29th August, 1994
"Remember these times Dave? - Work all week and play all weekend. Yes, the time of the mortgage, the mustang and Menasco (3M). Collecting Vinyl (still got any of those you old bastard or have you flogged them for a song?). In 1994 a Shure M70B cartridge was $19.95 at Radio Shack, can you find one now? - Perhaps I should have bought a few huh!!.Karen must still be around and bugging you still, what house are you in, didn't pick up the spade did you?..Anyway, hands across time. I pick up my beer and drink to you sir. I hope you have a long and happy life...Cheers! (gulp, gulp)."
A few days later we paid off a big lump of our mortgage and we owed less than thirty-five thousand on the principal and we were aiming to destroy it by the following summer. The reference there about picking up the spade again was directed at the mortgage removal process, that at some point in all our lives, we should put the spade down, stop digging ourselves into debt and fill in the hole.
Wise words from the younger Dave.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Money. It's a gas.
The diary entries for the first week back at Menasco reflect the reality of it all :
Monday.
"First day at the new, better paying salt mines. I felt a bit lost but managed to run a socket program. I felt better after that. Fifty minute drive there, Sixty five minutes back home"
Tuesday.
"More feelings of being lost, doubts about what I've done are creeping in. However, as with all these things we shall see with time - never go with first feelings. Let's give it all a month or so. Reasonable drives, no badge yet"
Wednesday.
"Badge!. I got my little yellow badge today, so I must be one of the boys. The week is half over, Waltzing Weasel day. Beer makes all things better (except headaches, stomach problems etc)."
I refer in that last entry to the local British style pub in Oshawa that we would attend on Wednesday nights, and the headaches were from eye strain and allergies, the stomach problems caused by stress and a bad diet.
It is a fact, and it is reflected in the diary, that I would not have been doing all this driving back and forwards to work if it wasn't for the money and the first few months learning the ropes at the better paying salt mines and long hours took the summer of that year away.
I had become a money grubbing wage slave.
Monday.
"First day at the new, better paying salt mines. I felt a bit lost but managed to run a socket program. I felt better after that. Fifty minute drive there, Sixty five minutes back home"
Tuesday.
"More feelings of being lost, doubts about what I've done are creeping in. However, as with all these things we shall see with time - never go with first feelings. Let's give it all a month or so. Reasonable drives, no badge yet"
Wednesday.
"Badge!. I got my little yellow badge today, so I must be one of the boys. The week is half over, Waltzing Weasel day. Beer makes all things better (except headaches, stomach problems etc)."
I refer in that last entry to the local British style pub in Oshawa that we would attend on Wednesday nights, and the headaches were from eye strain and allergies, the stomach problems caused by stress and a bad diet.
It is a fact, and it is reflected in the diary, that I would not have been doing all this driving back and forwards to work if it wasn't for the money and the first few months learning the ropes at the better paying salt mines and long hours took the summer of that year away.
I had become a money grubbing wage slave.
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Monolith
There really is no fiction in what I am about to type, because I am relating my existence right here, in the now, to another person that I was fortunate enough to know, back in time.
Larry Abram.
Larry was a Lancashire lad. I believe he was born a little North of Blackpool, around Poulton Le Fylde, Fleetwood or even as high up as Morecambe. I had the good fortune to meet Jim Collins as part of my Canadian experience, and then even more so, but not diminishing my Jim experience, I met Larry.
In life you will meet a few of these people if you are lucky enough.
I have talked to many people who knew Larry, they will tell the same story about the man, that he was a phenomenon, a cantankerous curmudgeon of a chap with a heart of gold. They will wax lyrically of the extremes of his emotional entanglements with the art of engineering, they will recall, with a glint in their eyes how he was a storm of emotions, but a foundation rock of a way forward, that he could argue with you until he was blue in the face but five minutes later, still be the best friend you could ever have.
That was Larry Abram, without doubt the very best boss I have ever had, without doubt a man that I have hated and loved, all in the same day, but in retrospect a man who taught me more in my time around him than any of the other "superiors" could ever have hoped.
You will not meet many people in your life who live by a code of no bullshit and total fairness, and perhaps I am selling Larry Abram short by saying that he exceeded my expectations of what a "good boss" should be, but in my entire career, before and after, he became the benchmark.
Larry Abram.
Larry was a Lancashire lad. I believe he was born a little North of Blackpool, around Poulton Le Fylde, Fleetwood or even as high up as Morecambe. I had the good fortune to meet Jim Collins as part of my Canadian experience, and then even more so, but not diminishing my Jim experience, I met Larry.
In life you will meet a few of these people if you are lucky enough.
I have talked to many people who knew Larry, they will tell the same story about the man, that he was a phenomenon, a cantankerous curmudgeon of a chap with a heart of gold. They will wax lyrically of the extremes of his emotional entanglements with the art of engineering, they will recall, with a glint in their eyes how he was a storm of emotions, but a foundation rock of a way forward, that he could argue with you until he was blue in the face but five minutes later, still be the best friend you could ever have.
