Paint it Pink

In the first hours of arriving at Menasco in January I was taken down a peg or three by Larry Abram who instructed me to move some boxes, the Stress Office was relocating and I was tasked to move some stuff.

I objected, saying "I'm not here to move boxes" which was quickly shot down by the seasoned man.

"You're here to do what you're f##king told!! - you get paid the same rate for moving f##king boxes!"

A lot of what Larry would say was like that, usually the f-word was used for maximum impact.

So, my apprenticeship started and during that first year, I learnt that if someone said "Paint it Pink" and it really didn't make any sense to paint it pink, for a quiet life it was best to paint it pink.

This I realized, was one of the fundamental differences between what I was and what I became.

The career man, someone who wishes to ascend the corporate ladder, would associate pride with the decision making process, a trust from management who bestowed (endless) responsibility on their subordinates and the career man, proud that his responsibilities were growing (even if his salary was not growing).

Yet, it became apparent that the only long term goal of the jobshopper was to earn more money and it really did not matter how that was accomplished, the one thing that was important was that responsibility was the responsibility of the masters, the salaried staff.

And if their decision was to paint it pink, then pink it would be.

If subsequently their decision was to paint it grey, then of course that could also be done.

Whatever color they wanted because as we all knew, if they had the hours...

...we could fix anything.

Captain Aries

The preferred method for obtaining software back in the middle of 1990 was the BBS or Bulletin Board System and I was a member of a local Oshawa BBS run by a chap called Captain Aries.

As the year evolved, my library of Amiga games grew to unreasonable proportions, yet the game seemed to be like collecting baseball cards, the more you had, the better it was.

Even if you did not play them.

So, my arrangement with the BBS was one of a "paid" member, I was downloading a lot of stuff, but uploading very little, sure I was a member of a couple of other Bulletin Boards in the Oshawa and Pickering area (the limits of the local phone calling zone) so I could contribute somewhat, but my "ratio" was not sufficient for a free membership.

So, I was paying a few bucks here and there.

The "Captain" was also not impressed with my 2400 baud modem, so he insisted that I buy (from him) a much faster dual standard US Robotics HST modem.

This paired up with his Courier HST modems for blazingly fast file transfers at 9600 or 14400 baud. 

There was a method in his madness, the less time a leecher like me was online, the more time "proper" users could upload good quality warez.

It was also a good thing for me because I could fill disks up faster with all the useless crap.

(A historical note here, in 1990 if you were paying a dollar a piece for 1.4mb floppy disks you were getting a bargain - I think I amassed about three hundred of them)

Mickey Ratts

Another very good friend of mine was a chap called Derek Smith whose family had originated on the West Coast (I understood they had a residence in Whistler) and he was a tall, sort of handsome stress analyst who liked a beer or three.

In the early years in Canada, we would visit Derek at his Grandmothers apartment (she was off in Florida) in Toronto and much beer was had, he had a buddy called Drew, who said he was from Jamaica, although he was one of the whitest dudes I had ever met.

The nights out in Toronto are the stuff of legend.

I could go off on some stories, but they all were a "you had to be there" type of story, sufficient to say, I had never had so much fun in Canada, sure, it was drunken fun and probably through the old rose colored glasses, but nevertheless, we had a group of people that were "well behaved" or "well conditioned" drunks and nights were usually safe and controlled.

We liked them so much that we even drove to one in a snowstorm (in the Ford Festiva biscuit Tin) once.

The diary entry in May 1990 reminds me of a trip to Buffalo, New York were we met up with Derek and his friend, who was a girl, but never seemed like a girlfriend, Tammy. We met at the Walden Galleria and had lunch and then booked ourselves in a motel.

The evening was spent at a place called "Mickey Ratts" and happened to be blue cup night. A concept that was amazing, went like this, you pay the man five bucks and he gives you a blue cup (about sixteen ounce size) and then, hear this, you can have it filled with beer forever (that night).

So we all had one of those.

I can remember being impressive on the mirrored dance floor, dancing with myself to Madonna (Vogue) and  leaning up against a column, the night became a series of snapshots and at some point, an argument between me and Derek, Tammy and Derek, or someone and Derek, ensued.

A taxi back to the motel and the invigorated discussions followed, I remember Derek becoming more hysterical and later (with Tammy and Karen drinking booze on the bed, watching with bemused looks on their faces) I tussled with him on the floor and finally, exasperated, thumped him on the head.

This then deteriorated in threats of throwing himself off the balcony (we were one floor up and he was over six feet tall) and then he went off driving in the car park before returning, tired and remorseful, to the motel room.

And once more, within minutes, we were all friends again.

Happy Times.

Dayton Ohio

I mentioned that the acquisition of the Amiga 500 was the start of a never ending upgrade path, I also mentioned that a new fiscal responsibility was seeping into the household.

