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.

Job Hunting

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?

Superdrug

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

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

Retail but not therapy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.