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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:05 AM  
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#11
BucksBugsy
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Originally Posted by mick View Post
As a 16 year old in the 5th form at grammar school in York I knew that I was never heading for 6th form and A levels let alone university. Very few of my peers went to university in those days.

We did however have dedicated careers masters and one day in June 1962 he said to me "xxxxxxxxxxxx you're good at maths and English - how do you fancy being a Quantity Surveyor?" I responded by asking what a QS did so he sent me off to a QS firm in York for the day to learn all about it. Imagine accountancy but counting bricks instead of balance sheets.

It transpired that Shepherds (a national but York based contractor) would be advertising for a trainee QS so I got in before the formal announcement and the rest is history. I only got three O levels in the days when you passed or failed but English and Maths were in there.

I worked for 53 years always in the private sector either contractor based, client side or as a partner in private practice. Also saw my share of bankruptcies and the like. Became FRICS (Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) when I was 35.

The methods of procurement in construction developed over the 50 odd years probably putting more risk on the contractors. Standard building contracts certainly evolved over the years. Standard 50 page JCT contracts which are supposed to be in a format agreed across the industry didn't stop client's lawyers preparing 100 pages of amendments.

I recall early technology producing Bills of Quantities on sheets of paper the size of a broadsheet newspaper. In my own practice in 1988 we had digitisers which allowed us to measure things digitally and converting dimensions to volumes and areas just by clicking on a dot.

How I miss the days of face to face confrontations on building sites telling 25 stone groundworkers that I wasn't paying their extortionate claims for extra costs. No hiding behind a keyboard then and acting tough.

Happy days

Mick
Ok so you top trumped me Mick I'm a mere 42 years in the career.

I hope when I do decide to retire I will be welcome in the Dibb Retirement Club"
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:08 AM  
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Originally Posted by EssexSue View Post
I was a Saturday in Marks and Spencer's. Each counter had its own till so we spent a lot of time doing nothing. But we had to look busy so had to tidy the counters and even take clothes out of bags and refold them.
Thank you for the reminder - I need to go and buy some percy pig sweets for my son
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:10 AM  
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SussexFamily
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Originally Posted by mick View Post
As a 16 year old in the 5th form at grammar school in York I knew that I was never heading for 6th form and A levels let alone university. Very few of my peers went to university in those days.

We did however have dedicated careers masters and one day in June 1962 he said to me "xxxxxxxxxxxx you're good at maths and English - how do you fancy being a Quantity Surveyor?" I responded by asking what a QS did so he sent me off to a QS firm in York for the day to learn all about it. Imagine accountancy but counting bricks instead of balance sheets.

It transpired that Shepherds (a national but York based contractor) would be advertising for a trainee QS so I got in before the formal announcement and the rest is history. I only got three O levels in the days when you passed or failed but English and Maths were in there.

I worked for 53 years always in the private sector either contractor based, client side or as a partner in private practice. Also saw my share of bankruptcies and the like. Became FRICS (Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) when I was 35.

The methods of procurement in construction developed over the 50 odd years probably putting more risk on the contractors. Standard building contracts certainly evolved over the years. Standard 50 page JCT contracts which are supposed to be in a format agreed across the industry didn't stop client's lawyers preparing 100 pages of amendments.

I recall early technology producing Bills of Quantities on sheets of paper the size of a broadsheet newspaper. In my own practice in 1988 we had digitisers which allowed us to measure things digitally and converting dimensions to volumes and areas just by clicking on a dot.

How I miss the days of face to face confrontations on building sites telling 25 stone groundworkers that I wasn't paying their extortionate claims for extra costs. No hiding behind a keyboard then and acting tough.

Happy days

Mick
Good work Mick!
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:14 AM  
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wobblywibbly
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Originally Posted by Trouble3 View Post
Most of my "career" was IT/Telecoms based, so like you I saw massive changes very quickly.

I was one of the first British Rail employees to get Windows back in the day.
where did you work for BR? I started in BR as a Telecommunication apprentice been in rail until about 5 weeks ago when I stated working in Nuclear power
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:31 AM  
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Originally Posted by BerkshireBugsy View Post
Although some of my PC experience pre-dates windows do you remember windows 1.0? Seemed so advanced back then !
Afraid I don't remember Windows versions, but going from DOS, SuperCalc & WinWord to Windows was amazing. I felt so lucky to be one of the first trialers... it's also how I moved into IT in the end.

Originally Posted by wobblywibbly View Post
where did you work for BR? I started in BR as a Telecommunication apprentice been in rail until about 5 weeks ago when I stated working in Nuclear power
I was in Reading Signalling Project Group in 1992(?). Wasn't that many years before "the end", i.e. Privatisation. We became Interlogic, then AdTranz. I still miss the days of being a BR employee.
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:32 AM  
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I started in IT in 1988.

