Whoops! I dropped a clanger at work

BACK in the Sixties, I was working for British Olivetti, which manufactured office equipment. One of my jobs consisted of opening the post and sorting out orders for spare parts from agents across the Uk. There was one huge storeroom for ‘Olivetti’ spares and another for ‘Underwood’ spares. In the early weeks, I made mistakes and sent orders to the wrong stores. Both storemen would, with great relish, highlight my errors by bringing the paperwork back to me. They were never discreet. I suppose it was their way of putting this young upstart in his place. One weekend, all the office staff had to assist with a massive stock-take. I was in the Underwood store, under the watchful eye of the storeman. There were thousands of boxes of screws and metal bits and pieces that went into the mechanical innards of mighty accounting machines. I was about to open a large round tin, when the hawk-eyed storeman shouted: ‘Don’t open it, lad! It’s a coiled spring and it could cut you to pieces if it uncoils!’ A bit of an exaggeration, I thought, because if it was needed as a replacement, someone would have to release this beast! My next blunder was to drop a whole box of little metal things (goodness knows what they were for) just as one of my, equally young, office colleagues walked in. The storeman chastised both of us. ‘Show me the soles of your shoes,’ he said. An inspection revealed we had numerous bits of metal embedded in our soles. ‘you’ve got £20 worth of stock there,’ he said, as if we were intending to walk off with it! We both tried to keep a straight face, while the storeman prised the objects from our shoes, mumbling: ‘young people today..!’

Don Townshend, chelmsford, Essex.