The Chuckle Brothers

April 1994.

It was apparent that Ken Marlton was not enjoying the new responsibilities or consequences of being Stress Office manager. That's not a reflection on Ken, who was a great chap, but I suppose part of his daily burden was the subtle office psychological onslaught from a group of bored permies.

If I think about it though, we were making fun of ourselves in the process, mainly as most of the permanent members of the group acknowledged that the contracting life had definite benefits, usually associated with a lack of responsibility or consequence with the added seasoning of lots of money.

There were a few jobshoppers that I talked to on a regular basis. There had been the legendary Tony Burgess, a great chap who had moved up in the world to head TDM technical services, a contracting agency and who was my agent back in 1990 when I had my brief stint at Menasco.

John Jefferies of course, Pete Malaguti, Jim Collins and even though Ken Marlton was now a manager, I still considered that he was a jobshopper at heart.

Frank Sapala was another great guy, who's motto was "We don't talk about Frank" when it came to what rate he was on. In my time learning PATRAN in the CAD room, I would talk to Frank about life, the universe and everything. When the weekly contractor pay envelopes would come around, Frank would open his, smile insanely and then methodically rip the pay slip into fifty pieces.

Then there are the two that I am affectionately nicknaming the Chuckle Brothers.

Dave Rutherford and Pete Clark held varying places either side of me on the Dowty squash ladder, and we had great battles over at the sports centre of a lunch time. Dave was installed on a desk near the back of the stress office and Pete was usually in the CAD room. The friendly competition on the squash courts resulted in a lot of office banter that was especially comical when either one of them had beaten me, or vice versa.

The light teasing that I was applying to Ken paled in comparison to the quality work that Dave and Pete were subjecting me to on a daily basis, it was a similar process though, a couple of competent jobshoppers provoking a permanent member of staff. It was not always about performance in the squash arena either, their speciality seemed to focus on ridiculing career decisions, failed jobshopper attempts and the general financial struggle.

It seemed like torture at times, office bullying I suppose they would call it nowadays, but what they effectively did was change my state of mind and I suppose what we permanent staff were subjecting Ken Marlton to had the same effect.

The countdown was on.

Spreadsheet Queen

I'll step back a year for a moment.

In those early months of 1993 the honing of the financial plan had continued, it was the usual RRSP time and Graeme Wright and myself were enjoying the various free seminars (and coffee and Donuts) that were offered in the Durham region.

In fact the financial discussions had spread to other members of the design office.

Ken Miller was our financial guy at the time, he was a pleasant man and he was recommended as a trusted soul by Jim Collins. A few of us in the office had subscribed to the Gordon Pape financial newsletter and in general, we were all learning about investing, Ken Miller actually organized a little get together at the local pub for those that were interested and the general discussion was good and positive and beer was alaways welcomed.

In 1992 Graeme had salvaged a little pocket computer (Chris Brookfield had thrown it away) and financial amortization formula had been adapted to BASIC and installed. In addition, we had programmed the Lotus 123 clone for this mortgage predictor and had both been using it to see the effect of balloon payments, interest rates and payment frequency on our respective loans.

It helped that I had grovelled to have a PC on my desk, A monochrome PC that had sat unused next to the Decwriter in the plotter room and the chief had reluctantly allowed it to be installed on my desk. As I have mentioned before, I was still very much the bad monkey and any sort of perk was frowned upon, so I felt "lucky" to have been given the opportunity of using an obsolete computer at my workstation.

Once the spreadsheet was constructed, Graeme was a regular visitor to my desk, and playing with mortgage numbers became a fascination in our lives.

It was obvious that the Weldon mortgage on our townhouse was not open enough, so we approached the bank to change that. Initially the bank came up with some huge penalty payment (in the thousands) but Graeme informed me that there were two variants of this penalty, one if you were changing institutions and another if staying with the same bank.

So, I trotted back to the bank and educated the clerk, who happily charged us $600 penalty for changing our mortgage to an almost fully open lower rate and in addition we changed from monthly payments to bi-weekly.

It only took about ten weeks to make that six hundred bucks back.

The original houseplan spreadsheet was used to budget the Weldon finances even more fanatically and almost on a weekly basis we were paying an extra fifty or a hundred dollars off the loan, I would nip up on a lunchtime, pay the mini-balloon payment and ask for a print out of the remaining principal and amortization period which of course was then checked with the mortgage spreadsheet to ensure accuracy.

This "second front" of financial smarts was the beginning of the end of the debt game for Graeme and myself and we both started to finalise our "Mortgage Free" or MF events.

The pair of us would both be "Out from under it" in the following two years, the Wrights received their "Mortgage Free Bucket" on the 20th August 1993 and the Weldon bucket arrived on June 17th, 1995.