I worked for Peugeot, the specification cards for the cards were printed on heavy card and had punch holes. Those cards would go with the car around the manufacturing track and be put into a reader that would read the holes.
Now they use RFID (radio frequency identification - those little silver strips you sometimes see).

All the reports about the business were physically printed. As part of my job I would feed 4 laser printers with boxes of A4. All night. These printers were the size of an average car and could print quicker than you could load them up. When the reports were printed they needed to be physically(manually) split and bagged up for delivery. The larger reports were over 8 inches thick and needed to be bound on a rapid glue machine to give them a spine. A set of drivers picked up the reports and drove them across Coventry and delivered them to a number of factory units.
Now it would be emails and PDF's.

The parts catalogue used to be produced once a week on microfiche for 800 dealers. A whole new set would be sent out every week. The microfiche were on film and were processed like photos by a machine that used some nasty chemicals. That machine broke frequently, I had the job one night of going to a basement in Birmingham to use another machine. I didn't leave the room for 8 hours, when I did I must have been high as a kite.
Now it's all online databases and access to all technical documentation is PDF.
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:33 AM  
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I worked for a bank for 20 years before I retrained and became a healthcare professional.

I was the 4th generation in my family to work for the same bank and the changes were huge, even for my short stint. As a cashier, I would process the customer’s transaction at the till, then twice more in back office processes. It’s now done once at the till which makes much more sense.

My parents and grandparents would hand write the transactions in ledgers which looked beautiful, but only if you had neat writing! Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that in my day as I wouldn’t have lasted very long.
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:34 AM  
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I remember -in my mainframe days - the company purchased an early IBM personal computer. I saw this sitting on a desk and thinking "this can only be trouble" and I was right !

Years later the performance of even a basic PC outstrips the mainframes i used to work on.
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:44 AM  
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I started in IT in the 90s, working support for Compuserve, helping people get connected with dial-up modems.

After that I was in an office doing lots of general IT. Token-ring networks back then. Eventually we got permanant internet and each PC had its own, public, IP address!

Since about 2000 I've been a software engineer. Worked on many things that have come and gone in that time that some of the younger members of my team have never heard of. Coldfusion, or classic ASP for example.

These days its all Microservices, Cloud and Kubernetes. Couldn't even have imagined those things when I started.
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Old 30 Oct 20, 11:57 AM  
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I have had 2 careers and a job, spanning 43 years. At the time of leaving School, they were saving up to buy their very first Computer.

Career one.
I joined the Army in 1977, 12 to a room for my first 2 and a half years as I trained to be a Helicopter technician at Arborfield, then Wallop with a mere 8 to a room. I was paraded and inspected most days before training commenced. Room inspections twice a week, pay parade where we lined up, marched in, saluted, were given pay in cash in an envelope, then marched out. All documentation was in books and ledgers including that relating to aircraft.
I served 12 years until 1989, when pay was place in your bank, aircraft documentation was still on paper, with a carbonated copy of some documents torn off and forwarded somewhere. Magnetic chip samples and oil samples from engines and gearboxes were posted to Farnborough for ‘urgent’ analysis. Aircraft publications had graduated from ‘volumes of paper’ to .. the same volumes backed up by Microfiche (how leading edge). By then I was a Sgt, sick of digging holes several times a year and roughing it in a field for weeks whilst pretending I was an infantryman and signed off. I had passed my Artificer Board for Staff Sgt, but no longer wanted to be in Germany. Time to go so I applied for the Police, taking my accumulated Army Pension with me. By this time, I had swum a lot, played a lot of good level Waterpolo, Learned to drive, passed the All Arms Commando Course and.. had a fair old Drinking Habit. I was earning 15k in Germany.

