Three Year Term

The three year term began, and a rough estimate of how much it actually cost me, adjusted for taxation rates, overtime and what have you, was somewhere in the quarter-million dollar range, so it was quite the little promise I made there to the Chief of Stress at the time.

However, it wasn't all about money, things happened during those three years that changed my career in very good ways, cemented some friendships and the very fact that I was earning less made me focus more on being more careful with money.

In addition, there was a whole bunch of extra time that was to be enjoyed, something like two hours a day or more, six days a week, that's a dozen hours a week, it gave me so much more time to waste.

In my last months of 1989 at Dowty, Patran-G had reared it's ugly head once more and there had been strong hints that I was required to wear that Finite Element Analyis hat once again, something that I was reluctant to do, in fact, in retrospect, it was one of the factors that pushed me away from Dowty (besides the evil money thing).

Now that I was back, it was fortunate that two of the guys had firmly placed their knees under the FEA table, so the expectation that the "young jockey" would take the reins was long gone, in fact, another fortunate thing, I had the suspicion that there was an essence of punishment (for my year at Menasco) and that the mighty Patran-G, or whatever it was called in 1991, was being withheld from my not so enthusiastic mitts.

The two guys, Andrew North and Holger Oberlander, also appeared to have no intention of allowing me, or anyone else for that matter, at one of the FEA workstations, yet the Chief of Stress was concerned that if one of his men was "run over by a bus" then the valuable FEA work could implode, so there was a general upbeat "everyone should learn Patran" theme in the office, it was a theme, but it seemed to go nowhere.

It was common in the industry for people to be protective of their jobs, even though we were not unionized the general approach was to keep knowledge and only reluctantly, impart knowledge. This had been true even back in the Harry Clark days at APPH, it was the hierarchy of analytical skills that kept analysts in the higher pay grades, and here, ten years later in another country, the same thing was happening.

The two FEA jockeys, who had formal training from MSC, were instructed to teach other members of the stress office, but daytime training sessions were few and far between because "real work" was getting in the way of any training, and also, any time spent on the machines was next to useless, mainly because the teachers had no teaching skills, or as I suspected, had no incentive whatsoever in sharing their knowledge.

So, even though I had a reluctance to relearn the FEA software, I knew that it would be of some use in this  so called career of mine and so, with the Chief's permission, I started using some of my unpaid spare hours to grab terminal time, after our experts had gone home, and relearn the nuts and bolts of Patran.

Unpaid spare time...yes, I truly had lost my mind.