock 'n roll, right?
I heard from friends that the wines & spirits department sold out of stock in the first week leading up to Christmas and couldn't get any more. Shame. They should treat their staff better.

When I started work at Superdrug in November 1978 I had achieved my ambitions for that year. New job, new house and a driving licence.

What followed was a real culture shock in every way

Temporarily speaking

2010-03-15T19:14:00.000Z

I was reading through my post about the temp jobs I'd had and I realised I'd missed a few out.
A few years ago I worked at a plastics factory in Kettering on the 6.00- 2.00 shift. I made black plastic dustbins. And yellow builders buckets. And the perspex "glass" windows for red telephone boxes. And casings for modem units, etc etc etc.

The principle for each of these products is exactly the same. You have a steel mould and some plastic pellets. When subjected to enormous pressure, the pellets liquify and flow into the mould. When the sequence ends, you take the product, examine it, trim off any excess and stack it ready for despatch. If the product is faulty, it's ground down into pellets and re-used.

The products are very hot when they leave the mould, and you can't wear gloves, so you handle them carefully. The dustbins were the easiest because each one took a minute or two to form. The hardest to make were the ubiquitous plastic stacking chairs. I just couldn't trim the seat and fix the metal legs in the time between each extrusion. I was a failure.
I didn't care to be honest. I was a temp, and more interested in my music career. Other temp jobs came along and the plastics factory was taken over by another firm and production moved up north. The factory remains, an empty shell.

Another production job involved making hydraulic and brake pipes for the automotive industry. There are several ways of making them. I started by placing pre-cut lengths of hose onto a jig. These jigs went through a process that hardened the hoses into the shape of the jig. Easy peasy. The next time I worked there I had to dismantle, move and reassemble a roomful of dexion warehouse shelving. It was hard work and awkward to work with, as anyone who has tried to assemble dexion will tell you. Then I was called back to paint a water pipe that ran from one factory to another at about eight to ten feet off the ground. At least they left me alone so I could work at my own pace. Nobody else was pushing themselves, so I didn't either. Then I was an electrician's mate, pulling cable and helping him rewire a factory. He took very long lunches, and so did I.
It was easy work, and fun while it lasted.

Retail but not therapy

2010-03-13T18:47:00.004Z

I began what is laughably known as a retail career as shelf filler in Tesco's. The store in Weston Favell had been open for about nine months and they were struggling to increase turnover because they couldn't keep the shelves full. The answer was to bring in a dedicated night team to stock the shelves and fill the bins.

I worked four twelve hour shifts and was paid £1 an hour. This was good money for Northampton, where shoe factory wages were about £28 per week. The downside was that the shifts were on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights. I never knew what to do on wednesdays. Should I go to bed during the day, or try to stay awake and sleep at night? Whatever I did, I always seemed to arrive for work on Thursday evenings tired out.

The work wasn't too hard. Armed with a price gun and a pen and pad, I'd list the stock that was needed for my section, go into the warehouse, load the stock onto a pallet, drag the pallet onto the shop floor and get pricing. We had to price every item. This was years before EPOS and scanners at the tills.

I stuck at it for about nine months and business boomed as a result of the better availability of stock. I asked for a transfer to the day team and they agreed. I was now a trolly pusher, cardboard clearer and mopper up of spillages. I also worked the tills when it was really busy.
One day the manager called me into his office and asked if I'd like to run the frozen food department. It was underperforming and way behind budget. I said I'd give it a go.

I started by instigating a cleaning rota, and clearing out the dead stock in the backup freezer. Gradually all the rubbish was sold through or disposed of, and I had a clean sheet to work with.

Those of us who are old enough to remember will recall that during the 1970s the nation's favourite frozen dessert was a dairy cream sponge, with arctic rolls and frozen mousses close behind. It may surprise you to know that frozen vegetable prices have hardly changed in more than 30 years and may even be cheaper in some cases. Once the department was organised we were able to push for sales. There was and is no secret to it. Keep the shelves or freezers full or if not, faced up so that they look full. Every Saturday afternoon we'd empty one freezer by rotation into shopping trolleys and store them in the walk in back freezer in the warehouse. We'd switch the freezer off and clean it thoroughly. On Monday morning we'd refill the freezer from the trolleys and top them up again, ready for the week ahead.

We never opened on Sundays. We stayed open until 8.00 on weekdays and 5.30 on Saturdays. You could always guarantee that someone would come into the store at 7.59 to do their month's shopping and someone would have to stay behind to serve them. If we'd have stayed open until 11.00 the same thing would have happened. Now we have 24 hour opening and the stores look the worse for it. The shelves are never full and I can't see the point of going shopping at three in the morning- ever. Get a life for goodness sake!

Surely the point of a successful business is to take as much money as you can in the shortest possible time? There is only so much money in the pot. If you can take it in 80 hours why double your costs and open for 160? The answer is fear.
Fear that your competitor might steal a march on you, might entice a customer to spend his hard earned dosh in their shop rather than in yours. Market share, market share, market share.

Anyway, we beat the target by miles. In April when I took over we were on course to make only half the target during the year. By September we'd equalled the target set for the year and by the end of the year we'd doubled it.

I was pleased. We'd worked very hard and had risen to the challenge. My reward was two fold. New freezers that reduced the stock capacity and which put the stock behind doors, and out of the customer's reach, and secondly, my target had been doubled. It was now four times what had been set the previous year.

It was years before I was motivated enough to try and reach a target. What's the point?

It was now 1977 and I was bored again. And demotivated by an impossible target.
I tranferred to the dairy department. We sold milk, cheese, sausages, pork pies and bloody ski bloody yoghurts.
Ski Yoghurts. We sold a pallet of them every day. Different flavours and every one of them disgusting.

The main challenge on the frozen food department was managing your back up freezer. Order too much stock and it would defrost on the loading bay. Too little and you'd sell out. By Thursday afternoon it was impossible to get another pack of peas into the freezers. The display freezers were chocka and the backup was full to the ceiling from front to back. By Saturday afternoon the backup freezer was empty, which was why we could park half a dozen shopping trolleys in there over the weekend.
Now you'd think that the best way to increase sales would be to enlarge the backup. Wrong.
In the run-up to Christmas the Butchery department would hijack the freezer and fill it with frozen turkeys.
On the dairy department we'd order our requirements daily from the various van salesmen who called. We'd record the deliveries, the stock and work out the sales before placing an order. we had to keep an eye on the "sell by" dates, especially on a Saturday afternoon. If a product was due to go out of date on a Sunday, we'd reduce it in price to clear it. Over the weeks I noticed that certain lines stopped selling. I reluctantly reduced them in price and they'd go in seconds. The customers used to circle like vultures playing a waiting game. Eventually I'd cut my losses and reduce the prices. Some weeks I refused and let the pies and sausages go out of date and be thrown away.
The crunch finally came on Christmas Eve 1977. It was a Saturday and we'd been incredibly busy all week. Unbelievably so. I took a delivery of a pallet of bloody ski bloody yogurts and single and double cream and waited for the onslaught.
It never came. The punters had finished their shopping on Friday night and had all gone into town to buy clothes or go to the footie. We got stung.

1978 was going to be different

Carefree

2010-03-01T16:09:00.000Z

I left school in 1967 and by 1976 I'd had the following jobs-
Bank clerk
Invoice clerk
Clerical assistant
Storeman
Telesales office worker
Production planner
Factory department manager
I'd also done a little temporary work.
Apart from a week at the bank's training centre,where I learned basic machine skills I'd had no on-the-job training. I was supremely uninterested in any kind of career, especially if it interfered with my music. I was content to drift.
I wasn't irresponsible. I just wasn't going to take any responsibility, which is a different thing altogether. Any leadership or management skills were kept hidden.
I wanted to be liked. This meant that I found it hard to reprimand people.
I once got my drummer a job in the same place where I worked. It was a disaster. There was a conflict of relationship. We were equals in the band, but I was supposed to supervise him at work. It's not a good idea to work with family and friends until you can get that sorted out. Many years later I could do it, but I had a lot of growing up to do.

Then there was the whole fraternising with the female staff thing. I went to a boy's school and was very shy when I started work at the bank. Although the women were only a year or two older, they seemed so much more grown up than me. I never felt like an adult. How's an adult supposed to feel? Different to a schoolboy? I confess that I never felt like an adult until many years later, in my mid-twenties.

Once I'd had my first girlfriend I felt a little more confident, but it wasn't until I was going out with my second girlfriend that I made up for lost time. I treated her terribly. She came back from holiday a couple of days early because she was missing me, only to find that I had a German girl staying in my bedsit (just for a couple of days until she found a place of her own, you understand.)
I've already confessed to a liaison or two with the temporary staff at Olympia. It was the whole sex and drugs and rock n'roll hippy era. I thought that that was how one behaved. You feel guilty but you soon get over it. I was in a rock band. Isn't that how you were supposed to behave?

I left Telfers and food production in 1975 and was unemployed for a couple of weeks. The novelty soon wore off. We never had enough bookings and I was broke. I had to find another job and quick.

I lived near a large shopping centre. There was a large Tesco there and they needed shelf stackers to work nights. I didn't want to stack shelves and I didn't want to work nights, but I did need a job and I did need the money, so I applied and was taken on.
Welcome to the wonderful world of retail. My career for the next eighteen years.

