At the beginning of 1988, Dowty had paid for our flights and the costs of moving our furniture from the UK, all they asked for was that I guaranteed to work for them for two years.
As 1989 was drawing to a close, that two years would be up, give or take a week.
Tony Burgess, a jobshopper in the design office and a larger than life type of character had decided to throw his hat amongst the agency types, moving on from a draughting job to be a partner in an aerospace contracting agency called TDM.
I'd had many a conversation with Tony about jumping ship when my bondage was up, when he left late in the year I asked him to keep his ears open for something at one of the other aerospace companies.
Another name I have remembered from back then is Frank Sapala, another design contractor who also encouraged me to "go jobshopping" as soon as I could.
It was late in the year when the phone rang, Tony had an opportunity and that was going to be at the mirror image landing gear company (strangely the same company that started my entire foray into North America back in 1985).
Menasco.
Or, as the bizarro company would call them, Brand-X.
The Chief of Stress at Menasco was Larry Abram, a man that had worked with Jim Collins many years before and after my call from Tony Burgess, I confided in Jim (who had become our Stress Office manager) about my devious plans. Jim was a very good friend and I knew that he would be helpful.
So started a few weeks of skullduggery and secret goings on as November moved along, I drove down to Oakville for an interview and met Larry, another larger than life character, his first gruff words to me, with a wicked smile on his face were:
"So's, you wants to be doing some Job shoppeuring does ya?"
Jim had already talked to him over the phone and I think he had already convinced him I was a safe bet.
Larry, a no nonsense guy, from the North of England (The Fylde) gave me the once over, a sort of intimidating, yet highly amusing, interview (which set the stage for our long relationship) and left everything sort of up in the air, I remember driving away from Menasco with a sort of tremble in my legs, knowing full well that a phone call in the next week could change everything for us.
Exciting times.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Cracks in the Ice
The work at Dowty Canada, or Dowty Aerospace Toronto was always interesting, always driven by what seemed like insane schedules and the pressure was always on.
In the almost two years since I had started I was elevated to the dizzy heights of "senior" stress analyst and my yearly pittance had rocketed up from $34,000 to around $38,000 augmented by overtime but eroded by that horrible taxation thing.
Four people in the office had a distinct effect on me that year, the first, Jim Collins who had been a "Job Shopper" in the past and in the office, within whispering distance, three current Job Shoppers, Tony Burgess, Pete Clarke and Dave Rutherford.
And a couple that were working for me, names withheld to protect the lazy.
A Job Shopper, for the uninformed, was a contractor, someone who worked for an agency as a sole proprietor or was unique as their own corporation (for tax and liability purposes) - basically, someone who was (usually) capable and did what they were told in the office.
A jobshopper, at the time, would earn above $40 an hour, work an average of fifty (or more) hours per week (overtime at time and a half) which equated to a yearly salary closing in on the $100,000 point.
And, they had numerous tax benefits, so they kept a lot of it.
So, here I was, an overworked, underpaid, salaried employee on numerous tight schedules, giving orders to a couple of guys who could not do their jobs on an hourly basis without asking fundamental questions.
The three guys I mentioned worked in the design office, Pete and Dave would barrage me with a strange form of heckling, ridiculing the hoops I was jumping through to get work out of the office, adding to the mental anguish minute by minute (and loving the sport) and adding a large portion of "not helping" and pointing out the shortfalls of the two guys I had "under my wing"
It was funny, sort of.
And it was making me think, I talked at length about it to Jim Collins and this other guy, Tony Burgess.
I'll talk more about them in the next post.
In the almost two years since I had started I was elevated to the dizzy heights of "senior" stress analyst and my yearly pittance had rocketed up from $34,000 to around $38,000 augmented by overtime but eroded by that horrible taxation thing.
Four people in the office had a distinct effect on me that year, the first, Jim Collins who had been a "Job Shopper" in the past and in the office, within whispering distance, three current Job Shoppers, Tony Burgess, Pete Clarke and Dave Rutherford.
