Spanish Practices - Real Life in Spain
Society & Culture:Documentary
Today Scream and the Gas Board
Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.
To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day 36 Scream and the Gas Board
Day 36 of our Spanish lockdown and the wind is blowing across the sea and through the mountain. It can be very windy here, I believe before this coast was called the Costa Tropical it was called the Costa Wind.
It rattles everything, plays musical notes through the glass balustrade and generally gets you down.
Breakfast and then the three good legs cat walk on his lead, in which, yet again he fell down the mountain trying to get to next door. I think the problem with male cats if they have a wanderlust and see each door or fence as a new opportunity to increase their territory. As you know we try and keep him away from feral cats, they sometimes have cat leukaemia, which can be passed on by a bite or scratch.
I returned and did an Audition for a voiceover agency. I do a lot of those and a bit like going for an acting audition – mostly you are wasting your time, with only a five percent success rate after an audition. At least I don’t have to travel somewhere and sit in front of bored producers.
Petra Facetimed yesterday and said to me “You haven’t broken anything for a while.” Well that jinxed the afternoon when I discovered not one but both of our spare microphones had stopped working. Both I think have succumbed to the extremes of heat here, now only my Rode microphone is working OK – I have a feeling that because it is made in Australia they design them to cope with high 30s temperature. I have ordered another, it is coming from a third party company on Amazon, so fingers crossed.
Yesterday I was talking about Mrs Findings knicker display to the workmen building the new part of my Secondary school. I left school at sixteen in 1977. Before the exams in the blazing heat of the summer we were given careers advice. This consisted of a sweaty bloke from the employment exchange trying to palm off ten apprenticeships to the Gas Board, I was tipped off by the boy ahead of my.
“Now than.” He said “A lad like you could do well to get yourself an apprenticeship, there is a job for life waiting for you at the Gas Board sonny.”
“I am awfully sorry but the smell of gas makes me vomit.” I said. “Oh..” he replied. “Do you have any other suggestions?” I asked. He rummaged around a sheaf of papers he was carrying, looking up at me every now and then. “Mmm not really.” - so that was my careers advice over with.
It was my Grandfather who forced me to write to Marconi, the local electronics company in town.. in fact the home of radio. Mr Marconi had decided on Chelmsford as his first wireless factory, god knows why. I guess being Italian he just picked a town near London.
I wrote a letter in fountain pen, on blue Basildon Bond writing paper, asking if there were any apprenticeship opportunities. Secretly hoping they would say no.
Just my luck, they wrote to say please attend an induction test at their Writtle Road factory, about five minutes from where I lived..damn!
I went along and there was a motley collection of similarly feckless teenagers all standing outside a classroom. We had a number of tests to carry out, simple maths, some drawing, and a practical test of assembling a unit with only the instructions and a diagram. I successfully completed this test and was surprised to discover I was the first to finish.
I was allowed to leave and my fate was sealed, I was invited to join the company as a “Wireman Assembler.” I actually enjoyed my time at Marconi, they were strict but I learnt a great deal about electronics and I was really interested in the Broadcast section where they made Telecine machines, that turned film into TV pictures and of course television cameras.. huge coffins with a lens at one end and a black and white monitor the other, that moved around on compressed air.
We got to play and see the cameras in action which was a lot of fun, so at the end of the first year you could decide which part of the company you would go and work in and I asked for Broadcast. They gave me Marine.. Marine! Building transceivers for Navy Ships.. I was also “shipped” to a far-off factory behind the local paper – The Essex Chronicle – the place was a dull, dismal dump full of middle aged ladies silently building circuit boards.
Although I did well academically – I was really bored – I remember I went into the room with the flow solder machine in it. Where a conveyor belt took priceless circuit boards down into a vat of molten solder, where the board kissed the solder and the components were soldered onto the board.
I didn’t know what I was doing, and mucked around with a few of the controls, then left.
The next day there was a middle-aged lady scream from the room. Everybody gathered around to see if someone had fallen in the molten vat.. no, much worse. Middle-aged Marconi Lady had fed the machine with thousands of pounds worth of circuit boards and they had gone along their merry journey and straight down into the bubbling molten solder – disappearing into a burning mass.
Nobody was blamed, but I handed in my notice. My foreman Mr Poulson said: “What are your plans?” “I’m going to work in radio.” He said “You daft pratt, you’ve got a job here for life!”
As it turned out Marconi went bust some years later and it was radio that actually gave me the job for life.
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