Go and Get a Bucket of Steam

Following on from yesterday’s blog where I explained how a stuck yoga position managed to help get me a job at Rootes/Chrysler, it was a strange feeling a couple of years later when I was one of the more experienced trainees watching the new recruits being put through their paces. Once they’d been hired, they immediately spent the first two weeks in the mechanical workshop under the tutelage of the more experienced guys – like me! Thereafter it was a complete culture shock for them – probably like going to boarding school and being a fag - without the ‘bending over bit’ I hasten to add.

Anyway, we made their lives hell. A typical trick was to send them off (to a known and pre-warned associate at the other end of the factory which was over a mile long) to get a bucket of steam and after an hour they’d come back, completely apologetic that they had failed in the task. ‘Ok then – go back to the tool store (same place) and get me a left handed screwdriver then’, was the next task issued. Again, they would return, all apologetic saying the tool store didn’t have any in but they would get some next week! Hilarious!

Now remember the saying, ‘what goes around, comes around’? Well, when I got to the Glasgow Transport Executive, I was totally stitched up……like a kipper in fact. I’d arrived there as some sort of hot-shot. A work study guy who had implemented all the newest production facilities in one of the most modern factories in Europe. Somebody who would introduce these 20^th century techniques to the dark, Victorian, 19^th century depots from which hundreds of Glasgow’s green and yellow buses exited every morning. I arrived on the Monday morning, suited and booted and was introduced to everybody in the department. I was given my free bus pass (I’m just waiting for my 2^nd one !) and my white coat and was advised that, although unusual, I was to go off to Anniesland Bus Depot where there was an urgent job waiting for me. They explained that although I had been brought in to update the methods and production techniques they used, I needed to see the old systems for myself.

When I got there, the depot manager explained the task - I needed to establish the time it took ‘old Jimmy’ to sweep the yard. No problem I thought……. until I saw the yard. It was about 2 acres in size. It was humungous! I was then introduced to ‘old Jimmy’ who was not too keen to have a white-coated, management, ponce (as he called me) following him about but I explained the principle of work study and we agreed to disagree.

We started. Old Jimmy sweeping away and going off to get his shovel every now and again which he propped up against the furthest away wall. When his shovel was full, he’d carry it off to the wheelbarrow which, strangely enough was parked against another wall. After transferring the dirt to the barrow, he’d then go and put his shovel back against the wall. After about 10 minutes of this I stopped him and asked why he had to prop his shovel up against one wall and his barrow against another wall. ‘To stop the buses running over them son’, he said. Diplomatically as I could, I said from now on he’d keep his shovel in the barrow and his barrow beside him. Once the barrow was full he could empty it. He growled something nasty, realised the game was up and then carried on in the prescribed manner. I was triumphant.

We carried on for the rest of the day, and the next and the next. I called the office to clarify how long they wanted me to stay there but my manager merely referred me to the depot manager who said I needed to work out a time for the whole yard. And so I carried on watching poor old Jimmy sweeping the yard, hour after hour, day after day….for two whole weeks. In rain and shine he swept. When it rained I watched from one of the parked buses, stopwatch going round and round the clock face in that monotonous way it did.

I returned to the office at the end of those two weeks to see everybody smirking. Laughing behind papers. Guffawing in little groups in the corners of the large, open plan office. I was called into the manager’s office and asked to show him my reams and reams of paperwork. ‘I don’t know where you’ve been’, he said. ‘We normally measure old Jimmy sweeping 20 square feet of yard and then multiply it up’, he said. ‘You should have been back here two weeks ago. Not a good start for a hot-shot would you say, Thomas’.  As I left and closed the door I could hear him in hysterics.

The picture is of ……..a left handed screwdriver !!!! No – it’s not a joke. Apparently they do exist now.