A temporary life

2010-02-28T20:04:00.003Z

It was early 1972 and I'd just quit my job at Olympia. The next day I wandered down to Hammersmith Broadway and went into an employment agency to register. I quite fancied a couple of days off to mooch around and maybe visit some friends in the Cotswolds, but it was not to be. I left my details and went back to my bedsit. I'd been back an hour and the doorbell rang. It was someone from the agency to say that they had a temp job and they needed me urgently. I went back to the agency and was sent off to do some temporary work in an office block in Victoria.
It seems incredible looking back, but there was full employment in the late 60s/early 70s. If you were a shop, office or factory worker in London, it was quite possible to quit one job and walk next door and get another within the hour.
I went on a couple of assignments with the agency that week. Two days later they fixed me up with an interview at Telfers and I started there the following Monday. Time out of work- half a day.
I worked a day or two at the Gas Board accounts dept. They had fallen behind dealing with customer queries so they got temporary staff in to clear the backlog. It was impossible for a temporary worker who'd undergone all of ten minutes induction to make head or tail of the job. I shuffled papers on my desk and alternated between staring out of the window and going to the men's room until the end of the day. I never did understand what I was supposed to do at the office in Victoria either. I just picked up a piece of paper and wandered around trying to look busy. Nobody asked me what I was doing, so I carried on until the end of the day, had my card signed and went home.

I went back to temporary work in the mid 1990s. For about four years I did anything and everything. I parked vans, delivered charity bags and made house to house collections, prepared new cars for delivery to the dealers, and delivered stationery to schools in a 7 1/2 ton lorry. I also delivered furniture and even made bombproof security doors. I packed chocolate, made all sorts of bread and rolls including several million hot cross buns and even walked around a landfill site picking up litter. I enjoyed that one, except that my DMs finally started leaking. I'd walked mile upon mile in them, trudging around the streets of Hereford and Colchester, delivering charity bags.
If there was work going I'd do it. I packed dog food in an open sided shed when it was snowing outside. It was either do that or not work at all. I worked in a leather belt factory, cutting the belts from the hides. I worked for the Environment Agency, plotting the flood defences on the Rivers Nene and Welland on the national computer. I typed up witness statements and collated evidence. I entered data on spreadsheets. I worked as a kitchen porter and washer upper. And I sold tickets to the 1998 World Cup from a call centre.
Call centres. I worked in a few of them. They need a chapter on their own.

Dossers and slappers

2010-02-25T21:18:00.002Z

After reading my last post I realised that that was the second time in my life that I'd left a job without having another one to go to. It got me thinking about my time at Olympia.
I started working in around November 1970 in an upstairs office overlooking the service yard. At that time Olympia hosted all the major trade exhibitions including the Ideal Home Exhibition. In all I spent about eighteen months there. Most shows took a week or so to set up, then the show itself for four or five days followed by another week pulling the stands down. There was a small core of staff augmented by casual staff when the shows were running.

There were still doss houses (a place where homeless people can sleep for the night. Provided either by the local council, or by a charity organisation)in London in the late sixties/early seventies. There was one just down the road in Hammersmith and the "residents" would queue up for work when we had a show. The firm would pay wages each day in cash, as it was by no means certain that the worker would turn up two days running. The men would be employed as porters and would be paid a pittance and get a meal in the staff canteen. It was just possible to earn enough to stay in the doss house by alternating between Olympia and Earls Court.
They'd stand in line each morning, nursing hangovers and giving false names to the personnel department. If they were lucky to be employed that day they'd dissappear into the labyrinth of tunnels under the halls and do just enough work to keep out of trouble.
I recall one regular. He'd alternate between pulling a rag and bone cart around the streets in the summer and pushing a barrow delivering goods to the dry goods store in the winter. He was loud and uncomplicated. He claimed he couldn't read or write, yet understood enough to be able to do the horses every day (reading the horse's names and the odds) and play darts very skilfully (subtracting his score and working out his next dart in his head).
I remember another kitchen porter who worked full time. He must have been approaching retirement age and may have been gay. (This was only a few years after homosexuality had been legalised). He kept himself to himself. I only spoke to him once and he told me how much he loved his job, because this was one of the last places in London where he could wash up by hand, with his hands in soapy water, rather than using the now universal dishwashers.
Ah well, it takes all sorts and I've met most of them.

I did a spell as a kitchen porter a dozen or so years ago when there was nothing else going, and I was glad to have had a dishwasher for the plates, cups and cutlery. The pots and pans were buggers to keep clean (and to get clean in the first place). Months of sloppy cleaning had left them encrusted with grease and dirt, and don't ask about the deep fat fryer!
(I sound like Kim Woodburn don't I)

As well as the itinerant tramps and dossers we had a fair sprinkling of foreign students, mostly commonwealth but a few from France. At one point we had two Canadians, one in the payroll department and the other in the winestore. Both were travelling around Europe and had arrived at Olympia at different times and from different European destinations. It turned out that they were from the same town, same university and had never met until I introduced them. Earls Court was like a magnet for Aussies and South Africans so we had a few of those working there as well.
On the female side, we had a lot of university students, girls coming from Europe to learn English and old gals waitressing for pin money. It was quite a mix.
I got to know one or two of the younger ones very intimately.

After a few months of almost terminal boredom trying to sort out the dockets for the accounts department, the storeman walked out just before the start of a show. I thought I'd give it a go and for the next few months was responsible for ordering all the bread, milk, cheese, coffee and all the dry and tinned goods.
I also learned how to cut cheese from a wheel of cheddar and make butter pats and curls using a grooved wooden bat and a marble slab. It's harder than it sounds.

The problem with the job was its start stop nature. Any fresh ground coffee left in stock at the end of a show would be out of date before the next show started. I lacked the experience to judge how much or little of a product to order and there were no records to look at. Once again I had no training and was left to muddle on. I stayed for one year and after the Ideal Homes Exhibition handed my notice in.

Working underground made one appreciate the sunshine. I remember leaving for work in the morning when it was still dark, working underground all day and then coming home at night in darkness. It was a strange experience for a country boy.
I'm glad I did it. It kept me busy during the days and paid enough for my rent and beer money in the evenings when I was out playing with the folk group. And I met some nice people. I also got to look around all the trade shows, car shows and Ideal Home Exhibition for free.
The doss house was closed in the early 70s and a swanky new hotel built on the site.
I have no idea whether the business continued to lose money. I was out of there.

The next day I signed up with an employment agency and looked forward to a few days off. Fat chance.

Management part one

2010-02-24T20:22:00.000Z

After a few months at the factory in Northampton I moved from production planning and took a job in the factory. I was the manager of one of the rooms in the factory, responsible for scotch egg and saveloy production and packing. I was in my mid twenties, more interested in making a success of my rock band, and without any training for the job I had to do.
I was an abject failure.

When we all relocated from London to Northampton to work in the factory we tended to cling together for friendship and support. There was a distinct barrier between the incomers and the locals, partly fuelled by the fact that we'd been given brand new houses by the Development Corporation and that we were generally earning London wages rather than the local rates, which were a lot lower.
The new factory was very spacious, with big open plan offices and a coffee lounge just for the office staff and management. We'd sit in there and talk about how much they had to drink the night before, and who was shagging who. We'd talk about how much work had to be done, but we never actually did much.
The factory staff just got and did more or less what they liked. I was very green, very anxious to be liked and to be everyone's friend, and consequently a pushover.
I had no authority and wouldn't know what to do with it anyway.

We never once hit our production targets and the quality of product was poor. But this was 1975, so it was OK. The unions ran the country and there was a crazy pay scheme in place where we got a wage raise if inflation reached a certain point. My wages increased almost every week, but our output didn't.
It was a train wreck in slow motion and I didn't know how to avert it.

So we sat in the coffee lounge when we should have been trying to get the factory working and we mouthed platitudes about how it would take about five years before the factory was running to its full capacity. And all the time the firm was leaking money like a seive and losing customers daily.

I was a fish out of water and totally unsuited to the job. I was more interested in my music and fraternising with the young female staff (naughty boy!)
And so after less than a year I left for pastures new.
And I didn't know what or where that was.

Sausages, saveloys and burgers

2010-02-22T19:10:00.003Z

Sausages, saveloys and burgers. We eat loads of them without once thinking about what goes into them. If you don't wish to know then stop reading this.

The first thing you need to know is that the legal definition of beef is everything that comes off a cow's carcass. When you bite into a big mac that you paid 99p for you are not buying into minced steak. That burger probably cost 5p to make. It probably cost more to transport the burger to the shop than it did to make it.

If it's off a cow and is at all edible, it'll be used in food production. When I made burgers the gristle and cartilages were cooked in a big vat and allowed to congeal.Then they were run through a mincer and added to the recipe as part of the meat content. Since then they've got even cleverer and can now remove every trace of anything remotely edible from the bones and turn it into food.

The next thing you need to learn is that burgers, sausages, scotch eggs etc are all produced by squirting the meat out of a machine. In order to get the meat to go through the machine the structure of the meat has to be destroyed. It is turned into a slurry that may only be 30% meat. The rest is soya and rusk, with additives to improve the flavour, hold the product together when it's cooking and some vitamins.
As Crocodile Dundee said "It tastes like shit but it'll keep you alive."

