White and Nerdy

Microswift Calc was a powerful spreadsheet for the C64, not freeware, it cost $7.99 at K-Mart and was worth every cent as it was almost a complete clone of Lotus 123 and had all the functions we needed for our home budget tracking sheet aptly named "Houseplan"

Microswift Calc evolved into Swiftcalc from Timeworks and became GEOS compatible, I bought Swiftcalc to try with my GEOS setup and it was a dog, looked pretty, but was slow and painful.

Houseplan was honed and converted over the years to different formats, "As Easy As" a clone of Lotus 123, Borland's QuattroPro and finally Microsoft Excel.

It is still being used today as an expenditure/tax planning tool.

Reality and the Cold light of Day

The numbers did not fit in the spreadsheet that well, the home finances spreadsheet at the time was run on the trusty Commodore 64, a program called Microswift Calc. In addition, a few people in the office gave me their advice about the "extras" that were involved when buying a house.

The expected mortgage interest rate in Canada was hovering around 8% and that would be a monthly amount of $1200 for what Remax Dave was proposing. The reality setting in was that, regardless of what the banks or trust companies would lend, we could only rationally borrow about two thirds to keep at around our current rent position.

So, the number was $100,000.00 which looks very big if you add those two zeroes. In reality it seemed much huger, which until right now I did not realize was a valid word.

The phone call (from the one central office phone) to Remax Dave was a little one sided, with the realtor being very quiet about the decision, he was reluctant and encouraged me to reconsider as "there was little out there at that price level" but I stood my ground and asked him to find options.

The deposit at the reduced level, was still an issue, but things would work out, like they do.

Helter Skelter

Dowty was paying me a salary of $34000 a year, which from my UK level of a year earlier was about thirty percent higher than the eleven thousand pounds that APPH paid. The subtle differences were not quite apparent to me at the time, but my time at APPH had given me four weeks paid vacation, whereas Dowty was two (I will have to check, it may have been less) and in addition my mortgage in the UK was about half what the rent was.

So, we felt squeezed.

Remax Dave laid out his battle plan on our $270 auction table, a table that became synonymous with real estate deals over the next twenty or more years. This however, was number one in Canada and it felt very different than anything we had experienced.

I could smell the fear.

The lowdown, was that we would have to bare our financial souls to see if we qualified for a bank mortgage, which was probably unlikely, so the alternate would be a Trust Company mortgage, brokered through a mysterious third party. The insignificant detail that we did not have enough for a deposit was greeted with the knowing look of a man who could work the system.

The $34k salary indicated that we could qualify for a $155k mortgage, so with 5% down we would be looking for an eight thousand deposit, plus legal fees, plus "other" fees so about ten thousand would do it.

That was about eight thousand more than we had.

And so it began.

Why pay rent when you can Owe.

The letter from our landlords read that as from November the 1st the rent was going up, relatively they were spiking the rents by $60 a month, which worked out around the eight percent mark, it was a shocker and was taking our monthly rent into the $800+ zone. It was also somewhat amusing that our landlords official title was "The Shelter Housing Corporation of Canada" and it felt like we had been given a deftly worded eviction notice as we had already been quite grumbly about the level.

Boiling a frog.

I don't know if the reaction was immediate, but it was reasonably quick and helped along somewhat by a mysterious advert in the rentals classified section of the Ajax free newspaper. The tagline being "Why rent when you can Own?" which was really groundbait from the local Remax Office, tempting the little fishes into the housing pond.

I phoned the number and was passed to Dave, a pleasant enough chap, let's call him Remax Dave.

Remax Dave asked a few pertinent questions and wondered if he could visit, I explained that the missus was at work and would not get home until later, he added an hour on and said he would be over, see you soon.

Karen arrived home from her long commute and I dropped the news that we would have shark infested waters before settling down to telly that night, she gave me one of those looks and we sat on our hands until the man arrived.

Three more dollars

Those early days of Canada, seem like a lifetime ago now, yet not even half a lifetime ago (as of writing) - what was I doing?

Oh yes, still have to dig out some pictures of Lynn and Graham and the first visit.

The Minebuster

We don't usually fall for this flagrant commercialism but they must have caught us at a weak moment after we exited the Great Canadian Minebuster, extracting three or four bucks that could have been used in much better ways.

However, there we are, being tourists, enjoying the ride, adrenalin soon to be replaced by a headache.