And a couple that were working for me, names withheld to protect the lazy.
A Job Shopper, for the uninformed, was a contractor, someone who worked for an agency as a sole proprietor or was unique as their own corporation (for tax and liability purposes) - basically, someone who was (usually) capable and did what they were told in the office.
A jobshopper, at the time, would earn above $40 an hour, work an average of fifty (or more) hours per week (overtime at time and a half) which equated to a yearly salary closing in on the $100,000 point.
And, they had numerous tax benefits, so they kept a lot of it.
So, here I was, an overworked, underpaid, salaried employee on numerous tight schedules, giving orders to a couple of guys who could not do their jobs on an hourly basis without asking fundamental questions.
The three guys I mentioned worked in the design office, Pete and Dave would barrage me with a strange form of heckling, ridiculing the hoops I was jumping through to get work out of the office, adding to the mental anguish minute by minute (and loving the sport) and adding a large portion of "not helping" and pointing out the shortfalls of the two guys I had "under my wing"
It was funny, sort of.
And it was making me think, I talked at length about it to Jim Collins and this other guy, Tony Burgess.
I'll talk more about them in the next post.
Hamvention
Those first couple of years saw the Commodore 64 setup expanded with a Commodore Amiga A500 and then the expected replacement of all of that by a PC.
Jim Collins was a ham radio guy (VE3OYE) and was also interested in the advent of packet radio and the Newmarket Ham radio "Fest" which by the time I started being interested in the PC was morphing into a Hamfest and Computer Fest. The latter becoming an annual or bi-annual event around the Toronto region.
In Spring 1990 Jim and his wife Sarah invited us on a coach trip down to Dayton, Ohio. An exciting trip in itself to be off down to the USA, even more so for myself as the prospect of a high speed modem was in the offing and boxes full of used stuff at the massive "Hamvention".
A high speed, affordable, modem in late 1989 was a 2400 baud external serial offering, that item became the prize of the trip for me (double the 1200 baud I was currently running) Of course, within a year I would be running a US Robotics HST modem at 14400 baud.
The trip to Dayton was great fun, after an early morning journey we arrived at the Motel Six and threw our stuff into the rooms, this was followed by the Hamvention and the rushed feeling of never being able to see everything in the acres of tables. happy times indeed.
The prize, apart from a couple of useless gizmos, a Zoom 2400 baud external modem, something that was examined many times during the journey home.
The Hamvention marked the start of a much more "serious" computer hobby for me, within 18 months I would be building computers from boxes of old stuff, experimenting with motherboards, video cards and what have you, it was also at the same time as a temporary furlough from my relationship with Jim Collins as I moved from one landing gear company to another, far in the distance, on the other side of Toronto.
They called it Brand-X.
Jim Collins was a ham radio guy (VE3OYE) and was also interested in the advent of packet radio and the Newmarket Ham radio "Fest" which by the time I started being interested in the PC was morphing into a Hamfest and Computer Fest. The latter becoming an annual or bi-annual event around the Toronto region.
In Spring 1990 Jim and his wife Sarah invited us on a coach trip down to Dayton, Ohio. An exciting trip in itself to be off down to the USA, even more so for myself as the prospect of a high speed modem was in the offing and boxes full of used stuff at the massive "Hamvention".
A high speed, affordable, modem in late 1989 was a 2400 baud external serial offering, that item became the prize of the trip for me (double the 1200 baud I was currently running) Of course, within a year I would be running a US Robotics HST modem at 14400 baud.
The trip to Dayton was great fun, after an early morning journey we arrived at the Motel Six and threw our stuff into the rooms, this was followed by the Hamvention and the rushed feeling of never being able to see everything in the acres of tables. happy times indeed.
The prize, apart from a couple of useless gizmos, a Zoom 2400 baud external modem, something that was examined many times during the journey home.
The Hamvention marked the start of a much more "serious" computer hobby for me, within 18 months I would be building computers from boxes of old stuff, experimenting with motherboards, video cards and what have you, it was also at the same time as a temporary furlough from my relationship with Jim Collins as I moved from one landing gear company to another, far in the distance, on the other side of Toronto.