It's quite a sight to see a burger machine stamping out the patties on to the conveyor belt. In our factory the belt went through a freezer so that the burgers were frozen within minutes of being produced. The ingredients were mixed in a large drum according to a finely worked out recipe. We produced several grades of burger with different ingredients. If a modern day big mac style burger is considered the top of the range, I shudder to think what goes in the cheap range that you see in Chav City (the shop that has slebs advertising party nibbles)

We also made scotch eggs. They were quite labour intensive. We had an egg boiler, a machine that you loaded with fresh eggs at one eggs and boiled eggs came out of the other. Someone had to peel the shells off the eggs and keep up with the machine. I used to be able to peel an egg one handed, one in each hand.

The outer covering of the scotch egg was extruded as a flat round patty and as it travelled along the belt someone would place an egg on the patty. Then a girl would mould the scotch egg by hand and place it back on the belt. You'd need six or eight girls to do that. At the end of the belt the egg would pass through a batter curtain and drop into a tank full of breadcrumbs. The eggs would rotate as they climbed up another belt and be covered with crumb. Then they would drop into a conveyor fryer. When they emerged at the other end they'd be placed in trays to cool down before they were packed. That's a fairly standard way of producing food.
When I worked at the bakery, the method of making rolls was virtually identical. We even had a conveyor oven as well as several turntable ovens. I still have the scars on my arms where a hot baking tray touched my arm as I unloaded the ovens.

Saveloys. When I lived in London they were the after-pub food of choice (much like the kebab is today) and with as fearsome a reputation. My department used to produce them. What went into a saveloy? Do you really want to know?

We used to bake all the pies before they went out to the chip shops. These days most chippies buy frozen pies and cook them as required. Back then there were few freezers, so the chippies would buy them in ready cooked. There was a certain percentage of pies that leaked when they were cooked off and we'd recycle them by mincing them up and including them in the saveloy recipe. The saveloys were extruded from a machine with a piston that forced the slurry out through a tube. The saveloy skins were pigs intestines that came in a huge barrel of salt. It was a horrible job getting the skins out of the barrel, soaking them in cold water to make them pliable and then loading them onto the nozzle. It was quite a skilful job to make saveloys and one that attracted a fair amount of ribald comment from the lads as they watched a woman working a machine with a left hand action that would give a great hand job.
The completed (but still raw) saveloys were then cooked in dye filled tanks. This gave the saveloy its red skin. If a saveloy burst or wasn't up to standard for packing, it was recycled into the next batch of saveloys.

So it was conceivable that there was a tiny tiny fragment in a saveloy that was bake waste, turned nto saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys etc etc.

Needless to say I haven't eaten one since.

Food glorious food

2010-02-22T17:23:00.003Z

I've had quite a few jobs working in food production. The experience changes you.

I had two summer jobs working in a banana factory. One of the perks was that you could eat as many bananas as you fancied. I fancied a lot. I reckon I ate several pounds of bananas a day when I worked there. After I left I didn't eat another banana for about ten years.

When I moved out of London I worked for a meat products factory, initially in the production planning department. I missed the hustle and bustle of the sales office, and the pace of life in Northampton was very slow compared to London. I got bored very quickly and when a vacancy occured for a department manager in the factory I applied and was taken on.
The first change was that I had to have a haircut. I couldn't get it all in the hairnet. When you work in the food industry you take hygeine seriously. If you don't, here's what can happen.

When I was a schoolboy there was a typhoid outbreak in the UK, caused by the South American factory cooling the corned beef tins in the local river water.
About fifteen years ago there was a huge rise in food poisoning that was traced to a firm passing off condemned chicken meat as fit for human consumption. The meat found its way into meat products all over the UK.
And there are numerous outbreaks of e-coli poisoning that are traced back to bad housekeeping and hygeine.

Then there are the foreign bodies that turn up in food, like this recent instance

http://www.droitwichadvertiser.co.uk/news/local/5010493.Wire_brush_found_in_burger/
" A DROITWICH teenager got more than he bargained for when he bit into a burger - and found a wire cleaning brush inside.
The Chicken Legend burger was bought from McDonald’s in Kidderminster by Janet Stephens and taken home for her son Brett.
But when the 18-year-old tucked into the burger he made a shock discovery.
The pair say the five inch wire bottle brush was running through the chicken part of the burger. "

Hmmm. Not sure about that one. Nor the apocryphal Kentucky fried rat. But I do know of a couple that happened.

When I worked at Olympia the catering firm also had the Wimbledon tennis contract. The sandwiches and scotch eggs were made in the kitchens under Olympia and they took on student labour to do the work. After a day of making sandwich after sandwich, the temptation to be creative became too much. There was the sin of omission, making a sandwich with the smallest possible sliver of ham showing, so the unlucky customer bit into plain bread and butter. Then there was the scotch egg with a ping-pong ball filling.
Ho ho ho how they laughed at that.

When I worked at Telfers sales office there was a tale doing the rounds of a steak and kidney pie handed back to the salesman. The customer had bit into and found a piece of paper. On it were written the words "Help, I am a prisoner at Telfers meat pie factory". I like that one. very creative and destructive at the same time.

I learned the difference between a uniform and an overall. When I worked in a bread factory a few years ago I was told quite bluntly that I had to wear a clean overall every shift. (The fact that there weren't any was neither here nor there).

The reason was that overalls were to be worn not to keep one's clothes clean, but to stop the food getting dirty.

I used to drive past the hospital on the way to and from work and I'd see the staff walking around outside wearing their uniforms, including the green that signifies theatre staff. In the food factory you had to remove your overalls if you left the factory floor for a smoke or to use the toilet, and you had to wash your hands when you went into the production area. If you didn't, you got shouted at by the other workers. We took hygeine seriously. You never saw food production staff walking around the town centre shops in their overalls, but I see plenty of NHS staff in their work clothes.
It's a pity that the NHS isn't run by food industry professionals. If the NHS was regulated as tightly as the food industry it'd be shut down long ago.

Live to work, or work to live

2010-02-21T20:35:00.003Z

I discovered the joy of making music at about the same time as I started work and except for a six year from 1984 until 1990 when I "retired" from making music to concentrate on raising a family and building a career, they've had almost equal importance in my life.
I've had a couple of "pro" music jobs in recent years, touring the UK. One was a theatre tour playing bass in a Patsy Cline tribute show and another was a tour or northern clubs and festivals with Nicki Gillis, an Australian singer/songwriter. It's interesting working with some professional musicians. Playing music is what they do, is all they do, and in some cases it's all they can do.
My working life has been a bit more varied, but for the most part, music has been very important. In fact, if it wasn't for playing music, either for fun or for pay, I wouldn't have stuck at half the jobs I've done.

I used to attend the free festivals in Hyde park in the late sixties. I saw a lot of good bands there, at the old site next to the Serpentine. The last free gig to be held in that location was when the Rolling Stones played in 1969. I went along but was amazed at the number of people there. There were at least twice as many as usual,and I couldn't get near the front. I couldn't even get to the top of the slope to look down on the stage. I remember the event for two reasons.
The first was hearing King Crimson play during the afternoon. I couldn't see them but they sounded special. They were playing at the Marquee the following weekend so I went to see them there. I was blown away and went back the next week to see them again. Stunning. So good that I contemplated throwing my guitar in the bin. I almost gave up playing. Fow a few days anyway.
The second was meeting a girl who became my first serious girlfriend. I was soon besotted with her and would bunk off work to spend the day with her while her parents were out at work. Naughty boy!
While it was acknowledged that the bank payed badly, the benefits compensated. For instance, you could get a mortgage at a staff rate. I knew a lot of staff who only stayed for that. Then there was the sick pay. If you were ill, as long as you rang in sick before 9.30 you still got paid. Very generous. Especially for a horny teenager who didn't like his job much. I don't know how many times I rang in (or got my mum to ring in) saying I had flu. It was about one day a fortnight by the time I left.

After I left the frozen food company where I was an invoice clerk, I ended up working at Olympia, a big exhibition complex in West London. I had a job working for the company that did the catering, trying to make sense of the accounts. This company was a subsidiary of J Lyons & Co and were losing money hand over fist, according to the accountants. They appointed me to take the chits issued by the various stores scattered around the vast labyrinth of tunnels under the halls, and make some sense out of them.
On the first day the lad who was to teach me what to do got talking and the subject turned to music. He was a drummer and the end result was that we spent all day and every day talking about music. We never did work out a system to track the goods in and out of the site. They continued to lose money.
My new found friend joined my circle of musos and we formed a band and played a few gigs around West London. When we weren't playing or rehearsing we'd go out and watch a band. There was great music every night of the week. In the list of priorities it was music first, girlfriend second, going out with the lads third and the job a distant fourth.
Even when I moved jobs and changed girlfriends (and got married the first time)my priorities hardly changed. I got tired of the prog rockish music I was making, and having seen King Crimson and realising I could never match their musicality I was ready for a change. I'd played a few folk clubs and liked the portable nature of the music (no amps to lug around) so when I visited a different pub near to where I lived and found a full blown traditional Irish session in full swing I was captivated. My favourite band Fairport Convention had just released "Liege & Lief" and folk rock was born. This was new and exciting. I sat in with the band one evening and stayed for nearly two years. Some weeks we played every night. It was great. My day job at Telfers was stimulating, and my evenings were spent in good company making good music all over West London and occasionally venturing out to the country. We played Cambridge folk festival in 1972, although I was too drunk to remember any details.

