Incoming

I had been dropped in the thick of it all at Menasco and I would liken myself to one of those music hall acts where the performer has to keep a series of plates spinning on poles, usually running around like a madman to keep them all upright.

MRB was a big daily job, in addition to the other things like report generation, proposals and general troubleshooting, MRB was the backbone of the work at the Menasco stress office and a lot of it was Boeing MRB work and of course, Menasco did a lot of work for Boeing.

In that first year at Menasco my attitudes to salvage and repair work changed dramatically, at first I felt that the work was beneath me, however, after a few months of working with the Boeing methods and the MRB guys at Menasco, I felt that MRB was by far the most interesting aspect of being a stress analyst.

In addition, as a job shopper, I could see that it was an endless gig.

I'll talk about differences in management style in a future post, but the one thing that was obvious about the structural department at Menasco was that no one was afraid of rolling up their sleeves to get MRB work approved and moved through the system. There was also no fear, no matter what the priority, about scrapping something that could not be salvaged for either structural or aesthetic reasons.

Larry Abram and myself would sit down and blitz through the salvage reports, his boss, a larger than life Greek guy called Gerry Kouverianos, would also roll up his sleeves when the waiting pile of MRB became too high, it was a simple thing, the engine of the business was production and warranty work which coupled with aircraft safety meant that we all took the job very seriously.

The only lighter side to all of it would be the liaison between the stress office and the chief representative of the MRB department, Nick Chronopoulous (another Greek) who would tend to "hover" about the office when critical salvages were required for approval. Nick would constantly roll an elastic band between his index fingers as he invaded our space,occasionally beads of sweat would appear on his brow when he suspected we would be scrapping something that "could not be scrapped" and he would, every now and then, cross the line and offer important stress analysis advice to exactly the wrong person.

Larry.

At those delicate and highly explosive moments (I would call them the "light blue touch paper" moments) it was best for the rest of us to scamper away and retire to the safety of a nearby bunker and watch and giggle as the firework display progressed...