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.

Musical Chairs Part Ducks

I believe it was the Challenger Tail Cone Tank internal loads report that I had to completely redo following one of the "killer tag" checking events, fortunately for me, I could do repeat stuff like that pretty fast so although it subtracted time from the schedule, I could work at "burst" mode to fix my stupid mistakes.

The error I had made was to reference ultimate loads with the limit loads rolling radius curves, so all the dimensions of compressed tires for the side load cases were incorrect, and incorrect in a bad way as the extra load produced more tire stroke which meant the internal loads were unconservative.

Regardless of me messing up that report initially, it was directly due to that experience on the Challenger aircraft that I was enlisted to work on derivatives of the Canadair Regional which was a similar aircraft but with different CG envelope and increased weights. The proposals for various new work came and went and I was busy on the F/A-18 NLG work when Dowty won the project for the next version of the aircraft, plus there was another proposal for the Global Express on the cards.

This was the start of an interesting six months at the tail end of 1993, as Jim Collins, who was our beloved Stress Office Manager, and good friend, retired from that position. Jim was always in his heart a job shopper, and even as the manager of the Stress Office (not the chief) he was quite a laid back individual and we would all enjoy his office banter.

It was sad to see him go.

The new project meant that Dowty needed bums on seats and there was such a huge influx of contractors that it presented a major problem in that busy time.

There were not enough seats for the required bums.

The nameless ones.

In the last post you will have seen me refer to "my boss" and not the person by name, well, the truth is that in the coming year or so of this account, people who know me will know who that particular "my boss" was, and that although he was a very good boss, he ended up doing something quite unforgiveable to me, so I won't be using his name.

I will also not be using someone elses name, who was actually an accomplice in the same future deed, and although I in particular agreed that all was forgiven with this secondary person many, many years afterwards, in fact, I never really did and merely "went with the flow" of circumstance.

It's just drama, and I think the blog is more about fun.

In 1991 when I returned to Dowty, I promised I would be back for at least two, perhaps three years as a permanent employee. I kept the promise and in the next few entries I will describe the set of events, which to me are quite comical, that led to me leaving once again for the realms of the job shopper world and of course, a much more lucrative career.