Girlfriends came and went, but the music was constant. My then girlfriend (later my first wife) and I moved to Northampton in 1974, almost the first thing I did (once I'd got out of commuting to London every day)was to advertise for musicians to join or form a band. Out of the first abortive rehearsals I teamed up with a guitarist called Jack and we formed a rock group called Left Hand Drive.

I was working as a production planner in a food factory. My job was to liaise with the sales office and the warehouse, checking the order requirements with the stock in hand and planning the production runs, ordering the raw materials and packaging, and checking that production targets were achieved. I sat in an office with half a dozen other staff and I hated it. The sales office I'd come from was busy busy busy, with the phones ringing constantly. The planning office was like a morgue in comparison. Two of my colleagues were rugby players and another was a boastful arsehole. I hated it.
I'd much rather be playing music.
After a few months there was a vacancy for a junior production manager in the factory so I asked for a transfer.
And so I entered the world of food production.

Deadlines

2010-02-19T12:28:00.002Z

Looking back I've realised that the jobs that involved working to tight deadlines gave me the most satisfaction. The best jobs are the ones where you can look back at the end of the day and see how much (or little) you've achieved. They can be looked upon as little victories (or defeats). They make the job more interesting.

I've written in previous posts about the deadlines we worked to in the bank. I also worked to tight deadlines when pricing up invoices at a frozen food company. I've worked at places where deadlines were non-existent or so lax as to be worthless. Those tended to be the jobs I hated. I'd find myself staring out of the window rather than doing my work, and getting bored by the minute.

Is it the protestant work ethic? Does the devil make work for idle hands? Is work actually good for us? I've been unemployed a few times over the years and I have to say I prefer to have a job, even a bad one. Just the act of getting out of bed and going to work gives structure to the day.
Having a job with an easily understood set of objectives set against a structure that has built in deadlines makes the day go quicker. If the working day goes quicker, then the evenings and leisure time come that much quicker too.

In the early seventies I worked inthe sales office at Telfers in Cadby Hall, West London. It was just along from Olympia and within a fifteen minute walk from my flat in Shepherds Bush.
There were three of us responsible for answering the phones and taking orders for pies, sausages and burgers that found their way into almost every chip shop in London, and every works canteen across half the country. Briefly, a customer would ring up and order his requirements for the next day's delivery. Our job was to take his order down, allocate it to the correct van salesman, and ensure that enough product was manufactured in the factories. One factory was in Cadby Hall and the other in Stratford, East London. We'd place a preliminary order by ten in the morning based on previous sales and whether it was raining or not (and other factors, like how much stock we were carrying from the previous day). As the day progressed, the pressure increased. There was a deadline for the customers to ring their order in, and the phone calls got more frantic as the deadline loomed. There was another deadline to order the goods from the factory. In between those times there was half an hour when all the loadsheets and spreadsheets had to be added up and cross balanced. And all done without computers.

The days would fly by. At that time I was playing mandolin in a traditional Irish folk group collective. The lineup of the group fluctuated according to whoever was available, from a basic five piece up to fifteen or so. It was loose and tight at the same time. We played pubs all over West London and at one stage played every night except Mondays, and twice on Sundays, all in different venues. It was great while it lasted.

It ended when Telfers decided to move out of Cadby Hall. The sales depot moved to Isleworth and production to Northampton. I didn't fancy commuting to Isleworth from Shepherds Bush, and there were brand new houses available to anyone who relocated to Northampton.
We were paying £8.50 a week for a grotty two room bedsit with a leaky roof and shared bathroom and no heating. They were offering a brand new three bedroomed terrace house with central heating for the same weekly rental.
No contest.
It was just that the job I took was shite.

Pioneer or settler?

2010-02-17T12:33:00.002Z

Pioneer or settler? We tend to be one or the other. Most of the previous posts have been more about me than the jobs I've done down the years. I've been looking back on what I did and why I did it, about the choices I made, about my expectations from life.

Most of us look for meaning and identity in our lives. It's a sad fact that many people are indistinguishable from the job they do. If they lose their job, they lose their identity and purpose. If we can't find our identity through our work, then we look for it in other places. How many people do we know who lead double lives? They have their work identity, and a totally different one for the weekends, for their holidays, for their leisure or for their hobby.

I found my identity when working in pioneer mode. Learning new skills, new ventures, breaking new ground, opening new territories. After that, boredom sets in.
I doubt if many people are totally pioneer orientated. We have a little of the settler in us all. We may strike out on our own in search of pastures new, but then we settle down to develop what we've claimed for ourselves.
Looking back, I've always been at my happiest when in pioneer mode. Opening new shops, starting up new factories, developing new concepts, writing staff manuals, training new staff.
I don't know how many new shops I opened during my retail career. At least five as manager, plus others as part of the opening team. I loved the challenge of moving into an empty space and over a week or two seeing the fittings and shelving installed, the staff interviewed and a team put together, the deliveries of stock, the unpacking, checking and stocking the shelves; the training of the staff in the various tasks; the late nights leading up to opening day. The exhilaration of opening day and the sheer hard work needed to overcome the obstacles of getting a new retail outlet bedded in. The variety of the seasons culminating in the frantic pressure of the first Christmas. Sales records set. Then the almost standstill post-christmas when it seems nobody's buying. The re-organisation of the shop layout to improve sales, looking for ways to do things better, quicker, more efficiently. Training your successor and moving on to the next store opening.
I left retail management in 1994 when I was made redundant following a takeover. I'd been with the firm for about five years, eight if you included working for firms that had been absorbed along the way. The industry was changing and I didn't like the way it was going, so I left and never looked back.
Many of today's giant retailers have their roots as market traders. Both Marks & Spencer and Tesco's founders began as barrow boys. Jack Cohen's motto as a barrow boy was "pile it high and sell it cheap", and when he moved from a market stall into his first shop in the 1920s he took his philosophy with him.
The Uk's first supermarket was opened by J Lyons & Co in 1950. When I worked in the sales order office at Henry Telfer's, our offices were just upstairs from the supermarket, just along from Kensington Olympia. Tesco soon followed, opening their first self service shop in St Albans in 1951, and their first supermarket in 1956. Tesco rapidly expanded through a mix of new openings and acquisitions, including a small chain of supermarkets in South London run by Ralph Goldstein. Together with his sons he started up a new venture, a self service drugstore, the first in the UK. They called it Superdrug and they did everything themselves, buying the goods, stocking the shelves and operating the tills. They were pioneers and I worked for them on two of their pioneering ventures, Superdrug and Volume One Bookshops.

Get a haircut boy!

2010-02-15T10:23:00.002Z

Let's face it, I get bored. Not all the time, but I will, in time.
I've worked in banks, offices, sales offices, retail, factories, warehouses, food production, driving, call centres. Everywhere and anywhere- except for working with animals and children.
The longest I've spent in any one job is about five years. That would have involved doing the same job for the same firm but in several different locations.
Since I was made redundant from retail management in 1994, I've worked mainly as a temp, except for two jobs where I started as a temp and was taken on as a permanent member. Even then, I've only considered my position as being temporary.
I'm not workshy. I'd rather be working than not working. I can turn my hand to anything. The reason I never pursued a more active musical career was that I disliked the downtime, the time between musical jobs. I also disliked the uncertainty of whether I would be earning or not. The bills always come in on time, but gig money didn't.
And I do have my own comfort zone. I can get comfortable very quickly. And get bored eventually.

"What do you call a guitarist whos girlfriend has left him?"

"Homeless"

That's not me.
Back in the sixties I was always being pulled up about my appearance. In banking it didn't matter how thick you were, as long as you turned up everyday, were never late, kept your hands out of the till, and were smartly turned out. I was OK, except for the last one.

It's just alien to me. Oh I do scrub up OK if I make the effort. It's just such an effort. I'd stay in bed until the last possible moment, not knowing if I had a clean shirt. I'd wear my jeans until they'd moulded to my shape, and then keep wearing them for a few more weeks. And as for my hair....

I hate barbers. As a child I was frogmarched into the barbers by my mother. I'd be sat in on a plank acroos the arms of the barbers chair and she'd order a short back and sides. No matter what the weather was outside. My hair had just grown long enough to protect me from the cold wind, and two minutes later I'd emerge freezing into a howling gale, my neck exposed to the top of my head. I hated haircuts.
Along came the Beatles and all that changed. I styled (ha ha!) my fringe so that it covered my acne (and thereby making it worse) and tried to avoid being noticed by the school prefects who could order you to have a haircut or face detention.
Eventually I was free of the tidiness gestapo and ready to join the world of work. Alas, they were as bad, only you didn't have to stay behind after work and write lines. Why the fuss? It's only hair.

One evening I cut it all off using a pair of kitchen scissors. And they still didn't like it. So I let it grow again. I did visit a hairdressers once. I didn't know how to explain what I wanted so I didn't get it. After a few years my hairstyle evolved into a "short on top, long at the back" sort of extra long mullet. By then I was working in Northampton at the brand new Telfers meat products factory. I had to wear a hairnet in order to go into the factory, and my hair was too long to fit into the net, so I reluctantly cut it back.

