In My Humble Opinion
Our new columnist, Mike Humble, remembers his first day at work.
Kids these days. They don’t know they’re born. A short while ago, a work colleague was telling me about his eldest son, who’s just gone into the trade as an apprentice technician. He went into detail about this as he knows that my past career and a great deal of the present revolves around the car industry. The crux of the conversation was his lad’s dissatisfaction at the way he is treated as a car-keen 16-year-old at a Volkswagen main dealer.
This struck a chord with me. This year marks the 30th anniversary since I walked into my first full-time job in the trade they call ‘motor’. It was with a very large but independently-run Ford main dealership. I remember getting a Number 1 bus to Quarry Road in Northampton to report for duty at 8.30am on Monday, July 4, 1988. Hopping off the Bristol VRT doubledecker, I walked into a whole new world, taking my first steps into manhood.
I’d only been living in Northampton for a few months. My late father worked for Leyland DAF trucks and they’d transferred him there from County Durham. I had the option of staying up north and taking one of a few job offers after finishing my school exams or moving with the family down south. Always being one looking for adventure, I chose the latter – besides, living with my nan filled me with fear and horror.
Today, coaxing a 16-year-old to take up a motor mechanical apprenticeship is nigh on impossible. Teenagers today want clean jobs where they can wear what they like, play with computers, etc. Tell them they have to wear overalls that by Wednesday smell like a dirty old carpet and their eyes glaze over like a doll. But back in the 1980s, an apprenticeship with a garage was seriously competitive, cut-throat and prestigious. When I was offered the Ford job, I was one of four out of 700+ applicants.
I had two distinct advantages over the other local school-leavers. My accent was thick and North Eastern – this made me stand out and be memorable. The other was an A-pass in the two-year GCSE course in Motor Vehicle Engineering – something not offered in the Midlands. As a result, I knew my way round a car. While my chums were kicking girls or chasing footballs, I was renovating Minis or loitering in breakers yards. All the companies I applied to offered me a job – even the Express Lift Company – but it had to be cars for me.
My first day on the job entailed being shown around the dealership, getting kitted out with workwear and, most importantly, going to the stores and being issued with my very own 3ft yard brush. This came in a large black plastic bag with all the components separately supplied: one brush head, one handle, two metal support bars and four screws. As you have probably guessed, the idea was to assemble your own brush.
Humble beginnings
One of the roles of the new apprentices was sweeping the work areas and ramps every morning before the first cars graced the floor. We used wood shavings that were stored in big wooden crates at the end of each of the ramp bays – three in total. You swept and shovelled the aforementioned mess into empty Motorcraft oil drums and, when they were full, you had to wrestle the drum onto an empty pallet.
The next treat for the trainee was to be hoisted into the air by forklift, standing on the wooden pallet, where you would tip the drum over, shake it vigorously into the outside skip and take it back to your workstation. Once a fortnight we would be taken to the nearby Harlestone Firs to shovel fresh sawdust into black sacks that would be decanted into the aforementioned wooden crates. Oh, the glory of it all!
When you weren’t dicing with death 15 feet in the air, sneezing like hell in a blizzard of sawdust or being sent on errands to the forecourt shop for soft drinks and fags for the older fitters, you learned about cars. There were no fancy OBD scan tools or computer terminals downloading the latest software while you flick through a newspaper – this was old-school trial-and-error diagnostics. The most hi-tech it got with Ford back in 1988 was a 1.8 R2A CVH engine with science fiction stuff like programmed ignition and hydraulic tappets.
Three decades on, my workmate is telling me about his son being flown to Germany on a fact-finding mission and about how he finds the job tedious and boring. The furthest I ever travelled for my first job was the Ford Motor Co technical training college in Daventry, barely 10 bloody miles up the road! But boring? Never. Road-testing police cars, riot vans, even funeral cars (about which I will share a funny story on another occasion), not to mention lunchtime punch-ups with other apprentices, they were great times I’ll never forget.
As you can guess, I didn’t show much sympathy for my colleague’s son’s displeasure at having to clean his senior mechanic’s tools at the end of each day or fetch him tea from a vending machine. That said, I didn’t tell him what I’ve just told you – he probably wouldn’t believe it.