Boring Job 2

[ten0rman]

Yes, it's really strange how life pans out.

Initially, it was suggested (don't know now how or why) that I might like the Police. Went the interview with the Chief Constable and got told I had the maths level of an 11 year old. At that time, yes I was poor, but not that bad - 6 months later I gained a respectable level in GCE maths, and many years later C&G Maths C.

Around May/June of my leaving year, my mother saw this advert for posts of Youth-in-Training. ie apprentice telephone technicians. I said I didn't fancy it. Mother insisted, so I wrote a dictated letter. Sat the entrance exam, went for interview where I was quizzed on why I had not answered one question on the Physics paper (I had no idea at all of the subject matter - how does a battery charger work), and was offered a job. No questions at all about GCE results.

Also went to the local Careers Advice Service, and was told that the GPO training was very good, but very narrow in that they only trained you for what they wanted. It was also suggested that I should try the local electricity board (they didn't want me) and the CEGB who apparently had the best/widest training scheme. CEGB said yes provided I got 4 'O' levels to include Maths & English. I only got three, and failed English. So I was left with the one job - apprentice telephone technician.

Over the next 35 years I took the C&G Telecomms Technicians course and eventually gained the top level qualification - Full Technological Certificate. At work I progressed through being the man who came to mend your telephone, to the man who you spoke to when reporting your fault, to strowger exchange maintenance, to a specialist group dealing with poorly performing exchanges and working on specialist projects including circuit design, and then finally to being an exchange planner before taking early retirement. So mother was right in making me apply for that initial post.

So what was the job like? Actually very good, but as the Careers Advice Service said, the training was indeed very narrow in that I was purely an exchange man - I know very little about all the other aspects that go to making up a telephone network. I met some very clever and knowledgable technicians - it helped that the average pay where I then lived was relatively poor compared to that of an exchange technician, not so in London, which meant that there was no real incentive for a good technician to go elsewhere. Looking back, I found a lot of the work quite easy, indeed sometimes too easy. That's not to say I simply sailed through without a care in the world, for example I required a metaphorical kick up the backside to get me back to Technical College to complete the C&G course. And there were things that did go wrong, but overall I enjoyed it.

And as someone has already mentioned, leaving/retiring, meant the loss of that very valuable ability of being able to find someone with whom you could have a chat about any problem, especially non-telecom related.

Probably the most dismaying thing is that all that learning is now obsolete. But that's life.

Thoughtfully yours,

ten0rman

[ten0rman]

There's another point which might be worth discussing, possibly on another thread, but I'll leave that to the moderators.

A few years ago I got in contact with a girl I had been at school with - we were in the same class for four years before I dropped a stream. She was always top, or near the top in all the exams whilst I languished near the bottom. She stayed on to do A levels and then university studying Maths whereas I left after O levels, did an apprenticeship and part-time Technical College.

I understand that following university, she did teacher training, and as part of that spent some time at one particular school which she never left until she retired. I, on the otherhand, moved around doing different jobs, and I remember being quite surprised that she never moved. However, on reflection, I realised that I was probably the odd one out as a substantial number of the people I met at work never moved away from their home area.

I would be interested to know what other people think about the above. Is it more usual to stay put, or to move around, for example.

Regards,

ten0rman

[kiloran]

I would be interested to know what other people think about the above. Is it more usual to stay put, or to move around, for example.

ten0rman

No idea what is normal. In my case, I could not wait to move out of the midlands, so moved north when I finished my studies and have now lived over half of my life in scotland (with 4 years in the south of France), and I feel much more at home here in the north. My sister, her hubby, all my cousins and all their offspring have never moved from their hometowns. On the other hand, all my wife's siblings, and all their kids have moved away from their hometown and spread to the far corners of the planet.

--kiloran

[Slarti]

I spent 16 years IT contracting. One contract at a totally ghastl;y client/environment I was in a small support team. Chatting one morning we were talking about working from from home and one guy said he wouldn't want to work from home because he would miss the social life at work.

I thought that summed the entire shambolic place up. Whenever I hear that company's name mentioned in context with any projects I shudder still

In my 20 odd years consulting I often found people who didn't need to work, financially, but who fought tooth and nail to remain in "in office" based work, as they didn't know what they would do if they didn't come to work. I would say that a good manager would have got rid of 75% of them.

Slarti

[tjh290633]

It was usual for many years to stay working for the same employer virtually all one's working life. I knew some who had only ever worked for ICI or GEC, for example. Pension funds assumed that this would be the case.

I think that one of the drivers of change was the increased level of companies being taken over or merging. If your job was duplicated, then you could be laid off, let go, made redundant or just fired. The other driver was the need to change employer to get promotion.