Often the two things didn't go hand in hand, however, with the recommendations of my accountant, it seemed like the tactical application of money for technology was a very good offset to taxes, a legitimate expense that was coincidentally my biggest interest.

In a previous post I had said it briefly, but at the end of April we journeyed down to Dayton in Ohio with our good friends Jim and Sarah Collins, the venue was the annual Hamvention, a massive, football field sized fleamarket dedicated to to Ham radio enthusiasts and the rapidly expanding computer hobbyist.

A nerd show.

The late night trip down on a filled coach was around twelve hours, lots of fun, we all had breakfast at a Cracker Barrel at the break of day, then threw our stuff into a Motel 6 - we either did this early or our bags sat on the coach for six hours or so when we went off for the morning Hamvention session.

It was an amazing day, the sun was "cracking the flags" and we walked for miles through all the various tables at the show, I picked up a few bargains, including that faster modem. Then later, we went to an impressive WalMart (they were impressive back then, believe it or not) and bought Karen a typewriter for her evolving home office and a bottle of Southern Comfort for the ridiculous price of $5.29

I'm sure we kept all the receipts...

I bought a Radio Shack mini amplifier, a Zoom 2400 baud modem, some other bits and pieces of random computer hardware for projects, all in all, a fantastic trip and we enjoyed the company of the people on the coach incredibly.

I think the 2400 baud modem was replaced within six months, such was the pace of affordable computer stuff, the little amplifier was used (on my computer setups) for a decade or more.

The Southern Comfort probably did not make it back to Canada.

Nuts and Bolts

The one thing that other contractors were not short of (besides a bob or two) was advice and it seemed to me that everyone had a different take on things.

At the end of 1988 when we moved into the Townhouse, Ron Barlow had said a couple of things to me, we sat in the front room on a couch facing the wrong way and Ron said "You'll be as right as ninepence here" which was a nice thing to say, he also said that if we watched the money situation and never lived beyond our means then all would be well.

I think he said something like "Live on pie and peas instead of steaks and lobster" although his actual words are lost in time.

So, a few years later, as a jobshopper, those words were among the best advice I had ever absorbed as I saw contractors around me living quite the extravagant life, spending money as fast as it came in, it was taking some time to sink into my thick skull, but I realized that with all this extra money I was earning came a responsibility to our future.

So, we started taking even more notice of the flow of the cash.

The nuts and bolts of being a contractor were explained to me by my first accountant, a Mister Stan Solomon, an accountant that I had found from the advice of another contractor, John Jefferies. Stan showed me how to do double entry ledgers, which I showed to Karen. A new, improved household spreadsheet was developed on the Amiga (using Borlands Quattro Pro) and of course, a dedicated shoe box was acquired to keep all our (real and imagined) receipts in.

The year of 1990 would be an imperfect start to our financial future, we did many things wrong but at the same time did some things right, I can't truthfully say that we lived a pie and peas lifestyle, but we certainly were not eating a lot of lobster.

Steak however...

End of another Era

I received a package of disks for the Commodore 64 off my old pen pal Tom Hopson in the UK, in his letter though he told me he had bought an Amiga, so, I realized it was the end of that particular era and shopped around for an Amiga 500.

I managed to find an open box unit at the local Oshawa K-Mart, it had a damaged system disk but they found another at the Pickering store, I often wonder what story the guy had who bought that particular Amiga, perhaps it was a chain of damaged/lost disk replacements that went on for months.

So, March 1990 became the month of the Amiga in the household, of course, at first I had no programs whatsoever, but in those pirate like days, that situation was not going to last long, especially as my main sources of disks from the C64 days all seemed to be switching up.

It wasn't long before I had the A501 ram expansion, external floppy drive and dedicated high resolution monitor and at the end of March and start of April, the Toronto Computer Fest and a Ham Radio Flea Market beckoned. 

Like a kid in a candy store I loaded up on stuff for the Amiga, games like I had never seen, fantastic graphics, amazing fun. 

It was the beginning of a never ending upgrade path.

Casio

I was still using my Casio PB-700 at that time, I really could not do without it as I had a whole bunch of very useful analysis programs running on it. I had expanded the setup in 1989 when I bought the cradle, printer and tape deck and in March 1990 it became invaluable when the PB-700 wiped itself of every program for some reason, my lug programs, hoop stress, margin calculations and of course, the very valuable "one armed bandit" program that I had honed to perfection over the years. 

It was a shock, but, when I arrived home that day I pulled out the interface, found the backup micro-cassette and restored the baby back to life.

Commute

February 1990.

This was the point in our lives where everything went crazy, at the time I was writing in my diary how there was never any time to do anything. It was still winter and the roads in Southern Ontario were absolutely awful at times and for the pair of us, we both had massive commutes to work.