The Circuit

The year was advancing, as they do, and the summer of 1988 had been a sizzler.

The season tickets for Canada's Wonderland had been used frequently, in fact earlier in the year (May 1988) we witnessed them pulling a young man out of the main pool, under the Victoria Falls. It was a tragic drowning and we had no idea of the circumstances, although it was clear that there were a lot of warning signs around the falls, strangely enough, in a detached sort of way it made the day more interesting.

The late summer visitation of Graham and Lynn from the UK had been a lot of fun, once again we visited the theme park, in fact, after eight months in Canada we became tourists all over again as we "did the circuit" of Toronto, Ontario Place, Niagara and all the other little corners of our new land. The highlight being a helicopter ride above Niagara Falls, obligatory Maid of the Mist voyage and fun at the Skylon tower.

I now need to dig out some photo's of that visit, will be back shortly...

Bob Griffiths

Bob was another unforgettable character stitched forever onto my tapestry of stressmen. In later years at Dowty I would have many, many moments involving Bob and as I dropped the last picture onto the blog it seems right to fast forward a little to talk about this entertaining guy.

The thing about Bob was that he loved to tell a story, or three, and most of the time would not respond to visual or physical cues that the victim/listener had become saturated and needed to move on with his day. The stress office was full of people who would back away from Bob, which was not a successful tactic as he would follow until any form of escape route was blocked, he had a story and once initiated, completion was the only viable option.

You could feel your eyes glaze over, you could see Bob, his coffee cup at three degrees off the azimuth and drips of the beverage around his feet, you knew that whatever topic triggered the anecdote, the story had a life of it's own, usually an unrelated subject completely.

"I told them, and you know, they wouldn't listen"

Bob had an arsenal of stories relating to every aspect of stress analysis, usually involving his disagreements with accepted procedures and methods, almost always punctuated with that line.

I miss the man because he was a character, perhaps somewhat of a nuisance at times, but nevertheless an office oddity that made the day interesting, not necessarily because of his stories, but because of the opportunities to "attach" him to an unwilling victim, or occasionally, applying the mercy rule and saving a victim by ringing the communal office telephone and saying "it's for you".

Or sit back and watch them dangle..

Office Life 3

Grant Minnes, our performance guy and secret professional squash player, at the front of the bus on the "other side" of the divider next to the outside windows. I was helping him with some predictions and he assumed I knew what I was doing, which I didn't, of course I knew that I didn't know my arse from my elbow and that just led to more of the pink stuff.

In the background, Bob Griffiths (standing) is talking to Jim Collins, I think my next blog will be dedicated to the man.

Money, so they say...

In retrospect, 1988 was a bad year in terms of money management, even though we had some cash put aside there was still a tremendous and uncontrollable desire to keep digging the debt deeper, old habits die hard as they say.

I had paid off the Barclaycard, but merely replaced that with Canadian credit cards, plural there, in the push to establish ourselves we had embraced the North American way of life, which, coincidently, was very similar to the British one.

I still had a "I want it now" mentality and it was not readily apparent to my tiny brain that, although we had a thousand bucks in the savings account, going out and spending the equivalent on the "never never" was counterproductive.

It was going to get worse before it got better.

Canada's Wonderland

The summer was turning out to be a scorcher, 1988 was shooting by and the grass on Ajax field was dry and parched.

We had bought season passes to a place North of Toronto called Canada's Wonderland, a sort of much bigger Alton Towers, Canada's version of Disneyland. The journey from Ajax involved highway 401 towards Toronto then (hopefully) a short drive up Highway 400 towards Barrie.

It was about an hours drive and we would arrive there early on a Saturday morning, when the carpark was empty, and wear ourselves out on the rollercoaster rides. As years went by they added a major ride, or two, each year, however, two of my favorites were the corkscrew Dragon Fire and the old rollercoaster, the Great Canadian Minebuster which was reported as being the largest and longest wooden coaster in Canada.

It usually gave me an instant headache as it rattled the hell out of my brain.

In the later months of summer, we extended our day into the evening with the free concerts that they presented at their fantastic open air venue, usually reasonable acts like Billy Ocean and Brenda Russell.

It was after that particular concert that we had an accident in the Mustang, we were driving home along some of the back roads (to beat the congestion of the 400 series highways) when I took a right hand corner too fast, the Mustang did not have the handling of the XR2 and I realized that quite quickly as I slid the back end into a curb with a violent thump.

