Og's Blog Pt. 02

They built thirty of them at the water's edge so they could be transported by barge.

All would have been well but:

The depth of water beside the concrete blocks was only one foot deep at the highest tide. No barge could get anywhere near. The blocks had sat unused from 1944 until now.

The local council wanted to use their seafront promenade obstructed by the concrete blocks. Please would we remove them, please?

They were too wide and too heavy for the nearby roads. So what did I suggest?

I told my boss that I would remove them if he didn't ask any questions. He was doubtful, but agreed, giving me a week.

I spoke to my friends in the Royal Marine Commandos. They held a night exercise, coming by inflatable boats bringing explosives. In the early hours of one Sunday morning thirty concrete blocks were reduced to a pile of rubble. A scrap metal dealer removed all the metal reinforcing and a Navy bulldozer pushed the rubble into the muddy water's edge, giving the council another foot of promenade. In the morning the commandos, the metal dealer, the bulldozer and the large blocks had all gone.

The local residents complained about losing sleep but no one knew who had done the dirty deed.

My boss was unhappy that I had caused a whole town to lose sleep but as long as he didn't get the blame he accepted the fait accompli.

19 Apr 2020

Locks, safes and too many keys.

One of my responsibilities was the supply of security devices including locks and safes.

At the end of every ship's commission when a crew handed over to a new commander and crew, all safes had to be removed and replaced by other ones.

The returned safes had to be opened in the presence of an officer - me - who had to certify that the safe was empty of secret papers and cash. If not, the officer responsible would be facing a charge of neglect of duty unless there had been an incident which had been reported. The usual one was a mistake when changing the setting of a combination lock which had to be done monthly.

If the combination lock would not open after resetting the locksmith could usually work out what the ship's officer had done wrong and try a set of numbers that might be an alternative. If not, the combination lock had to be cut off and replaced.

Over a couple of years I had a masterclass in lock-picking and how to defeat a combination lock.

Almost every time the safe was empty but once, hidden under a drawer, I found a French 10 franc note - about one pound.

But one aircraft carrier had a major problem. The ship's main safe room, built into the structure when the carrier was built, had a jammed combination lock. It couldn't be opened without cutting through the ship's hull and all the money to pay the crew and buy fuel was inside - about one hundred thousand pounds. The captain had to get money from the British Embassy in Rome to keep him going until he returned to the UK.

I went on board with the locksmith. Inside five minutes he had opened the lock. I and the ship's captain had to count and list all the money, which took a long time. I gave him a receipt before walking back through the dockyard to the finance department with more money than I had ever handled before.

Small ships' captains had a problem. They held the spare keys to all the ship's security devices - a substantial bunch which was really too much to have in a pocket. The Navy had a solution. They would fit a small security box in the captain's sea cabin. Each box would have a combination lock and a single small key that the captain could wear around his neck.

If the captain was lost - the security box could be opened by cutting with tools available on any ship but not without showing that it had been cut open. There would have to be a reason for such drastic action.

But when the new security boxes were delivered from the manufacturer they had misunderstood the Navy's instructions. Instead of one key, each box had two - as the manufacturer did for everything they made. The second keys had to be destroyed by hand of an officer - me.

I had the whole resources of a dockyard to use. My first thought was the steam hammer - 200-ton pressure. I put each small key under the hammer. The key, normally about half an inch long, was now a very thin metal disc about ten inches diameter. But the shape of the key and the number was still clearly visible even if grossly distorted. If one knew what size the key had been, a replica could be made from my flattened versions.

But I had one more thing to use. I took the flattened discs to the top of the blast furnace and using very long tongs, dropped them into the molten metal - keys destroyed!

19 Apr 2020

Staff references

1. I had been an officer for a whole week but I was still a trainee, I was probably the youngest of my rank in the whole UK civil service in a post-graduate position at age eighteen and a half - another long story.

The officer in charge of the personnel unit went on leave and I was asked to cover for him while he was away. I knew nothing but I knew the staff members were experienced. I survived the week without any fuck-ups but I had to compose a reference for a recently resigned employee who had gone to work for the local council.

I had never met the woman but I had copies of her annual appraisals. She had been very well regarded as an efficient employee who could be considered for promotion to the rank I was - when she had enough years' service - about five more. But positions at my rank required that the employee be prepared to take a post anywhere in the UK or abroad. She didn't want that as she was married and her husband's work was local.

