It's now over half way through January and still no good
news from my dear friends at the DVLA. I had another letter from them yesterday
putting the blame on the delay at the feet of my consultant.
So now I have two institutions that I have to hassle to get
my HGV licence back. It's a never ending saga of phone calls and letters
backwards and forwards between Swansea, me and my consultant. I'm sick of it. A
classic case of one step forward and two steps back.
The company I work for; Recticel; have been really good so
no complaints there. They could have kept me away as I am not able to do the
job I was employed for. All credit to them for at least finding me something to
do and continuing to pay me at my old rate. It's still a kick in the lower
regions not being able to do the job I love.
This last week has seen me swopping the transport office for
the new delights of being a 'Trainee Lab Rat'.
For the last week I have been working in our companies
testing lab. Goodbye diesel and timed deliveries and hello, Tensile Stress
Testing. I'm using maths that I haven't used in nearly forty years!
One good side of this is that I have learned more in a day
than I have over the last five years on how our company operates. It's been an
eye-opener.
Setting fire to foam to see how your sofa would behave in a
fire is just one of the things that have kept me busy. Pulling, crushing,
heating and weighing foam samples before they go to customers has been a real
change to my daily work.
Good fun and it's got my brain working. Work out the density of a piece of foam in kg/m3. Work out the percentage stretch before reaching breaking point etc etc. It hurts your grey cells at first but soon becomes dead easy :-)
My tales of self pity are rather pathetic though compared
with what others are going through. One of my fellow drivers, Paul C, is in
hospital following major surgery to his brain. It makes my problems seem very
small compared to what both he and his family are going through. I really must
make the effort to go and see him this week.
Over and out for now.
I feel as if I've dumbed down since becoming a driver, no offence meant to any drivers out there, but in my days as an engineer, Trigonometry was a daily calculation, Sines, Cosines, Tangents etc etc... if A = 1,2335 what does C= and so on.. Speeds & Feeds, Gear train calcs, dividing head and more.
ReplyDeleteI feel quite thick now... :-) Do you need an apprentice by any chance? Im liking the sound of this Lab work, I could take to that I reckon.
Very interesting Ian. Certainly beats sitting in the house twiddling your thumbs or listening to the traffic monkeys. My other half has done a bit of training on this, as she used to work with one of the big bed and sofa retailers a few years back. I have to put up with things like, "Don't make the bed right away when you get up, leave it a little while to breath then make it." Aye righty oh wifey !!!!!! :-0
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