And that was that.

Bata Extravaganza

A few months earlier, the famous Christmas of 1993 we will call it for the sake of the story, another of the famous Bata Extravaganza's took place, something that was far removed from any of the Dowty Christmas parties for a significant reason.

No Dowty Christmas event ever had an open bar.

Karen was working in the payroll department at Bata, and to boot downtown in lovely Don Mills, a fantastic daily drive experience, especially in the winter months, and at the time, she was driving there in the family biscuit tin, the Ford festiva, and particularly exciting with a full set of severely bald tires.

Acknowledging that she had attended the shoe emporium for another year through all types of driving conditions they had presented her the annual unlimited access to booze at their holiday party festivus, and that was one thing we as a family unit would surely not miss, regardless of the weather. As a responsible thing, we always booked ourselves into the party hotel for the night.

I cannot brag here, I am sincerely a terrible drinker and an absolute child when it comes to free.

The event went as usual that Christmas, an initial cocktail hour, full on complimentary bar, followed by a parade into the main room, a formal three course meal, entertainment and jollity, and of course, prizes for the executives, management and key employees.

I wasn't any of the above, and in that first hour, especially with winks and nods from the enthusiastic bartender, I took absolute full advantage of the free bar, in addition, I was talking to one of Karen's workmate's husbands, and we got into a "fuckemall" type conversation. I went toe to toe, drink for drink with the guy, trouble was, a factoid I missed at the time, he had at least twice the body mass of my little self.

So the dinner gong went off, everyone paraded into the dining room, and me and Tom squeezed in another double before joining them all at the tables, for the celebration of managemental loveliness.

I decided to go for a quick toilet break and in the process my trouser button exploded. I found that I could zip up my pants but the top was spread out, so I had an issue and I went to the dining room and told Karen I would have to go to our room and install a button.

Time passed apparently.

This is my account, but apparently Karen's story is quite different which may be detailed later, regardless, the ending of my particular story was that I was happily asleep on the bed in the hotel room when the light went on, some crazy lady, presumably Karen, which I doubt as she very rarely uses any type of expletive, came up and loomed over me, said something that an experienced sailor might say and then the light went off and I smiled and went back off into a deep sleep.

Oblivious of any trouble I may have been in.

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.

Welcome back Kotter.

It was the new year, 1993 was over and things had moved along at the landing gear emporium.

Jim Collins was back, but not in his previous role as manager, Jim had returned as a contractor and was sat back at his old desk, earning more, paying less tax, and was enjoying his days. The desk in front of him was now inhabited by Ken Marlton, who in a strange twist of fate had been sweet talked into giving up his contracting position to have the grand title of Stress Office manager.

It had only been a few months, and Ken was not at all happy with this.

I always made a point of finding my way around to Ken's desk each payday, and as he opened his envelope I would sing "I know all there is to know about the crying game" as he shook his head. It seemed a constant shock to him, the amount of money that was subtracted for the various taxes and fees that permanent members of staff enjoyed.

I told him he was lucky, that the chore of keeping receipts and employing an accountant had been lifted from his shoulders. I would add as an afterthought that I felt that Jim Collins had pulled off a master stroke and I would ask Ken one thing before I wandered off back to my desk.

"What the hell did you think you were doing?"

Jim would chortle.

Ziggy played Guitar....

A short moment to jump back in time.

In late 1971, when I was 14, A school friend of mine, David Whitacker, loaned me the single "Space Oddity" with the B side "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" and shortly afterwards I saved my pocket money and bought "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album.

Whitacker was part of a group of friends at the time, there was me of course, Andrew Swift, and Dave Burt and later an outsider, Joe Haynes. We all had a little music thing going and those first three guys introduced me to a few things, Bowie being one of them, and of course, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath.

And Gin.....

Joe Haynes was a different kind of friend, he tried many times to introduce me to girls and unfortunately for me at the time, I resisted. 

Joe didn't and he went off and found his own friend, Katrina Burns.

I think Ziggy Stardust was the first "real" music album I owned. The following year, by mail order, I bought Aladdin Sane and it was another of those albums that I played to death along with "No Secrets" by Carly Simon, an album whose cover made me realise that Joe Haynes was probably right.

One clever online person recently said that the death of David Bowie was merely the "tip of the iceberg" and perhaps he be right, methinks we'll be having a tsunami of dead rockers in the next few years and I sincerely hope I outlive them all.

I am however, sad that I outlived my good friend Joe Haynes.

Ten Days

I have to take a moment out of the story and personally thank the amazing David Bowie for providing a large part of the soundtrack of my life.

Love.
Peace.