That is why she had left to join the local council where she might be promoted but stay locally.

I wrote a fulsome reference. Two years later, when I had moved towns I received a letter from the chief officer of her local council. In it he thanked me for her reference. He said that they had been surprised at how good that reference was, most unlike a usual one from the civil service, but every word had proved to be correct. She had now been promoted twice since joining the council and was expected to rise to a very senior position eventually. Thanks again.

2, The UK's disabled register can be a pain. One of my employees had lost a leg to above the knee in a motorcycle accident and now had an artifical one. If you didn't know, you wouldn't necessarily be aware that one leg was false.

He was registered as disabled but not claiming any benefits since he was holding a full time well paid job. His disabilty only meant that his employment status was protected.

But - every three years the civil service would send a letter to his employer - me - asking 'Is he still disabled?' I had to write 'No. His leg hasn't grown back' and that was it for another three years.

3. One of our very senior scientific employees retired. He didn't want to stop working completely so he applied for a job as a laboratory assistant in the local high school. He submitted a bare CV, omitting almost all of his qualifications and experience. He was interviewed and appointed. His headmaster wrote to me asking for a reference as the last employer. They had personal references and were very satisfied with his work but the local education department had insisted that an employer's reference was essential.

I rang him up at home. It was awkward. Should I give a standard reference which would give a lot of information about his past work, or a modified one?

We agreed that it was preferable that the reference was a normal one. So I wrote it:

Three times emeritus professor; twice Ph.d, Head of a Royal Society etc. etc.

On receipt the school's headmaster telephoned me:

'I knew he was more than he said but this is embarrassing. He has more qualifications than the whole of my science department. '

I replied:

"But he likes the work and is enjoying it. You have an asset for a low pay."

The headmaster agreed but thereafter, the lab assistant instead of being called a lab assistant was known as 'professor' and he held those three professorships part-time until he died.

19 Apr 2020

Og's near disaster

I have just had a phone call from an old friend who was with me in the 1960s when we both worked in a dockyard.

It reminded me of an event where I nearly caused a major incident.

At the time I was the system manager for an IBM mainframe computer - high tech at the time.

My friend was in a neighbouring office and had gone out to get sandwiches for lunch. While he was gone, someone dropped a cigarette end into a wastepaper basket which caught fire. No one noticed until papers on the desk caught fire too. They evacuated, sounding the fire alarm.

On hearing the fire alarm I told my twenty-five staff to evacuate, which they did.

When trained by IBM, I had been told that, in the event of fire, I was to pull a large red handle on the side of the main processing unit which would cut power and avoid electrical damage.

But that handle was connected to a busbar and there were hundreds of wires soldered to it. Pulling the handle would rip all those connections apart. It would take three months to rebuild the computer and the only alternative computer was 100 miles away.

That computer, like ours, was in use 12 hours a day. I would have to drive 100 miles each way every day to use their computer at night and most of my staff couldn't work.

I was standing there, as the smoke got thicker, wondering just how long I could defer pulling that handle.

My friend returned with his sandwiches. He grabbed a fire extinguisher and put out the flames before the dockyard's fire brigade arrived. He then walked into to the computer room to see me standing there with my hand on the red handle.

Hew asked what I was doing. I explained and the consequences of pulling that handle.

"Why don't you turn off the main switch?" he asked.

Doh! It would be just as effective and the computer could be back in operation within seconds.

IBM changed their advice for fires.

19 Apr 2020 Aside

Quote:

Originally Posted by domroger View Post

Don't care if it is bullshit ,it;s amusing and as an ex serviceman it has enough facts to be plausible if unlikely.

At the time I was startled and surprised as were the Marines but in retrospect:

I had been back from Australia for only eighteen months. While there, my sports coach was an Olympic gold medallist, one of three on the sports staff. They had high standards.

I was using the local YMCA's gym three evenings a week. I was much larger than the average Marine at three hundred pounds of serious muscle. I could, and sometimes did, carry two marines up a hill.

My Australian Cadet Force training was far more rigorous than a UK army recruit's training because if you qualified you were exempt from National Service but you had to reach a very good standard of efficiency (and fitness, and Australian standards of fitness were much higher than UK ones).

I might have been a civilian but I was a very unusual civilian.

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