They called it Brand-X.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Pivot
Looking back, it may have been that year that caused the pair of us to pivot, a start to the sprinklings of thoughts about what we should be doing with money. I suspect it still was two years off at this point, but the man with all the gold and the cigars certainly made a couple of bottom feeders like ourselves realise that we were not in control of our money.
A year later we had saved our pennies, dollars, hundreds and thousands and we paid off the second mortgage on the townhouse, all ten thousand of it. I think that was very impressive at the time that we knuckled down and saved that sort of money.
Of course, in typical form, the system had a few surprises for us at the end of the year, as an example, a small clause in the contract meant that we had to pay the lenders lawyers $250 to rid ourselves of the mortgage and in addition, a visit to the land registry office demanded another $50 to enable a clerk to erase our name from a board.
But, added "stupid taxes" at the end did little to surpress our joy at destroying that second mortgage.
A beer, or three, was had.
A week later, the lender called us at home, said that "we'd both made money" and we agreed, yet, it was obvious who had made more...
A year later we had saved our pennies, dollars, hundreds and thousands and we paid off the second mortgage on the townhouse, all ten thousand of it. I think that was very impressive at the time that we knuckled down and saved that sort of money.
Of course, in typical form, the system had a few surprises for us at the end of the year, as an example, a small clause in the contract meant that we had to pay the lenders lawyers $250 to rid ourselves of the mortgage and in addition, a visit to the land registry office demanded another $50 to enable a clerk to erase our name from a board.
But, added "stupid taxes" at the end did little to surpress our joy at destroying that second mortgage.
A beer, or three, was had.
A week later, the lender called us at home, said that "we'd both made money" and we agreed, yet, it was obvious who had made more...
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Fees Glorious Fees
I have kept the documents to our first house purchase in Canada from 1988, mainly to remind me of how much naivety two little people can have when making a purchase, sorry, the major purchase of a short lifetime to that point.
The promissory note, for a loan of eight thousand dollars actually outlined that we would be paying a loan rate of sixteen and a half percent, payment of one hundred and nine dollars per month. I sit here with simple calculator in hand and see that in rough terms, that interest rate and that principal would be about thirteen hundred and twenty bucks over the year, and we signed up to pay almost exactly that.
So at the end of the one year term we would owe almost exactly the same amount.
The commission, or originating fee was four hundred and ninety-five dollars. The first mortgage "administration fee" was two hundred and fifty dollars. Add to this our legal fees (which were supposed to be four hundred dollars but ended up almost twice that) and mortgage insurance premium of twenty-two hundred and fifty dollars.
At the end of the year, when we paid off the principal on that second mortgage we were delighted to see another discharge or closing fee of one hundred and seventy-five dollars. I think Karen had to pay another fee at the land transfer office, oh and when we paid off that first mortgage in 1995, she had to pay again.
Over a barrel.
All of this was not really a nightmare, it was an essential part of our financial education, it was sowing the seeds for all the work we would do in the early nineties, the fortunate first kick in the head that was partially a catalyst to financial common sense.
Of course, it would not be the last kick in the head.
The promissory note, for a loan of eight thousand dollars actually outlined that we would be paying a loan rate of sixteen and a half percent, payment of one hundred and nine dollars per month. I sit here with simple calculator in hand and see that in rough terms, that interest rate and that principal would be about thirteen hundred and twenty bucks over the year, and we signed up to pay almost exactly that.
So at the end of the one year term we would owe almost exactly the same amount.
The commission, or originating fee was four hundred and ninety-five dollars. The first mortgage "administration fee" was two hundred and fifty dollars. Add to this our legal fees (which were supposed to be four hundred dollars but ended up almost twice that) and mortgage insurance premium of twenty-two hundred and fifty dollars.
At the end of the year, when we paid off the principal on that second mortgage we were delighted to see another discharge or closing fee of one hundred and seventy-five dollars. I think Karen had to pay another fee at the land transfer office, oh and when we paid off that first mortgage in 1995, she had to pay again.
