Oxygen Thieves

The Regional Jet and Global Express work had required a large influx of draughtsmen to be hired to meet the various schedules, but as I had mentioned earlier, there was little room to house them all.

A pair of terrapins, light blue/grey portakabins, had appeared and been fitted with a dozen or more drafting boards, and through an aggressive recruitment campaign, most of them had been installed with a jobshopper.

If you've been in any industry where something like this has happened, you will know the score, that little useful work went on in these sheds, and at a future date a manager had to be installed to monitor the inmates. It was a little like the Bob Newhart infinite number of monkeys joke....

"to be or not to be, that is the gozornonplat"

In the winter months before a prefect was installed I would visit the portakabins, they were connected to the shop floor by a wooden corridor, and on entering the corridor you could hear great laughter and jollity, that would suddenly be stifled as the sound of approaching footsteps were heard. I would enter the shed and be recognized as "not a boss" and the conversations would start up again.

A few of the jobshoppers had very little drafting experience in the industry, I think one had actually been a bouncer at a nightclub in his previous job and was being paid "the big bucks" for basically consuming oxygen.

One thing was for sure, they were all having far too much fun and for those few months before management realised their mistake, the portakabins were the happiest social scene at Dowty.