A few years later I found a hairdresser I got along with, and in common with Kevin Keegan and countless others, I had a perm. I'd wanted one ever since Eric Clapton had his hair permed as an act of homage to Jimi Hendrix. The lead singer of the folk collective "Captain Swing" that I was a member of had a huge ginger afro. Afros looked cool. I wanted one. It could have been worse. I could have had a mohican. They first came into prominence in the very early sixties, but didn't catch on until it became part of the official punk uniform.

I never had a DA. I was just too young for rock 'n roll.
I never had a mohican. I was too old for punk.
But I had a perm
And a mullet.

When we moved back to Northamptonshire after living in Somerset for three years, a young hairdresser used to call around to our house to cut our hair, and continued to do so for the next twenty years, so my hair was nondescript, except for when I had a no2 crew cut. Just the once. I let my hair grow again after that.

I was asked to help out at my wife's place of work about five years ago. I'm still there. On my first day on reception, I turned up booted and suited, wearing a tie. My boss, like me an aging hippy, looked and asked me not to wear a tie again, as it showed him up.
That's one of the reasons why I'm still there five years later.

On a whim, and just to show that I still have hair to grow, I decided to let my hair grow when on holiday back in 2007. My hairdresser trimmed it a couple of times but I'm letting it grow. There's not much of it but I'm not planning to cut it off just yet. I'll cut it when I want to.
I'm having chemo for leukaemia at the moment. They warned me that I might lose my hair. I haven't so far, so that's all the more reason to keep it. A flag of defiance if you like.
Or a plume of defiance.
Or a ponytail.

Modulus eleven

2010-02-15T08:59:00.004Z

I've been lying in bed thinking about modulus eleven. Why? and what is it, you may ask. I just looked it up on the internet and read through the description and I'm as mystified now as I was forty years ago. It's to do with why your bank account number has those particular numbers, and why bar codes work.

Part of my duties as a junior bank clerk was to allocate account numbers to new accounts.You couldn't just choose any old number. We had a printout containing the available numbers. I noticed that consecutive account numbers were about eight numbers apart. For instance, if an account number ended in 08, then the next number in the sequence would be 16. Usually.

I was told that the last number in the account number acted as a check number for the whole number. Then they uttered the magic phrase "Modulus eleven".

It meant that if you mis-punched an account number, the machine refused to accept it, which cut down the likelihood of applying a credit or debit to the wrong account, or consigning a credit to limbo.

I was thinking about this because the last few days I've been trying to describe the work I did as a junior bank clerk all those years ago, and I've now realised that although the cheques went through the clearing house and were somehow sorted into branch order, so that we only received our own cheques, they didn't get posted against the customer's account until the cheque arrived in the branch. And that was our job using a Burroughs punch tape machine.

The keyboard was much as the others that I have described. It was loaded with computer paper, very wide, with guide holes on each side, and faint (feint?) lines printed on the paper to help guide the eye.

The machine would only accept genuine account numbers (modulus eleven again), so we'd set the machine for either debit (cheques), or credits. Everything that was punched in found its way onto the punchtape (the soft copy) or the computer paper (the hard copy).

When punching in a batch of cheques, you'd be given a pile of cheques and a total for the batch. You'd punch in the account number, the cheque number and the amount. All that information was punched into the tape by making holes that could be read by a mechanical reader.

Many years later I was friends with a man who collected player pianos. The tune to be played was created by making holes in a roll of paper, like this-

Exactly the same idea as computer punch tape, but one hundred years older.

I use computer technology in my recording studio. Some studios "programme" the music using a sequencer. The music roll unwound vertically, but the sequencer unrolls (scrolls) horizontally across the screen

But exactly the same principle.

Anyway, you'd work your way through the batch, get to the end and press the total key. The moment of truth. Did your total match the amount you were given? If it did, you'd start on the next batch. If not, you had to find the error. The machine couldn't be used until the error was cleared.

All this was played out against a strict deadline. You soon got good at machining, and even better at finding errors. That skill stays with you.

Proofreading? No problem.

Batch data entry? Easy peasy.

And modulus eleven? It's still in use today. Without it, bank account numbers wouldn't be secure. Without it, there's be no bar codes. You don't need to know how it works, only that it does.

The genius that is Dilbert!

2010-02-15T08:23:00.003Z

The genius that is Dilbert!

Machine skills

2010-02-14T22:06:00.002Z

This was the keypad I learned to use when they sent me away to learn machine skills back in 1968.

As you can see, there are a few more keys to use, but it's simple once you know how.

From the left hand side, the first nine columns are for pounds, the next two light coloured columns are for shillings, and the right hand column and a bit are for pence, so you can enter up to £999,999,999-19-11d in one go. Each column has buttons marked 1 to 9.

Operating it is a doddle. press the keys corresponding to the each item you want to add, eg £110-9-6 and pull the lever. repeat as needed and the total is in the little windows at the bottom (shown as white dots in the photo. Sorry but pictures of these ancient machines are hard to find)

The amount can be entered using one finger, but speed comes when you use all your fingers to depress the keys in one movement. It's easy to stretch your hands so that they can cover all the keys. The next thing to learn is to read the amount to be entered as one figure. The human brain can read long combinations of letters and recognise them as words, and it can read long combinations of numbers as well.

So you look at the amount and not at the keyboard. You use the mark on the 5 button to guide your fingers and you see the amount and form the shape of the number and press. The illustration I used is for a mechanical version that needed a crank handle to operate. There were electric versions where you touched the motor bar with your little finger to record the amount. With practice it was amazing how quickly one could list cheques, and the skill never leaves you.

Imagine a mechanical machine that consisted of a keyboard like this-

and this keyboard surrounded by an array of metal boxes (you can just make out a couple of them in the picture). Anything up to two dozen different boxes. Each of these boxes has the electro-mechanical equivalent of the operating handle in the earlier machine (see above).

This is an NCR Proof Machine, a noisy, clanking whirring monster of a machine that sorted all the cheques that had been paid in into the different banks. One box for Barclays, another for Lloyds, etc. There were a lot more banks in the 1960s. The Westminster Bank and the National Provincial banks merged to form the Natwest bank in the late 1960s. Many other famous names disappeared at the same time. At the end of the day's business, each bank's cheques were tallied up and sent to the Central clearing house. Each bank would present bundles of cheques and receive cheques back. The cheques physically changed hands. Those cheques were then sorted into branches and sent to each branch to be cleared. That's why it took a week for the cheque to be cleared. Two days to arrive at the drawer's branch, one day to be accepted, two days if it were refused.

So why, in these days of computers and instant transfers, and when cheques no longer have to be presented at the drawing branch, why does it still take a week to clear?

The mechanical Proof machine was something to behold. You knew you'd arrived if you were judged sufficiently skilled to be able to operate it. You needed to be quick and accurate.

Speed and accuracy. Where have I heard that before?

As computers became smaller and more powerful and ways were found to speed up the input at branch level, these machines were phased out. Now the cheque is to be phased out.

And one day, cash will go as well.

School days.

2010-02-13T21:01:00.003Z

Anyone lucky enough to have had a primary school education prior to 1970 had the best possible start in life. No calculators, no extra subjects to cram into the curriculum at the expense of the basics.
The teachers had time to teach you how to read. You proved that could read by standing up in class and reading from a book. They had time to teach you how to spell. Our fourth year teacher had spelling competitions that were fiercely fought. I recall as a ten year old standing up in class to spell "encyclopaedia". It was competitive. It was fun.
They taught us arithmetic. We had to learn our tables, up to the twelve times tables. By heart. My dad said I had it easy. There was even less pressure on the curriculum in the 1930s, so he had to learn up to the twenty times table. We were taught fractions. We were taught mental arithmetic. Calculators hadn't been invented.
My headmaster at Penpol Primary School in Hayle was a Mr Mitchell. He was a grown up so didn't have a first name. He taught the fifth year, and got us prepared for the eleven plus exam. Out of a class of about thirty, and without classroom assistants, he enabled five of us to pass the eleven plus and go the grammar school. Competition for places was tough. There were less than 200 places for the whole of West Cornwall. Selection was on merit, on how well you did in your exam. You got into grammar school because you were the best.
All through that final year at primary school his motto was "speed and accuracy". But accuracy first, because without accuracy, speed is useless.

I read recently that GCSE examiners are told to mark as correct any mathematics answer that has the right numbers but with the decimal point in the wrong place.
I also read recently about a locum doctor who prescribed ten times the dose of a drug to a patient who subsequently died.
And they don't make the connection.

Before February 1971, the currency in use consisted of pounds, shillings and pence. Twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound, two hundred and forty pennies to the pound.
When I started work at the bank, all staff were expected to be numerate, that is to say, they could add up and take away. Each cashier was responsible for the contents of his till, which he would balance each day. He/she had the use of a tally roll calculator for adding up the "meat ticket" cash slips, but we prided ourselves on our ability to do arithmetic, and to do as much as possible without recourse to machinery.