Over a barrel.
All of this was not really a nightmare, it was an essential part of our financial education, it was sowing the seeds for all the work we would do in the early nineties, the fortunate first kick in the head that was partially a catalyst to financial common sense.
Of course, it would not be the last kick in the head.
End of an Era
I am going to go off at a tangent for a moment here, rewind back to 1985 when I was working in Building Two (or was it Building One?) at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, California.
The days of the T-45 were a heady and happy time and we contractors (of sorts, no lucrative money at the time) worked side by side with the "normal" Long Beach inmates.
Despite the red striping on my badge, one day I was given special dispensation to go and see (and sit in) the T-45 mockup in the developmental area. An area where security was tight, not really for the T-45 but for a huge fuselage mockup in the same building. We were allowed to take a look, it was the C-17 study unit and it was HUGE, they had been using it to show vehicle loading viability.
One day, a few months later, sat at my desk, the tannoy sparked to life and the voice of Sandy McDonnell boomed throughout Building One (or was it two?) announcing (to great cheers throughout the facility) that McDonnell-Douglas had won the C-17 Program, I think his words were "..given the green light".
I'm sure I had a Michelob (or seven) that night to celebrate, mind you, in that chapter of my life I was having that sort of nightly volume of beer under normal circumstances.
Sandy McDonnell died on March 19th, I hope that more Michelob will be raised to celebrate that man's life achievements, in fact, I will make a start on that that right now.
The days of the T-45 were a heady and happy time and we contractors (of sorts, no lucrative money at the time) worked side by side with the "normal" Long Beach inmates.
Despite the red striping on my badge, one day I was given special dispensation to go and see (and sit in) the T-45 mockup in the developmental area. An area where security was tight, not really for the T-45 but for a huge fuselage mockup in the same building. We were allowed to take a look, it was the C-17 study unit and it was HUGE, they had been using it to show vehicle loading viability.
One day, a few months later, sat at my desk, the tannoy sparked to life and the voice of Sandy McDonnell boomed throughout Building One (or was it two?) announcing (to great cheers throughout the facility) that McDonnell-Douglas had won the C-17 Program, I think his words were "..given the green light".
I'm sure I had a Michelob (or seven) that night to celebrate, mind you, in that chapter of my life I was having that sort of nightly volume of beer under normal circumstances.
Sandy McDonnell died on March 19th, I hope that more Michelob will be raised to celebrate that man's life achievements, in fact, I will make a start on that that right now.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Let the Owing begin!
It was the last unit of a grimy strip mall on Simcoe Street South, the company name was RayCan Financial and we trooped fearfully into the place, ready to be educated as to how we could buy a home with almost no money to our name.
The downstairs room was smokey and the larger than life man with the gold identity bracelet and neck chain, drawing on a cigar, was Frank Callaghan. It was outlined to the pair of us how the mortgaging of everything would be accomplished, primary mortgage, promissory note that would convert to a secondary mortgage after completion and fees, fees, fees.
The first mortgage would be 90% of the house purchase price and because of the ratio, the mortgage had to be insured with the CMHC or Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, that would add a premium to the house price, then the Primary mortgage lenders, Family Trust, had their own fees, legal fees of course and then "special" fees for RayCan and that promissory note conversion.
After signing a bunch of unread paperwork, we left, stunned.
What had we done?
The downstairs room was smokey and the larger than life man with the gold identity bracelet and neck chain, drawing on a cigar, was Frank Callaghan. It was outlined to the pair of us how the mortgaging of everything would be accomplished, primary mortgage, promissory note that would convert to a secondary mortgage after completion and fees, fees, fees.
The first mortgage would be 90% of the house purchase price and because of the ratio, the mortgage had to be insured with the CMHC or Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, that would add a premium to the house price, then the Primary mortgage lenders, Family Trust, had their own fees, legal fees of course and then "special" fees for RayCan and that promissory note conversion.
After signing a bunch of unread paperwork, we left, stunned.
What had we done?
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