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...