I left the bank in 1970 and for a few months worked as an invoice clerk for a frozen foods firm. The telesales girls would ring their customers and write the order on an itemised invoice. The Invoice clerks would price the individual lines, add up the invoice and deduct the commission to leave the total at the bottom. There were four of us, working to a deadline, and we'd have hundreds to tally up during the course of a day. We were employed on the basis of our ability to add up. And we were good.
Altogether now-
Take 3 3/4% discount off an invoice for £17-6-4d.

No I can't do it now either. But I could back then. Without recourse to paper and pencil.

Our branch of the bank was busy. We had several large local firms, plus many local shops and department stores. At the close of business, we'd have a pile of cheques a foot high that had to be sent away to the clearing house. Each morning we'd receive a huge pile of cheques that had to be filed into each customer's file. This was called sortaway. Then we'd compile the statements, taking the cheques and paying in slips and arranging them into the order they appeared on the statement. and woe betide if a cheque was mis-sorted. It had to be found.
By the time this was complete, there was a pile of today's work to be done. There was always a deadline to hit. It was pressure. It was fun. From 3.30 when the branch closed the doors until 5.00 it was a rush to balance the tills (to the penny), transfer the cash to the vaults, process all the paying in slips and cheques, punch the data, and bag up the cheques for clearing.
It was fun if you could keep up.
I couldn't.
I used to watch the more experienced staff as they operated the various machines. Their fingers flew over the keys and they never seemed to look at what they were doing. And their work was almost always correct to the penny.
I had to be taught how to do that. So they sent me away for a week to learn. It's a skill that never leaves you. In recent years I've worked from time to time in data entry. I easily passed every assessment, both for speed and for accuracy.
Speed and accuracy. But accuracy first.

GIGO

2010-02-13T09:32:00.001Z

GIGO is the first rule of computing. It means, garbage in = garbage out. When I joined the bank in 1967 it had been computerising customer accounts for about two years. All the London branches were computer based when I started work.
Computers were big machines that needed tender loving care. 1960s TV shows like the Avengers, the Persuaders or Thunderbirds would portray them as big metal sided boxes with large reels of tape whirring around on the front. The modern mobile phone has more computer power than these monoliths, but they had to start somewhere.
The computers could process data faster than it could be inputted, certainly much faster than a human punch it in. The bank used punch tape to input the data. The branch could input the data throughout the day and transmit the tape via a phone line to the computer in the City.
Here's a picture I found on the internet. I hope the owners don't get too precious about me borrowing it to illustrate this post.

This picture shows the punch tape being loaded onto the first spool. Once loaded, the tape is fed through the reader and on to the second spool. Hit the start button and the machine reads the holes in the tape as binary code and is transmitted down the phone line. At the end of the transmission, the computer tells you if it received everything successfully.

Our branch had one of these terminals, and every day a courier van would arrive at about 5 o'clock with data spools from the sub-branches.These would be transmitted as well. Several (always male) members of staff formed a rota to stay late to transmit this data, and if you were lucky it took an hour. If there were errors in the data, you stayed until you found them, corrected them, and retransmitted the data.

So accuracy was essential.
The first law of computers is garbage in = garbage out.
The first rule of banking is credits must equal debits. Someone pays cheques and cash into their account. The various cheques and cash must add up to the total on the paying slip. That is fundamental and easily understood. Extend the principle so that every paying in slip when added together must equal all the cash received, plus all the cheques received. Simples.
Banks were built on trust. When a customer placed his money with a bank for safe keeping, the last thing he wanted was for the bank to lose sight of it, or be unable to account for every penny. Accuracy and numeracy were absolutely essential. It was the customer's money.

These days it's no longer the customer's money that keeps the bank in business. They keep in business by lending the bank's money to customers who have none. They stopped insisting that every cashier balance his till to the penny every day about thirty years ago.
I was working in retail at the time and each day I'd take the takings to be banked, and collect bags of change for the tills. I spoke to the cashier a week or so after the changeover from individually accountable tills to a system where the tills results were pooled. They never balanced from day one. They never did, ever again. Later again they stopped balancing the tills daily and only balanced them weekly. It might have saved time, I don't know.
What I did know was that numeracy (the ability to add up and take away) was declining alarmingly through the nation. Maybe the banks were forced into pooling the tills through a lack of quality staff.
What I did know was this. Every day, supposedly honest and trustworthy staff were buying their snacks using money from the till. It wasn't much, a few pence, but a principle had been lost.
If credits no longer equalled debits because of a few Mars bars, who made up the difference?

And did those who participated in, or oversaw and colluded with this petty dishonesty ever make their way to the top of the banking industry?

Hi Ho Hi Ho, it's off to work we go

2010-02-12T16:53:00.004Z

It was September 1967 and I had just landed a job at the Chiswick High Road branch of the Westminster Bank. I was booted and suited and ready to brave the rush hour to get to work.
I was very good at finding my way around London. I used Red Rover bus tickets (a bargain at 3/6d) to explore the capital from the age of 14 or so. As the son of a railway employee, I was entitled to privilege tickets on the London Underground. I could travel anywhere on the Underground system for 6d (2 1/2p), so I sometimes took the train to Uxbridge or Upminster and buy a Green Rover ticket and travel on the London Country buses. It's amazing how far you can travel for less than ten shillings. The Dartford tunnel had just opened, and London Transport had a small fleet of vehicles based on a Ford Thames Trader chassis to take bicycle users through the tunnel. So I used my green rover ticket and travelled south from Grays to Dartford. I think I got as far as Sevenoaks before it was time to head back home again. On another occasion I sampled the delights of bus travel in and around Harlow and Luton, and the experience cured me from wanting to visit either location again.

So I knew my way around London. But I'd never experienced the rush hour. I used to walk the mile and a half to school every day, then back home for lunch, back to school for the afternoon lessons, then maybe cross country running after school before walking home. That's a minimum of six miles walking every day. I was built like a racing snake.

Travelling from North Kensington to Chiswick was fairly straight forward, with the advantage of travelling against the main flow of the rush hour. People took the tube into the city. I took it away from the city, from Ladbroke Grove to Hammersmith. Then it was out of the station and a short walk to the bus stop in King Street, just outside the Hop Poles pub. The bus travelled along King Street to Chiswick High Road, and then it was stay on the bus until the stop opposite the bank.

It was a ten minute walk to the station, then a fifteen minute train ride followed by a fifteen minute bus ride. Less than an hour.
In my time at the bank I discovered a universal truth.
The closer you live to your place of work; the more likely you are to be late.
The last person to sign in each morning lived around the corner.

I worked in Brentford a few years later, by Kew Bridge near the Star & Garter. Although it was only a mile or so further to travel, the extra distance made it harder to get to work. So I'd bunk off and visit my girlfriend instead. But that's another story.

The furthest I travelled to work when I lived in London, was in the early 1970s and I travelled from Shepherds Bush in west London to Stratford in east London. I walked to the Central Line station, grabbed a seat if one was available and stayed put as the train filled to bursting and then was empty for the last part of the journey from Liverpool St to Stratford. I endured that for a month or two, and then moved to Northampton and had to commute from there to Stratford. I really hated that. Luckily it was only for a month or two until the Stratford factory closed and production moved to Northampton. On the whole I dislike commuting, but have travelled up to 50 miles each way by car to work. These days I prefer to live and work in the same town.

I don't remember much about those first commuting journeys. I recall seeing a young lad who was convinced he was James Dean. He had the haircut, the jacket, and the way of sticking his chin in and looking up at you. I stayed well clear. He looked belligerent.
I stayed clear of the man who used to get in the same carriage, take advantage of the crush, and then touch me up all the way to Hammersmith. The cheek! I couldn't even persuade a girl to do that. That was a long way off.

Smartly turned out

2010-02-11T20:40:00.005Z

I have absolutely no interest in fashion. As far as I'm concerned, clothes should keep me warm or cool according to the season, and be reasonably comfortable. End of.

Part of this is down to my upbringing and the time that I grew up. My mother chose my clothes. They had to be hardwearing and functional. I was the oldest, so I never wore my sibling's cast-offs. I did however wear other people's cast offs if they fit. Growing up in the fifties in a small seaside town, there were no washing machines or launderettes. Clothes had to be washed by hand and wrung out using a pre-war mangle. I had one school shirt when I went to grammar school. I'd wear it all week and it would be washed at the weekend ready to be worn again the next week. When the collar wore out from all the scrubbing, it was either unpicked and turned over and resewn, or a patch was sewn over the frayed material. Clothes were basic and functional and certainly not fashionable. My mother insisted in kitting me out in corduroy jerkin and shorts. I wore shorts until my legs got too hairy. It was the norm.
Clothes were expensive. They were expensive compared to how much I earned. A cheap shirt cost fifteen shillings (75p), a good one was a guinea (£1-1s). A cheap off the peg suit cost £10, which was one week's wages.
I needed a suit to work at the bank. My parents paid for my first suit. It cost £10. My second suit cost a bit more. I went to Burtons for it.

There was a Burtons in every town. I went to the branch in Portobello Road. Their buildings are very distinctive. They always occupied a corner site and they almost always had a snooker hall upstairs. The former Burtons site in Kettering is now an Estate Agents, with a night club upstairs.
I went to Burtons one Saturday and was measured for my suit. He asked me if I dressed to left or to the right. He had to explain what it meant. Then I had to choose the style of suit. Finally I paid a deposit and the suit was ordered for me.
Burtons had a huge factory in Bradford or somewhere like that where they made up the suits that had been ordered in the local shops. A week or two later I called in and tried my suit for size.
It cost me £30, three week's wages.
My next suit was off the peg, and cost £18 from Burtons. I never bought another for years.

