300 Not Out

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Ducts, Waunfawr Telephone Exchange - image ©Kel Harvey

 

Well, here I am at another little milestone; actually two for the price of one, in fact. This is post number three hundred since I started this blog in March and this week is officially the first of retirement, my gardening leave having finished at the end of the month. The final ritual of handing back keys, pass cards, laptop and phone complete, my former manager Rob and I had a good jangle about all and sundry over coffee; all in all a very enjoyable hour or two.

On balance it has been a pretty good fifteen plus years with the company and I will definitely miss the craic, if not the winter working. I knew last winter that it would be my final one with the firm as just summoning up the motivation to get out of the van in the teeth of a gale and driving rain/sleet/hail just got too hard.

The tipping point was during one such maelstrom last year, on a darkening Saturday afternoon in Capel Uchaf, Clynnogfawr. Damage Report Overhead, right at the top of the hill. Normally just a make safe and go. Except that it was a 100 pair aerial cable down low over the road. The wind was so strong and the cable so heavy - it being 0.6 mm copper and so a meaty bugger - it took me nearly half an hour to lasso it and haul it into the pole it had come off and lash it down with rope to make it safe enough to deal with. After many attempts by the duty manager to find anyone from a cabling gang to help, we decided I'd have to cut it, which I duly did, knowing full well that it would knock everyone off upstream of the break.

A few days later I met up with the Second Stage crew that had picked up the repair on it and they proceeded to give me a hard time, asking why the hell I'd cut it at both ends [which I hadn't:  I'd cut it at the middle pole and made the ends safe in the field at one end and on the grass verge at the other]. It looked like the farmer who owned the field by the verge had chopped it and thrown the length into his field. As there was a fair few quids-worth of copper in the cable, it would have been good salvage. That of course is pure speculation, your honour.

That afternoon convinced me that the decision to retire I'd made earlier that year was the right one. It's been a good job, though not without it's faults, same as any other; but like other workmates who've retired this year, I'm looking forward to the next phase of my life and continuing to expand on the stupidly eclectic CV that has been the story of my life since leaving school. So, there we are, then: onwards and sideways, as ever.
 

Comments

  1. Joe Stoner5 November 2020 at 06:19

    Don'tcha mean lateral my literal mate?:)
    I had to retire from my sound engineering "side-line" cos me back's not upto it anymore. I retired from diving to go back to sound engineering in the 80s 'cos it wasn't paying enuff for a family of four. Whilst diving I was insulated by a dry suit and enjoyed being so, mostly! I often wore just a wetsuit hood and distinctly remember being "tethered" facing up-stream on Welsh Water job, on the sillway of a weir in Bangor upon Dee (screwing down cover plates) with melt water pissing into my hood on either side of my mask where it was exquisitely painfull on the temples!:) I could manage 20 minutes before the headache (just like a severe migrane) most of the team managed only ten but then I'm a stupid sod!! Industry and enterprise are built on the bravery/stupidity of the workers!:( My son Jim nearly had his head "knocked off his shoulders" by the cowboy outfit that he works for they're re-fitting Tesco stores all over the country. They were using a hauling mechanism to pull hundreds of meters of heavy armoured cable into new ducting around a fucking corner when the inevitable happened and the wire broke and caught him just a glancing blow, luckily! There's a point to this and my anecdote in that my job on the weir should have been done as part of routine maintenence when the river was low (or NO flow) in the summer [my diver mate Tommy was killed in a different but at root similar fashion] and Jim's team now do not pull the cables because they've out-sourced it to another, hopefully better resourced and trained outfit. The point IS that engineers (& now H&S "officers") should know the dangers in a job and obviate them BUT they are just the grunts (remember the "It's just a bunch of connections!" comment by one of your OR "bosses"?) and the Masters of Bugger All that run EVERYTHING are dangerous and irresponsible and SHORT TERM idiots, that includes our politicians, who can only see "savings" that are "good" but do not see or listen to the dangers in it. Classic case of this blindingly stupid short-termism: the afore mentioned UK leading retailer and cash cow for it's investors have emergency generators to keep the frozen peas from unfreezing when the "lights go out" Jim's job here in Bangor depended on them being able to cut off the mains to these circuits and have the "Uninterruptable Power Supply" gennies do their job: seems that some TWAT or TWAT system has not checked that they work in YEARS! So what happened when they need them: fuck all!! You can't say that Tesco can't afford to have good systems, they obviously can and thought that they DID but stupidity obviated the UPS. In this case Jim "went home early" and nobody was hurt but I was and Tommy was needlessly killed!

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