Karen, in a dreamy summer party skirt, stood shivering as the light was fading, I struggled at the side of the road to replace the rear wheel, the tire had been popped from the rim, which was bent, and eventually we were on our way again.

Insert relevant and amusing 1988 Billy Ocean song title here...

Bikes

The diary for 1988 suddenly ends, as diaries sometimes do, it was summer and the weather in Southern Ontario was amazing, even though we were both working we were finding plenty of things to do, after six months we still felt like tourists, as though this was an extended vacation.

Money had become a back burner issue and wasn't such a traditional worry as it had been, and even though we had a seventh floor apartment, a pair of bicycles appeared one day, two reasons for that, first we thought that they would make us fitter and second, they were incredibly cheap.

In the days of my brother Rob and the Prescot Road Club, back in the 1970s, an aluminum cotterless chainset cost a small fortune, and here, in Canada a ten speed racing bike, lightweight with full Shimano chainsets and gears cost a scant ninety-eight dollars. This was back when the exchange rate was around 2.40 dollars to the pound, so the bikes cost about forty quid a piece.

Even though, as time would show, they were never really used, besides a few trips down to Lake Ontario and back, they were very shiny and they were ours.

Carry On

After writing that I was reminded how much I'm not like Terry Thomas...

Readers Wives

Along with a pair of budgies we had bought a hibatchi grill from the local Zellers and I had told people at work that I was going to drag it to Darlington Provincial Park at the weekend and cook some sossidges.

One of the women at work said that she had an unused bag of charcoal in her garage and she would bring it in the following day, which she did, and at lunchtime she came over to my desk and volunteered to help me take it over to the apartment, five minutes away.

It was in the trunk of her car and we drove over to Falby Court, I said I'd be just a minute and she insisted that she would come up with me, so we silently rode up on the elevator to the seventh floor and took the charcoal to it's new home.

What followed was a very uncomfortable five or so minutes with this busty woman, a few years older than me strolling into the apartment and appearing to flaunt herself. I recall it finishing up with a comic, "carry-on" vision of her leaning over the budgie cage and wiggling as I, redfaced and halfway through the front door, managed to end the adventure without spillage.

In the Pink

It may have been the change in diet, the new job or simply the stress of moving from one side of the planet to the other, but in the middle of 1988 I was having problems, pains in my chest woke me up one night, like a tight belt around me.

The diet, well portions were bigger (and so was I) and the first six months in Canada had felt somewhat like a vacation, so drinking was, of course, an issue.

At work I had been thrown into an unknown area of loads generation and was blindly running landing predictions, in addition, Fortran was giving me constant headaches along with the cumbersome file system of the mainframe.

And the coffee, endless coffeeeeee....

After a visit to the doctors and a few tests, I was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer, something that could be cured with a pill and a reduction in certain foods, coffee, alcohol, chocolate cake and working stress.

And the pink stuff:

New Friends

It seemed to me that, although Canada was a vast unexplored place and excitement was just around the corner, the work environment was the "same old, same old" and in some ways, because everyone appeared to take themselves so darn seriously, I had lost something in the wash.

It had only been five months or so since we had been stuck in immigration, waiting on a sausage sandwich, and from those initial weeks of the language barrier and the inability to order even a pair of toasted bacon sandwiches, we had settled down into our new life, and, it was very similar to the old one, but without friends.

This was nothing new for me, I had lost all my school friends when I was ten years old and the family moved from Liverpool to Whiston, I had discarded my Whiston friends when I was sixteen and went off on an adventure to Essex and found new friends, then two or three years later, discarded the new bunch and found some more.

A process I would keep repeating.

The new friends here in Canada would take some work, I knew, to bring them to my way of thinking, the process of making work fun had to begin...

Backup

I was on quite a sprint there to arrive at the Canada years and I realised that I have to back this thing up, something I should have been doing all along.

Blogspot is a great place, somewhere to put down memories that can be shared, and for me, a place where I can organise (somewhat) my thoughts for a so called book I may never write, therefore, if a paper version will ever exist, backups must be done.

The odd thing is that Blogger does not make this an easy task, unless you reformat the blog and save it, so, I'm backing up the only way I know how and it's a bit time consuming.

So, please, check back from time to time as I expect to document the next couple of decades of my working life soon.

Oh, and Happy New Year.