That was Larry Abram, without doubt the very best boss I have ever had, without doubt a man that I have hated and loved, all in the same day, but in retrospect a man who taught me more in my time around him than any of the other "superiors" could ever have hoped.
You will not meet many people in your life who live by a code of no bullshit and total fairness, and perhaps I am selling Larry Abram short by saying that he exceeded my expectations of what a "good boss" should be, but in my entire career, before and after, he became the benchmark.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
It's all about me.
I imagine that we all have the level of conceit at one point in our lives that I had in the middle of 1994, it comes from some inner place in our psychological universe and I would be surprised if others have never experienced it.
I was riddled with it back in 1985, after my long stint in California at McDonnell Douglas, I arrived back to Wigan in the UK like some returning astronaut with an inflated ego and belief that I was better than the average working class man.
That soon changed back.
In 1994 when I left Dowty it was like I was following the yellow brick road to Menasco across in Oakville, so much money and in my tiny mind, the same workload, less responsibility and an accelerated financial plan as a result of it all.
Freedom fifty-five!
If I read my diary correctly though, very rapidly in those first months the avalanche of new money I was earning was being eclipsed by new things to buy in the small amount of hours left in the week and all the money was being consumed. I remember thinking this at the time, the phenomenon of how a puddle of water takes the shape of the ditch that it arrives in.
Douglas Adams memories there.
How many times in life can we make the same mistakes, our spending matching or exceeding our income and regardless of all our efforts the debt hole continuing to grow bigger?
It is all about me, and within a few months of working all hours "god sends" the realization with a capital "Z" arrived that we had wandered off the path and we started to curtail our "polo pony" ways to settle into a spend less, save more type arrangement.
Yet still have fun.
I could credit Dave Chilton (of Wealthy Barber fame) for this eventual change in our collective habits regarding money, but I prefer to give it to another man, someone who gives me a smile as I remember him, someone who said once that myself and the lovely Karen would be "as right as ninepence" in our little townhouse in Oshawa. A man who told me that as long as I was earning steak money and eating pies that I would always be happy.
Ron Barlow.
xx
I was riddled with it back in 1985, after my long stint in California at McDonnell Douglas, I arrived back to Wigan in the UK like some returning astronaut with an inflated ego and belief that I was better than the average working class man.
That soon changed back.
In 1994 when I left Dowty it was like I was following the yellow brick road to Menasco across in Oakville, so much money and in my tiny mind, the same workload, less responsibility and an accelerated financial plan as a result of it all.
Freedom fifty-five!
If I read my diary correctly though, very rapidly in those first months the avalanche of new money I was earning was being eclipsed by new things to buy in the small amount of hours left in the week and all the money was being consumed. I remember thinking this at the time, the phenomenon of how a puddle of water takes the shape of the ditch that it arrives in.
Douglas Adams memories there.
How many times in life can we make the same mistakes, our spending matching or exceeding our income and regardless of all our efforts the debt hole continuing to grow bigger?
It is all about me, and within a few months of working all hours "god sends" the realization with a capital "Z" arrived that we had wandered off the path and we started to curtail our "polo pony" ways to settle into a spend less, save more type arrangement.
Yet still have fun.
I could credit Dave Chilton (of Wealthy Barber fame) for this eventual change in our collective habits regarding money, but I prefer to give it to another man, someone who gives me a smile as I remember him, someone who said once that myself and the lovely Karen would be "as right as ninepence" in our little townhouse in Oshawa. A man who told me that as long as I was earning steak money and eating pies that I would always be happy.
Ron Barlow.
xx
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Huge
June, 1994.
I sat outside the Future Shop on Markham road in Ontario, just a block of two away from the Majestic Superstore where we bought our first stereo in 1988. I had just paid almost a thousand dollars to have an activated one of these in my hands. A miraculous wonder of modern miniature micro technology.
I sat outside the Future Shop on Markham road in Ontario, just a block of two away from the Majestic Superstore where we bought our first stereo in 1988. I had just paid almost a thousand dollars to have an activated one of these in my hands. A miraculous wonder of modern miniature micro technology.
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Time Travel
The second stint of my Menasco experience began on the sixth of June, nineteen-ninety-four.
I will write about it at length as there are some fantastic memories of people that I must write down for my own enjoyment in future years, but my first comment about that particular chapter of my life is that I have never, and will never again I would imagine, experience time travel like I did during those four and a half years.
I was awake and on the road at five-twenty in the morning (I've just looked at the clock on the wall here and it is exactly that time) and my journey to Oakville from Oshawa would (in normal circumstances) take fifty minutes and I'd arrive at Menasco at around six o'clock.
I would then have a thirty minute or more sleep in the car, in a sleeping bag before heading into the plant when the canteen opened for the best coffee of my life and some breakfast.