I changed employer on four occasions. The first was because the reason for which I had been recruited had ceased to exist. The second was because a vacancy had occurred for which I was invited to apply. The third was because I saw a job advertised which I decided to go for. The last was because I was made redundant. The duration of those jobs were 2, 4, 5, 22 and 8 years respectively. In the third I was promoted once, in the fourth my role changed a number of times and my job title kept changing, sometimes having more than one. The company also changed names several times with two takeovers and one demerger. Life was interesting.

My colleagues often had similar experiences. In many cases the reason for moving was the desire for promotion, not possible where you were because of an incumbent. Lots of other reasons, of course.

TJH

[AleisterCrowley]

I've worked for the same 'organisation' for 25 years, but five different companies ...

[swill453]

I've worked for the same 'organisation' for 25 years, but five different companies ...

My brother's done similar, but for 40 years. Probably about 6 companies, without moving desk (virtually). Never had to apply for a job or go for an interview since he left college, and he's about to retire.

Scott.

[redsturgeon]

We had a big clear out last week of papers and files that we have collected over the last 20 years or so.

Going through some of my wife's old work papers before burning them, I came across the paperwork produced for an industrial tribunal brought for unfair dismissal of one of her direct reports.

This person was a field based salesperson who had been found not to be going out to work for most days over a period of many months, she had moved over 50 miles off her territory without telling anyone (in contravention of her contract) and had falsified records and expenses over that time. The sheaf of papers was about two inches thick and must have taken hundreds of hours of management time to prepare.

The case was eventually settled "on the court steps". What a waste of time.

John

[hermit100]

I am retired now from paid work but when I did work I had 2 jobs that I absolutely loved for the first couple of years but in each case a combination of politics, power games and incompetent management changed things so much that they became unbearable. My most recent 'proper job' was both boring and pointless and I took early retirement to spend my time doing something that I found worthwhile and fulfilling.

I now work much harder, and longer hours, than I ever did before, doing something that I don't get paid for at all, indeed it often costs me money, but I love it.

[brightncheerful]

is anyone actually in a job where they love every moment of it?

Yes. Some days I love it more but mostly I just love it.

[muldonach]

I don't imagine there are many people who could claim to have loved every single minute of every single day but I could not claim to have too many regrets.

Went to sea at 16 and still there 44 years later, every rank from apprentice to master, served on many varieties of vessel but principally on offshore support vessels with a few stints abroad in management and operations roles. Consultancy work over the last 14 years or so with a good variety of projects.

As a sideline we bought a small farm in 1999 - definitely never bored there!

And then there's a few shares to keep an eye on

[midnightcatprowl]

Consider myself very lucky to have always had work I enjoyed - well except for being a 'Saturday Girl' in British Home Stores while I was still at school in the 1960s. How BHS lasted so long I shall never know! And then there was summer holiday work in a dreadful department store called Parishes (sp?) in Gateshead - a store now long gone and, in my opinion, for good reason. Being a Christmas postie and a barmaid were quite entertaining (at least in short doses) and I even enjoyed a short inglorious career as a Tea Lady in the Head Office of what was then Procter and Gamble during which I managed to spill a cup of tea all down the wall of the Managing Director's office on the day he came back from sick leave after a heart attack.

I very vividly remember Careers Advice at school. Teachers had no input at all - at least officially. A Careers Officer was sent by the LEA and we all got a compulsory careers interview - which lasted a good 15 minutes or so - whether we wanted one or not. It became clear from the experience of some of the girls that the local pickle factory was in need of labour.... I'd decided that I wanted to study psychology with a view to becoming a Clinical or possibly Prison Service Psychologist. I had a good idea what would be entailed in the course (courtesy of an ex boyfriend who was already embarked on studying psychology at university and of reading up on the subject for myself). I had chosen the right courses of study to get the exam qualifications I need to get into a psychology course and I had every prospect of gaining the required grades at A Level. Bizarrely the Careers Advisor spent the whole of our meeting trying to persuade me I actually wanted to study Sociology with a view to becoming a Social Worker which I absolutely did not. The Advisor didn't seem to take into consideration things such as personality type. I was actually by personality and academic skills very suited to being a Psychologist and totally unsuited to being a Social Worker. I just ignored the 'advice' and fortunately had the support of my parents, they hadn't the faintest idea what a Psychologist did but they knew I'd researched the issue thoroughly and that I knew my own mind. I still feel sad about a girl who was quite a close friend at that stage. She desperately wanted to go into engineering but had no family support (frankly her parents didn't care if she lived or died except that if she died no one would have done the ironing or minded her baby brother). This was 1965/6 or thereabouts. No support from the Careers Advisor who was only interested in 'suitable careers for girls' and no support from the school - in the end she was talked by teachers into going to a College of Education to train as an RE teacher of all things. I lost contact with her after a last New Year's Eve party when we were both back home for the holidays in our first year of college and university. I fear the training or teaching career probably ended badly but I'm sure she'd have made a good engineer.