Career 2. I joined the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary in January of 1989.. at 10k, where I remained for the next 22 years until enforced compulsory retirement for all Officers below Chief Supt at Pension high water. (Remember I had carried some across). This occurred in the years after Labour had proudly spent all the money. It was called ‘regulation A19’ and only 5 forces used it (including mine).
In those 22 years, We went from paper and message switching to computers around 1994, when we were promised an impending ‘paper free’ workplace. Strangely, we still committed nearly everything to paper until the day I left in 2010. (Just in case). Within 6 months of joining, I realised having had supervisory status in the Army and then starting again, that I did not like being responsible for the errors of others and resolved never to seek promotion (you self promote through a multi guess exam, a Chrystal maze acting assessment and then finally a board where finally, they may (or may not ) judge you on your abilities and merits). I dug in and chased the overtime, lots of overtime. I was regularly in the top dozen in the Force as I often travelled hundreds of miles, accruing that overtime. I joined the PSU’s (riot police to the uninitiated), was CBRN trained (Chemical warfare trained to the uninitiated, as in the Novochuk incident in Salisbury). When eventually joining CID, I even kept up the above training and in addition volunteered for every uniformed duty that involved.. overtime. My CID colleagues were ashamed of me, LOL.
CID was great, demanding, paper intensive and in a rural Station (Camborne) often very pressurised. Computers were however crucially important as I learned the wonders of cut and paste, saving good material for greater use, researching the intelligence screens etc etc.. I loved it! Good suits, plenty of money and lots of Kudos without any great responsibility for the actions of others. Ten years ago when I retired, I was regularly taking 50k per annum. What could go wrong! ... Enforced retirement at a time when Civilian jobs were also being shed was what went wrong and thus, there were no vacancies for retiring Officers as younger, civilian staff were prioritised in a tier type system when applying for anything.. suddenly I was out the door at 50, with a half pension and a 6 figure commutation in the bank. I cleared the mortgage and had a look around. I should add that in the 5 years between my retirement and reaching 55 when my Pension became index linked, the Police did not have a Pensionable pay rise. On 55, my Pension leapt 13% , so I won and they lost.. in fact the general public lost because 303 of the most skilled, experienced and qualified Officers in the Force were shamelessly booted out. My former colleagues report that it took many years to replace our skill bases.

I became a self employed gardener/decker/patio builder/ tiler/decorator/ loft boarder.. any thing that I felt I had the skills to do. Work was easy to come by, but I was conscious of boredom, advancing age, no sickness net and no further pension accumulation. I did my own books with ease (because by now it was all Internet based and I had built up reasonable practitioner skills.

One day whilst working in a garden, I received a phone call from G4s. ‘You are a retired D.C. Do you want to work at Bulford with the SIB dep not of the Military Police on a historic child disappearance that occurred in Schloss Neuhaus in 1981?’Answer.. ‘Yes please’. I remembered the disappearance of Katrice Lee on 28 November 1981 on her 2nd birthday and was honoured to be involved in an attempt to give her poor family answers. Yes the job was 200 miles away (drive up at 0400 on a Monday, rent accommodation and drive home on Friday afternoon, but it was a ‘real’ job for which I had the skills. 13 of us were taken on and all had quit within a year. We never felt welcomed. The SIB method of doing things was, despite their protestations, not compatible with the Civilian Police Model. I was by far the least experienced in Major Crime Investigation and listened intently to my peers, who each had decades of experience in this area. They were at the top of their game.. and soon left. On top of this, my contract was for 40 hrs only and I was not allowed to ‘bank’ hours. The SIB took 2 weeks at Easter, 2 and a half weeks off at Summer, 2 and a half at Christmas etc. They were paid for these leaves, I clearly was not, yet had to maintain Rental, Council Tax, Electricity and other bills throughout. Whilst I could offset against tax, by the end of the financial year, I had £6500 of tax offsets that I couldn’t use as I was down to no tax already on that employment. Time to go.

I got a job (not career) with an NHS Security Team at a local Hospital within a month and have been there 7.5 years. It is a 24 hour job with Shift enhancements, weekend enhancements, lots of annual leave (38 days at the moment with shift enhancements if taking), incredibly generous sickness allowance (6 months full, 6 months half including enhancements) and a cracking pension. We were sold to an Outsourcing Company 6 years ago, but TUPE has been fairly honoured by them.
Whilst at 60, I have to annually asses my degradation through years and will retire the moment I feel I cannot still do it, I am fine right now. (We get in scuffles and restraint situations with patients who are often decades younger than me). This is not a career. If I wanted to advance, I would have to sign away my NHS employment conditions and join the ‘Company’. If I was made a manager, I would still earn an awful lot less than I do now... and lose sickness rights, enhancements, annual leave and Pensions. I suppose that in a strange, inverse way, I am in golden handcuffs!

Long, meandering, sometimes dull, but never unemployment or a benefit of any kind other than child benefit. I hope to make it to 66 years and 1 month, by which time I can add a 13 year NHS Pension and a SERPS paid up State Pension to my Police one! Here’s hoping.

Computers? . self taught and never educated to improve. I had to learn it all myself by trial and error. I still do not even have a ‘computer passport’. I wish that I had though. I feel that I have really missed out. I do not possess the generic computer skills needed to work in an organisation other than the Police.
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2005 onwards.. lots of times!

Index of all my Trip and Pretrip reports..https://www.thedibb.co.uk/forums/sho...6#post15662196

Edited at 01:35 PM.
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