I would leave work, usually, at six-thirty at night. The journey home would normally take an hour and I would phone Karen on my cell phone (it was huge) when I was close so that she could "get the tea on" and on Wednesdays we continued our mid week pub and NTN nights.
I worked Saturdays.
A normal working week at Menasco was almost always ten hour days, five hour Saturdays, fifty-five hours a week, plus travel time and that continued for two hundred and thirty weeks with a few vacations along the way. I have just calculated that a typical working week including travel was around eighty hours.
It was always busy, it was mostly fun, and my time there evaporated.
I will take the time to recall my favourite moments of those years, and try to fix those moments in some sort of timeline. At the moment though, in my mind, it feels too compressed, as though I was really only there for a happy year or so, but although I know that I loved the place I also have to acknowledge that at times I really loathed the place and my timeless reality.
Plenty of time to decompress those memories...
I will write about it at length as there are some fantastic memories of people that I must write down for my own enjoyment in future years, but my first comment about that particular chapter of my life is that I have never, and will never again I would imagine, experience time travel like I did during those four and a half years.
I was awake and on the road at five-twenty in the morning (I've just looked at the clock on the wall here and it is exactly that time) and my journey to Oakville from Oshawa would (in normal circumstances) take fifty minutes and I'd arrive at Menasco at around six o'clock.
I would then have a thirty minute or more sleep in the car, in a sleeping bag before heading into the plant when the canteen opened for the best coffee of my life and some breakfast.
I would leave work, usually, at six-thirty at night. The journey home would normally take an hour and I would phone Karen on my cell phone (it was huge) when I was close so that she could "get the tea on" and on Wednesdays we continued our mid week pub and NTN nights.
I worked Saturdays.
A normal working week at Menasco was almost always ten hour days, five hour Saturdays, fifty-five hours a week, plus travel time and that continued for two hundred and thirty weeks with a few vacations along the way. I have just calculated that a typical working week including travel was around eighty hours.
It was always busy, it was mostly fun, and my time there evaporated.
I will take the time to recall my favourite moments of those years, and try to fix those moments in some sort of timeline. At the moment though, in my mind, it feels too compressed, as though I was really only there for a happy year or so, but although I know that I loved the place I also have to acknowledge that at times I really loathed the place and my timeless reality.
Plenty of time to decompress those memories...
Fifty, the Magic number.
In those last two weeks at Dowty I wrapped up the work I had been doing to pass on, in addition the coffee machine chat group had grown and quite a number of people were telling me that "they would be next" which sounded very familiar to me, shades of my previous ship jumping experience.
In another deja vu moment from the closing days of 1989, Pete Clark the contractor came to me and with a wry smile used exactly the same sarcastic line, the only thing different was the number he used.
"If you're going there on anything less than fifty bucks an hour then you're being ripped off!"
Pete had added ten bucks.
I was leaving Dowty in Ajax for Menasco in Oakville and my hourly rate was to be fourty-two bucks, so for a brief moment, the sarcasm worked on me, but fortunately this time his jibe left no lingering doubts in my mind.
Pete Clark and the rest of the contractors knew what the desired goal was, the magical fifty bucks an hour, but few were achieving that at the time, probably because the agencies were taking their cut of the bigger slice of pie, just like TDM had done with me back in 1990.
This time though, I was on a "direct" six month purchase order, which may have been perceived as a bad thing of not having an agency to "look after my interests" for the long term, but in my mind all would be well and for the short term, fourty two bucks would be my going rate,
There was an assurance by new boss, Larry Abram, that with all the MRB work in the pipeline there would be plenty of overtime and although I would not reach that magical fifty dollar mark during normal hours, after the 44 hour point, my hourly rate would jump to sixty-three dollars.
A dollar and change per minute.
In another deja vu moment from the closing days of 1989, Pete Clark the contractor came to me and with a wry smile used exactly the same sarcastic line, the only thing different was the number he used.
"If you're going there on anything less than fifty bucks an hour then you're being ripped off!"
Pete had added ten bucks.
I was leaving Dowty in Ajax for Menasco in Oakville and my hourly rate was to be fourty-two bucks, so for a brief moment, the sarcasm worked on me, but fortunately this time his jibe left no lingering doubts in my mind.
Pete Clark and the rest of the contractors knew what the desired goal was, the magical fifty bucks an hour, but few were achieving that at the time, probably because the agencies were taking their cut of the bigger slice of pie, just like TDM had done with me back in 1990.
This time though, I was on a "direct" six month purchase order, which may have been perceived as a bad thing of not having an agency to "look after my interests" for the long term, but in my mind all would be well and for the short term, fourty two bucks would be my going rate,
There was an assurance by new boss, Larry Abram, that with all the MRB work in the pipeline there would be plenty of overtime and although I would not reach that magical fifty dollar mark during normal hours, after the 44 hour point, my hourly rate would jump to sixty-three dollars.
A dollar and change per minute.
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