The routine of a "normal" day saw me dragging myself out of bed at around 5.15am, of course it was pitch black and usually the car had to be scraped of ice or snow. While I was doing that the mustang would be running to warm it up slightly, I would maybe boil a kettle and have a quick drink, but most of the time I would clear the car off, jump in and fly off down to Highway 401.

If you had lived in Ontario in the last quarter of a century and mentioned the "four-oh-one" people would roll their eyes and recount horror stories of terrible commutes, well, in our infinite combined wisdom we elected to both commute to far off places, and both those commutes involved a significant stretch of Highway 401.

I was driving to Oakville, a hundred kilometers one way journey, Karen was driving to Don Mills near Toronto, about sixty-five kilometers, however, her commute was probably worse than mine as she had to contend with highway 404, the infamous Don Valley Parkway.

A two car family now, I with my (un)trusty Ford Mustang, usually loaded with a couple of bags of play sand in the trunk to retain some sort of stability in the ice and snow, and Karen was the owner of a new yet slightly unstable Ford Festiva, a little red biscuit-tin of a car that was about as safe on the road as a moped.

So, everything was crazy, long days working and on the road, terrible commutes compounded by "other people" causing accidents on the highways, impressive snowfalls and just plain old volume of traffic.

The one silver lining in all of this was that I was regaining my interest in music, for an hour in the morning, an hour or more at night, I was able to enjoy "sitting down" and listening to music. Even though I was driving at the time, the music sessions in the car became an oasis of sanity in the craziness of it all.

LHX and the record week.

The LHX request for proposal had come our way and the schedule was tight (it seemed they always were) so it was going to be a busy few weeks.

The Main landing gear was quite the puzzle, having a planing link to rotate the assembly into a space constrained bay area, so it became an iterative process within that tight schedule, something that was great for the bank account but not so great for the mental stability of all involved.

Stability, that was something that was elusive for the FEM constructions I was involved with, the system used at Menasco was SEAS200 for beam models, which was similar to STRESS3 but as anyone who has used either will know, not quite the same. The two packages evolved from the same code but, over time, the respective owners or caretakers of the modified codes took their own paths.

So, SEAS200 and a rapidly evolving kinematic puzzle created what seemed like an endless loop of model making, at the time, coordinates were developed from the CAD model, hand cranked into the FEM and then  a fingers crossed approach ensued. Often unstable models were catapulted into infinity and specific reasons why became elusive.

So, mental stability became an issue also.

If I recall correctly, myself and a good CAD guy called Tony Barr ran through thirty or more kinematic variations of the LHX main landing gear over a period of two weeks, working weeks that included Saturdays and Sundays and of course, premium time.

The proposal was completed in time, not without frayed nerves and a shift towards evening alcoholism, it was at this point in my life that a job shopping earnings record was set, never to be broken in the years that followed.

In that final week of the proposal, I had worked seventy hours in total, thirty of them at premium time. I was on a lowish rate of forty-three dollars an hour back then, but even so, that last week provided me with a check of almost thirty-seven hundred bucks.

Mentally unstable, but money in the bank.  

Job Shopping

Jumping back to 1990, those early, winter months travelling 100 km each way to Menasco were a nightmare, however, the excitement of earning the big bucks really did overwhelm any discomfort of sitting in traffic every day.

The second day I had written in my diary "I just did not believe it when the alarm went off at 4.53am. Can this be worth it??" and in retrospect, of course it was, however, those first few months of winter driving put a tremendous strain on everything, especially in my tail-happy Ford Mustang.

After a month or so I dropped into the groove and the time slipped by as the routine became normal.

The work was very similar to what I had been doing at Dowty and I was comfortable doing it. In addition, as someone said to me at the time, the faces were different, but the people were the same, which is true in most things in life, you meet people who remind you of others, the roles in the play are filled and the actors do what is expected of them.

I will talk more about Larry at some point, on reflection across my career I can honestly say that he became the best "boss" I had ever had and if you had known the guy, you might think that was a strange thing to say, but nevertheless, there were character traits in this man that I grew to respect.

There were still times however when I wanted to murder him...

...and if you had known the guy, you might think that was a normal thing to say 

HNC

I was thinking back to my "struggle" to obtain my HNC in Mechanical Engineering back in the late 1970s and as with any story, the consequences of being uprooted from Romford in Essex, leaving my Ford motor company apprenticeship behind at the H1 level and travelling back to the North of England, all led to where I am now.

Wigan College of Technology looks bright and modern from the outside now, but back in the late 1970s it seemed like a very miserable place as I worked towards completing my H2 while working at Gullick Dobson in Ince and living in Skelmersdale. 

It was here that I met Paul Martin, who became a good friend and eventually, through that friendship, I met my future wife. 

It was not that much of a struggle when I reflect on it, in fact, if I put my rosy glasses on, it was a magical journey, filled with adventure, danger, relationship dysfunction and binge drinking.

All part of a normal life.