Pulling it all together

It's fast approaching the end of 2019, seven years since my last post. So what have I been doing?
On the job front- not a lot. I retired from paid work in 2015 following a number of health issues and now keep myself busy by writing books.
As of now I have five in print with another available on Kindle and at least two more in preparation.

The Kindle book largely consists of collating the posts on this blog, sorting them out into date order and bringing my story up to date. If you want a study of the changing nature of work over the last half century- this one is for you.

I make no secret that my main interest has been my music and I've written three books that tell of my own attempts to make music, the bands that I was in, the bands that I saw playing live, and the music that influenced me, from 1957 up to 2018. It's divided into three parts.

Part one covers my early life up to 1974. It's called 'Too Young for Rock & Roll' ( I was 7 when Elvis hit the charts)
Part two starts in 1974 and ends in 1984. It's the story of the two bands that I played in- Left Hand Drive and pop covers band Conspiracy. It's called 'Too Old for Punk',  In 1977 I was 27 and more interested in Steely Dan than the Sex Pistols- I'd been there and done that.
Part three begins in the late 1980s and brings the story up to date. It's called 'Forever Changing'.

So what is the title of my book about the world of work?

'The Things I did for Money.'
Available on Kindle and maybe in print sometime soon.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07S94VVM8/

Fee earners

I've been working for a firm of solicitors for the last six and a half years. I'm amazed to realise that this is possibly the longest I've worked for one firm. Mind you, in that time I've had time off work to go on tour with various bands, up to a month or six weeks at a time, and I was also off sick having treatment for leukaemia for over a year. So it's not six years at all.

I'm now working part time in an admin role. It's a small office with just a handful of staff. Broadly speaking the staff can be divided into fee earners and support staff. Our business is selling advice. Buying a house, getting a divorce, making a will, sorting out a deceased loved one's estate all require specialist knowledge that the ordinary individual would not know or understand. We provide a service to the public where we act for people using our knowledge and training and years of experience.
We charge for this. Sometimes we can quote a price for the work based on our experience of how long/complicated the case may be. Other times we cannot, but as we charge by the hour we can tell teh client the hourly rate and give a rough estimate/ball park figure. The customer/client is free to accept or reject our estimate. He is free to instruct whoever he/she likes. That's how the market works.

Paying more does not guarantee a better job. I read somewhere that retailers find the the best selling item is the second cheapest. The cheapest can't be any good the customer thinks, so plumps for the second cheapest. Some items, namely luxury cars, are stuffed full of gadgets that are there purely to justify the outrageous price tag. Why can't I buy a car with wind up windows any more? Whay can't I buy a car without a radio? Or a heater? Thirty/forty years ago cars were very basic and consequently cheaper.

Where was I?
Our firm's fee earners are supported by the admin staff. Put bluntly, they earn the money while we cost money. My job is to enable the fee earners to earn money (and thereby pay my wages). Some costs are inevitable. Premises, heating, lighting. Our computer system is getting old but it works. Our accounts system is basic but it does the job. Our telephone system is about ten years old but it works. We don't spend money unwisely. Our clients very rarely comment about the decor. One woman did once, but soon shut up when I said that we'd have to increase our fees to decorate the building to her satisfaction. Clients keep returning. They don't have to. There are plenty of firms out there who could do a similar job, some can do it cheaper. But our clients keep coming back..why?

They get good service. We remember their names. I had a client come through the door to say their daughter wanted us to act in a house sale and purchase. When they mentioned the name I remembered their daughter's name and where she lived. They were surprised I could remember but we do. It's because we see our clients in person. We get to know them. Sometimes we're a shoulder to cry on. Sometimes we lose. One client was frustrated at the apparent lack of progress and took his file elsewhere. A few months later he called in to apologise. The new solicitor was having the same problems as we had. Perhaps his case was unwinnable?

Throughout all this I'm aware that I don't earn the fees. I can help make the environment better for the fee earner. I can be helpful and courteous towards the clients. I can spend the firms' money wisely.

Now we come to the bigger picture. The government doesn't earn the money that keeps the country solvent. Businesses do. Individuals do. Fee earners do. They pay the taxes that the government spends.
The excellent Tom Paine blog had this post a few months ago:
http://www.thelastditch.org/lastditch/2011/11/keep-it-up-brothers-and-sisters.html

I urge you to read it, especially the comments

Belt up

Every now and then I'm speaking to someone or watching the TV and something triggers a memory. I honestly thought I'd written down every job I'd done, but no, there's more.
I worked in two different belt factories over the years. Both were temp jobs, lasting just a few days while the firm got a large order out. Both were in small factories employing just a few staff.
The first was in Corby. I had to fix the metal end to the leather belt, at the other end to the buckle. It involved placing the end of the belt into a machine that planed the leather to the correct thickness so that the metal end could be fixed. I think I used to tack it on, but it was a long time ago.
Another time I worked in a leather belt factory in a tiny village deep in rural Northamptonshire. This time I had to use a machine to stamp out the belt blanks from leather hides. It was more complicated than it seemed because you had to judge the distance between the cuts. To far apart and you'd waste leather, to close together and the belt sides wouldn't be perpendicular and would fail quality control. It was fun using the huge press that cut through the leather so cleanly. I shudder to think what might happen if one's finger was trapped. It was impossible because of the many safety gates and other features on the machine, and no, I didn't try...

Both the firms were producing quality leather belts for sale in UK shops. I think I recall seeing M&S and TopShop labels on the finished belts. Are these firms still in existence? Is it still possible for a small local business to produce a quality product to be sold on the High Street, or have they succumbed to the Chinese invasion?

I enjoyed my time working in a different environment. Most temp jobs are for a day or two, and you never go back. I haven't been to that village since then. There's a busy dual carriageway that takes the traffic from one motorway to another and the sound of traffic is hardly heard there now.

Briwax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.