Because clothes were expensive you tended to wear clothes until they wore out. The habit tends to stick with you.
In the early 70s I used to wear loon pants. They were made of cotton and were died in bright colours. They cost about £2.50 a pair. A nice grandad tie dye T-shirt cost about the same.
It wasn't until the late eighties that clothes started to come down in price. And as they became cheaper, people began to throw them out before they wore out.

About ten years ago I had a job working for a recycling firm. I'd clock in at six o'clock in the morning at the site in Wellingborough, and together with a driver's mate would drive a white van to the designated collection area. I started off in Colchester, which was about a hundred or so miles away and took about two hours to get to. We'd buy an A-Z map and choose an area to work in. We'd spend the morning walking the streets putting bags through the letterboxes. Our target was 1000 bags per day, assuming we could find 1000 houses that hadn't been visited. After a month or more we'd walked every single street in Colchester and every village within ten miles.
Every afternoon we'd drive to the location that we'd visited two days earlier, this time we drove around looking for the bags that had been left out. Once we'd collected all the bags we drove home, had the van weighed on the weighbridge, emptied the van and clocked out. The next day we did more of the same.
Our target was one ton of clothing per van per day. Some vans went to areas that produced more. Others produced far less. It must have made money, even with all the miles involved.

Some of the clothing was packed into large canvas bags that were sewn shut and loaded in an unsorted state into lorries and transported to eastern Europe, where the clothes were sold to a poor population. This was prior to the enlargement of the EU. Some clothes were sorted into types, eg cotton, silk, wool and went to be recycled. Some customers would order say, a hundred pairs of used denim jeans, or fifty large ladies overcoats and these would be packed and despatched. Clothes that were given away to charity found their way to market stalls in Africa. The Organisation that gave its name and added credibility to the operation received a percentage of the cash raised in this way.

We performed a vital role in the economy. Many people (but not me) love shopping for clothes. Inevitably they run out of storage space. A charity bag would be posted through the letterbox and it would be filled with unwanted or unloved clothes, thereby releasing space for more purchases and keeping the tills ringing in the high street. A small fraction of the clothes collected would find its way into the charity shops of the organisation named on the bag, but it tended to be the very best stuff. Once a week we'd send a van to these retail outlets to take away the unsold clothes and bring fresh stock in. Almost all the clothing collected got reused, resold or recycled.

Until now. The problem is that clothes are now too cheap. I paid £3 for a pair of jeans from Tesco. If prices had risen in line with inflation that would have been around £90 based on 1960s prices. I don't do fashion, I don't do designer labels, I do do comfort,and they're uncomfortable I'll throw them into a charity bag. Most clothes are produced in the far east. Most of them are made from man made fibres, which can't be recycled. Clothes that sell for a pound or two when brand new have no resale value and can't be recycled so go to landfill. Transport costs mean that the foreign markets have dried up. It costs too much to send our unwanted clothes to Africa. The Africans can buy their clothes direct from the factory, as we do.

I stayed with the collection vans for about three months. Inevitably the longs hours took their toll. I was being paid by the hour, so I was earning well enough. However, I was supposed to be a musician and songwriter and while I found that walking the streets was a great way of working out song lyrics ( I wrote one of my favourite songs while tramping the streets of Wivenhoe in Essex), I didn't have any time to get into the studio to record the songs. I wanted to record another album, so in the end I packed the job in.

I'd walked every street in Colchester, Haybridge, Malden, Mersea and all the surrounding villages. I also walked the streets of Hereford and Ross on Wye. I discovered that every new housing development looks the same, irrespective of local architectural styles. Bland bland bland.

Banking for Beginners

2010-02-11T14:49:00.002Z

I remember September 1967 for two reasons. I started work at the Chiswick High Road branch of the Westminster Bank, and I went to my first "proper" rock concert. It was part of the "Sunday at the Saville" season and the bands at this first show included Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band and to top the bill, Pink Floyd. Other shows I saw included those by Jimi Hendrix, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and Vanilla Fudge.
While waiting for the first house audience to leave, my friend Dave & I stood outside. Dave nudged me in the ribs and in a loud stage whisper pointed out the DJ John Peel leaving the theatre, looking as inscrutable as ever. Finally we took our seats and the curtain rose and the band that started the show sent shivers up and down my spine. They still do more than forty years later. I refer to the magnificent Fairport Convention featuring the awesome playing of Richard Thompson on lead guitar. I was less impressed with Pink Floyd. Their single "See Emily play" had just charted and I expected a pop group, not an hour of psychedelic instrumentals with the band silhouetted on a white backdrop, and a multi-coloured light show making strange shapes on the screen. I went to see them a few more times in the coming months, and repeated listening to "Piper at the gates of dawn" soon got me on their wavelength.

It was a far cry from my day job. Banking was conventional and safe. It was said that it was impossible to get fired from a job in the bank, unless you were caught with your hands in the till, or were consistently late for work in the mornings. You could get a subsidised mortage and drift along until retirement. I met many an old duffer who turned up for work impeccably dressed, punctual to the minute, who did just enough to keep going, who never attempted to excel or even be noticed. Any promotion that came their way was on the "dead man's shoes" principle, plus the fact that the banks were chronically short of good male staff. Men held all the top jobs, and the best a woman could aspire to was to be branch chief cashier in charge of the tills. That was how it was. That was how it had always been.
The branch had about twenty five staff in all. There was the branch manager, an anonymous man who lived in his office and rarely emerged. His assistant manager (not to be confused with the manager's assistant) sat in a raised cubicle overlooking the banking hall. In front of him there were a line of till positions, and to his side and behind him were the staff who processed all the cheques and paying in slips. Other specialist staff occupied areas to the rear of the floor. These included the foreign cashier, the standing orders clerk and the securities officer.
The cashiers sat at their positions with a wide open counter in front of them. There were no security screens (Until a few days after we'd had an armed holdup. More on that later) Everything was as it always had been.
The staff had to be signed in before nine. There was work to be done before the doors opened at 10.00. At 3.30 the doors shut and there was a rush to get everything done before we went at five. If we didn't get finished, we stayed. We used to open on Saturday mornings but that ceased soon after I joined.

We now know that the first computers were built and used at Bletchley Park during the war. The first company to use a computer was J Lyons & Co in the early 50s. It was called Leo and it took up a huge amount of space, being made of valves and resistors. The banks started using computers by about 1965 and so I joined the bank at the dawn of the computer age. In time I would join the team that fed the machine, but first I had to learn a few skills.

The junior staff were responsible for the filing of the customer's cheques each morning. Then they compiled the bank statements that were sent to the customers. Every statement that went to the customer included all his cheques sorted into the order they appeared on the statement. This was time consuming but a useful service. The banks stopped sending cheques with the statement many many years ago. You now have to fight to get your old cheques back.

It's useful at this point to understand how the banking system worked back then. For a start, it's important to know that it was a cash based economy. Everyone was paid in cash. Very few people had a bank account. Even fewer people had the new fangled Barclaycard.
It was cash, cash, cash.
The coinage was big and bulky. Paper money was in ten shilling (50p), one pound, five pound and very rarely ten pound denominations.
Credit was hard to come by. There was hire purchase (shunned by the older generation), and Provident cheques, that could only be spent in certain shops. My mum used Provident cheques to pay for seasonal items like school uniforms and Christmas presents. She'd borrow, say, twenty pounds, get a cheque that could be used in certain local shops, and pay it back at a pound a week over twenty one weeks.

Banks did not lend money to just anyone. Banks were places where you put your money for safe keeping. The bank manager's role was to look after your money and make sure you didn't overspend. If he thought that you were spending more than you earned, he would call you into the office for a chat. If he thought you were a good risk, he might be persuaded to advance you some money against your future earnings. It was always your money that you borrowed. You had to have some money in order to open an account. You opened an account and some time later you'd get a cheque book. Your account was watched carefully to see you didn't go astray.

Sometime during the early 1970s it began to change. Suddenly the bank manager was your friend. You needed some money? Talk to your bank manager. Debt was encouraged. Only it isn't called debt. It's called credit.
During the 1980s I'd walk past banks that advertised the "products" they had on offer inside.
To me a product was something that was a physical entity that had been manufactured, not a savings scheme that promised a bonus upon maturity. The banks had changed from safe places to keep your money, to retail outlets offering bonuses for people with money so that they can lend that money to people who had none, and making profits on the commission.