Having shook off the Careers Advisor the next thing when I was in Lower Sixth Form was being stopped in the corridor by one of the only three male teachers in the school - he was a history teacher and he expressed concern that I was proposing to study psychology because 'it is such an unfinished subject' - he was clearly baffled by my response of 'yes that's one of the attractions'. Poor chap evidently thought that nothing more would be added to the body of knowledge of history either! Then, of course, there were the female teachers who tried to persuade me that it would be so much 'nicer' if I went to a local Teacher Training College and stayed close to home (and by implication work close to home too). I didn't, at that time, have any plans to be a teacher, plus I wasn't so stupid as not to have found out that, even if I changed my mind, a teacher with a degree (long before it became an all degree profession) earned far more from day 1 and had much better prospects for promotion. I also, for a variety of reasons, wanted to put as much distance between myself and my home as I could, plus I thought it well worth while moving across the country to the course which was 'just right' instead of to the course which was 'make do'.

In time, and via some work experience I did as research for my third year dissertation while doing my first degree, I changed my career objective to being an Educational Psychologist which in turn required that I qualified first as a teacher (automatically a better paid teacher as a graduate with post graduate teacher training of course) and gained teaching experience. I really loved my teaching career (many teachers do actually really love teaching no matter what the others may say) and almost stayed in it but in the end I got a post as a Trainee Educational Psychologist meaning I worked for a time as a trainee for a local authority and then they paid the fees for me to take a Master of Science in Educational Psychology and that was my career for the next 20+ years. I enjoyed my second career but towards the end I was running out of the emotional (and to some extent the physical) puff which is required by that job. In my mid-forties and already a volunteer in the fairtrade sector I surprised myself by taking the huge risk of owning and running my own fairtrade retail business. Often very stressful but also very enjoyable and stimulating. I finally retired - very reluctantly - aged 66 when my shop started to run into financial trouble and I couldn't find a way out and had to decide to get out before it became a financial disaster.

I found the first year after retiring one of very mixed feelings. On the one hand I knew I'd made the right decision and it was a relief to be out of something which had become increasingly worrying and stressful though at the same time still enjoyable. On the other hand if a fairy godmother had turned up with the right amount of money I'd have been out looking for new shop premises the next day - still would in fact. It was nice to have a rest. It was nice to spend time doing all the things I hadn't had time to do when I was running a business. But at the same time what I really, really, wanted to do was what I actually had been doing. Today I'm actually spending a lot of my time doing it all over again and loving it - long story but this time around I'm doing the work and another organisation is taking the financial risk (actually they are not taking any risk at all as we are doing really well but that's another story). I have the pleasure of doing what I love but mainly on a part-time basis and I also have another couple of voluntary roles which are quite demanding but time consuming only at intervals rather than all the time. I suppose this comes out that I'm 'working' if you add up all the hours perhaps the equivalent of three days per week which leaves me some leisure time. The extra time is good and I enjoy it but if that fairy godmother came along I don't think I could say 'no'...

Looking back over my life I do regard it as a great asset to have had work/career that I've enjoyed and which has meant a great deal to me. That is different of course to some particular work places along the way even if the work itself remained fulfilling! One thing I do regret? Well my father came from a family where almost all the members had been small business people running pubs and small hotels and which most of them enjoyed very much though I was not aware of that while growing up. My Dad - the menopause baby of the family born long after the rest - never got the self-employment bug and brought up in a situation where his mother was the sole financial support of a large family first by taking in lodgers and later by running a small commercial hotel, his memories of 'business' were sad and bad. He was always an employee (and a very unhappy employee) and he never passed on to me the interest in running a business while my mother (and her mother) had no experience of anything but working for someone else in poorly paid positions. Later in life I can remember being at a rare gathering of my father's family for a wedding anniversary and someone asking a great aunt (whose husband had been the captain of a small ship and able to provide his family with a pleasant home in a pleasant area) what she regretted in life and her immediate answer was that she had never run her own business, never had a little pub or hotel! She absolutely knew the work involved, she'd been used pretty much as slave labour in her own parent's small business before she married, but the one thing she regretted was never having had her own small business! I suspect that my own very risky launch into self employment in mid-life may have been partially stimulated by that conversation