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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.\\xa0\\xa0

To find out more:\\xa0 https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 36 Scream and the Gas Board

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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.

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It rattles everything, plays musical notes through the glass balustrade and generally gets you down.

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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.\\xa0 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.

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I returned and did an Audition for a voiceover agency.\\xa0 I do a lot of those and a bit like going for an acting audition \\u2013 mostly you are wasting your time, with only a five percent success rate after an audition.\\xa0 At least I don\\u2019t have to travel somewhere and sit in front of bored producers.

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Petra Facetimed yesterday and said to me \\u201cYou haven\\u2019t broken anything for a while.\\u201d\\xa0 Well that jinxed the afternoon when I discovered not one but both of our spare microphones had stopped working.\\xa0 Both I think have succumbed to the extremes of heat here, now only my Rode microphone is working OK \\u2013 I have a feeling that because it is made in Australia they design them to cope with high 30s temperature.\\xa0 I have ordered another, it is coming from a third party company on Amazon, so fingers crossed.

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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.\\xa0 Before the exams in the blazing heat of the summer we were given careers advice.\\xa0 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.

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\\u201cNow than.\\u201d He said \\u201cA 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.\\u201d

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\\u201cI am awfully sorry but the smell of gas makes me vomit.\\u201d I said.\\xa0 \\u201cOh..\\u201d he replied.\\xa0 \\u201cDo you have any other suggestions?\\u201d I asked. \\xa0He rummaged around a sheaf of papers he was carrying, looking up at me every now and then.\\xa0 \\u201cMmm not really.\\u201d\\xa0 - so that was my careers advice over with.

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It was my Grandfather who forced me to write to Marconi, the local electronics company in town.. in fact the home of radio.\\xa0 Mr Marconi had decided on Chelmsford as his first wireless factory, god knows why.\\xa0 I guess being Italian he just picked a town near London.

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I wrote a letter in fountain pen, on blue Basildon Bond writing paper, asking if there were any apprenticeship opportunities.\\xa0 Secretly hoping they would say no.

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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!

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I went along and there was a motley collection of similarly feckless teenagers all standing outside a classroom.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 I successfully completed this test and was surprised to discover I was the first to finish.\\xa0

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I was allowed to leave and my fate was sealed, I was invited to join the company as a \\u201cWireman Assembler.\\u201d 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.

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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.\\xa0 They gave me Marine.. Marine! Building transceivers for Navy Ships.. I was also \\u201cshipped\\u201d to a far-off factory behind the local paper \\u2013 The Essex Chronicle \\u2013 the place was a dull, dismal dump full of middle aged ladies silently building circuit boards.

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Although I did well academically \\u2013 I was really bored \\u2013 I remember I went into the room with the flow solder machine in it.\\xa0 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.

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I didn\\u2019t know what I was doing, and mucked around with a few of the controls, then left.

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The next day there was a middle-aged lady scream from the room.\\xa0 Everybody gathered around to see if someone had fallen in the molten vat.. no, much worse.\\xa0 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 \\u2013 disappearing into a burning mass.

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Nobody was blamed, but I handed in my notice. My foreman Mr Poulson said: \\xa0\\u201cWhat are your plans?\\u201d \\u201cI\\u2019m going to work in radio.\\u201d\\xa0 He said \\u201cYou daft pratt, you\\u2019ve got a job here for life!\\u201d

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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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