But in the 1960 it was a cash economy. Everyone paid by cash or cheque. As I said, the cash was bulky and it had to be banked somewhere. Banks had branches in every small village, town, shopping arcade, and market. They issued their customers with leather wallets that could be deposited in the night safe in the wall of the bank. Each morning the cashiers would open the wallets, and count the cash before the branch opened its doors. The amount of cash in circulation was staggering. About 90% of all retail business was paid for in cash. And the local bank needed staff to count the stuff.
Almost all wages were paid in cash. Each Thursday the local firms would telephone a breakdown of the cash they needed for the payroll, broken down to the exact number of pennies and halfpennies. The Chief Cashier would need to make enough cash available for the area's payroll needs, and would order coin and notes from the Bullion Department.
Each week the Bullion van would park outside the bank and we'd help the delivery drivers carry the coin into the bank and down into the vaults. A bag of silver coin weighs about 28lb (from memory) and it was just possible to carry four if you could grip the bags. We had a lot of coin and notes delivered each week.
One week a heavy hessian sack dropped onto the pavement in front of me. I'd been carrying coin and wondered if I should pick it up. There was no-one else around so I picked it up and carried it into the vault. When the van had gone it was opened.
There was £50,000 in new £1and £5 notes in the sack.
At that time my salary was £370 a year, with an extra £150 for working in the London area.
£520 a year.
£10 a week.

The Summer of Love

2010-02-09T21:06:00.002Z

Ah yes, 1967. By July I'd had enough of school and they'd had enough of me. I managed to get my summer job back at Ffyffes Bananas, and resisted any questions about careers etc. My school friends Andrew Brazier and Dave O'Callaghan both applied for jobs in the bank, so for no other reason than "why not?", I applied too.
The education system of the mid sixties was very stratified. I took and passed my 11 plus exam and went to grammar school. After the first year's internal exams, the brightest 25% were put into an elite stream, who then went on to take their O level exams at the end of the 4th year, rather than the fifth. This meant that the brightest ones had taken their A levels and were on their way to University by the time they were 17. I'm a big fan of streaming pupils according to their ability. If you keep the bright ones in with the duffers, they get dragged down and never achieve their potential.
By some fluke I found myself in the A stream in the second year, and from then on I struggled to keep up. I managed to pass five O levels at the end of the fourth year, but this wasn't enough to get a place in the sixth form, so I stayed another year in the upper fifth, passed another O level and called it a day.
My grammar school was all male. There was a girls school next door and we'd spend the breaktimes shouting obscenities through the fence. My experience of girls was nil when I left school. I could, however, blush for England. I was a lanky spotty youth who was awkward, always in trouble for having long hair, and a dreamer. I'd just learnt how to play the guitar and it was my consuming passion.
So why did I opt for a career in the bank?
My parents had both passed their 11 plus exams, but grammar schools were fee paying in the 1930s, so they couldn't go. My father had to go out to work at the age of 14, and there was a lot of pressure from my parents to get a proper job. Playing music was not a proper job, despite the fortunes that could be made then.
The careers that were open to grammar school educated teenagers with average O level results were, commerce, banking or the civil service. I answered three adverts in the paper and went for interviews.
The first was at Thomas Cook. It was a grim place. I was interviewed by two grim people. They asked me why I wanted to work for them. They told me that whistling wasn't allowed in the corridors, and that all male staff had to wear grey suits with either white or grey shirts. And a plain tie.
And this was the summer of love.Kaftans, flowers in your hair, cowbells as necklaces.

My next interview was with the civil service. I can't remember much about it. Basically, if you turned up every day, stayed out of trouble and turned in an above mediocre performance, you had a job for life. The only sacking offence was consistent lateness.
Next.

My next interview was with the Westminster Bank. It was like the other two, but paid better.

And so it was, that on September 29th 1967, I turned up for work at the Chiswick High Road branch of the Westminster Bank.

Welcome to the rest of your life. As if.

Way back when

2010-02-07T20:25:00.006Z

Welcome to my new "been there done that" blog. As I get older and increasingly grumpy, I start to sound like my old man, with one exception- he left school at 14 and worked delivering coal in 56lb sacks, before getting a job on the Great Western Railway, just prior to nationalisation in 1947. He stayed with the railway all his working life, progressing from cleaner to fireman and then to engine driver. He was driving High Speed Trains when he contacted cancer and died in 1984. His story is typical, where a man would join a company and stay there throughout his working life.

Not today. And not in my case.

I can remember a familiar conversation when I was a boy. "And what are you going to be when you grow up?" I didn't know. I still don't. My father was adamant that I shouldn't join the railway and be an engine driver. I was a grammar school boy and more was expected of me. I had to get a proper job. But what job?

My first introduction to the world of work was in Hayle, Cornwall as a boy aged about ten. There was a farm next to our estate (council housing estate,that is) and one year my mother and a load of local women were offered work picking potatoes. Being the eldest, I was brought along as well. It wasn't hard work. The farmer drove his tractor fitted with a sort of pronged wheel device down the field, and lifted the potatoes. We then bent down and picked the potatoes and placed them in boxes. We had to move quickly because he'd turn around and lift the next row within a minute or two. I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed the challenge of picking every potato before the farmer returned. My friends were happier mucking about and throwing stones, but I got stuck in. At the end of the day I received 2/6d (12 1/2p), except that my mother took it to help with the housekeeping. My stone throwing friends also got 2/6d.

A few years later we lived in London, just off Ladbroke Grove. This was in late1962 and there were no supermarkets, just small grocers and corner shops. My mother heard that the local grocer needed someone to stack shelves so I went to work there after school. I recall seeing a pack of Persil on the store room shelf. It was out of date because it had the slogan "Persil 62- new as 1962". It boasted better cleaning power than ever before and promised that your whites would be whiter than white. Nothing changes, only the label.
The grocer also had a milk round, so I worked the round for a while. I was 14 and used to operate the milk float along Ladbroke Grove and the side streets in the early morning. It had a tiller with a button to switch on the motor. I'd park it on the side of the road and load up my 12 bottle milk crate and deliver milk to the various blocks of flats, running up and down the stairs. The crate was heavy and the stairs were steep, and some of the old tenements opposite Kensal Green gasworks were dark and smelly, without lighting on the stairs. I'd also have to go out on a Saturday morning and collect the money. I think I earned about 5shillings a week and it went into the family housekeeping fund.

Some time later I got a job in an off-licence on Harrow Road, near the junction with Elgin Avenue. I'd have to fill the shelves, help with the deliveries into the shop, and deliver wines and beers to customers in the area. I was 15 and too young to serve the customers, but it was a challenge to keep the bins filled, bottles dusted and faced up. Working at the off-licence cured me of Christmas, as I worked there one Christmas Day, and it was just another day. I've disliked Christmas ever since.

My only other job as a student was when I worked at Ffyffes Bananas, back when the bananas were imported on stalks and ripened and cut to order. This was in 1966/7. The process was very labout intensive. I did various jobs, loading wooden banana boxes on to a conveyor, ready for the cutters to fill them, unloading railway wagons packed full of green bananas, hooking them via chains to the overhead conveyor belt that wound around the factory. Another job involved stripping the paper from the banana bunches as they passed. If you were lucky, you could catch the paper just right and debag the bunch with one movement, If you were unlucky, you got green banana skin under your fingernails and that hurt. The belt moved very quickly and you soon found yourself waist deep in paper and plastic. Woe betide if there was a fire. There was no way out. When the bananas were unloaded, you'd bail up the paper and plastic, and then you'd discover how many spiders and cockroaches had made their journey across the Atlantic. The mostly West Indian workforce didn't worry about the big green hairy spiders with big feet. Tree spiders are harmless. Not so the little Black Widow spiders, or the occasional snake that had survived the journey. Every now and then you'd hear a commotion as they dealt with the intruder.
I learned a lot about worker relations at this job. We had no rights. There's the door and there were plenty more looking for work. Sick pay? None. Holiday pay? Just the basic wage. I asked the Jamaicans where they went for their holidays. Nowhere. No-one could afford holidays abroad and the sight of a black face or body on an English beach was a rarity. I only ever met one black person in the thirteen tears I lived in Cornwall.
I learned a lot about race relations. This was only a few years after the Notting Hill race riots that took place about a mile away from where I lived. I was a hick from the sticks so I emphasised with the black immigrants and tried to treat them as equals. Whether they noticed or reciprocated I don't know, but I was very surprised to hear the black West Indians call the black Africans highly racist and discriminatory names. The racism was between black and black. The Jamaicans called the Nigerians monkeys who didn't know how to use a toilet properly and would make monkey noises at them. I learned that racism has nothing to do with skin colour, and I believe that still holds true today.
In the summer of 1967 I got a holiday job at Fffyffes, this time in the office. I had to record the sales figures do other admin jobs. I'd arrive at work at 8.00 and be done by 9.30. I never did learn how to make a job last all day. I was bored, but I was being paid 2/6d an hour, which was better than the 2/6d a day I earned picking potatoes. That was £1 a day, £5 a week. £250 a year. And all the bananas you could eat. I ate a lot. I mean a lot. Five or six very ripe speckled bananas at a time. All day, every day. It was almost twenty years before I ate another. This was the "Summer of Love" and I'd just learned to play the guitar. My head was full of hippy music.

I'd taken my GCE O levels in 1966 and passed five. I still didn't know what I wanted to do, so did nothing. Five O levels was only average that year, so my half hearted attempt to gain a sixth form place was turned down. I decided to join the upper fifth and take some more O levels. One year later and I'd gained an O level in English Literature and an improved grade in German to go with my other passes, (French, English language, Geography, Latin and German) so I now had six O levels and no desire to continue my education. I was bored. I'd had enough, and my school had had enough of me. Not quite rebellious, just a pain. A long haired spotty dreamer.

So the world of work awaited me. What would I do?