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.

Modulus eleven

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But exactly the same principle.

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

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

Proofreading? No problem.

Batch data entry? Easy peasy.

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

Machine skills

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Speed and accuracy. Where have I heard that before?

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

And one day, cash will go as well.

School days.

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

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

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

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

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

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