Don’t be a fool – don’t use a stool…

Featured image is of the windscreen of my car on the road from Etwall to Mickleover, Derby, taken sometime around 1994. Scan of 8”Agfa Record Rapid FB print from Rolleicord 6×6 cm Ilford HP5.

Mickleover is only a couple of miles down that same road from the Toyota plant at Burnaston, Derbyshire.  There is a spurious segue here, even by my standards, telling of a darkly amusing cautionary tale about working on the car assembly line at that factory.

In around 2004, I was a self-employed photographer / web designer / HGV driver / jack of all trades. Unfortunately I suffered a bad attack of gouty arthritis in my left knee (clutch leg), which made it impossible for me to drive an HGV for several weeks.

Always being the sort of guy who will do anything for money (but I won’t do that) I went along to a Derby employment agency in response to an advert for ‘quality control inspectors’ at the Toyota factory on the A38 between Burton on Trent and Derby. The hourly rate was excellent, at about £10. Great back then. I was given the impression at the interview that I would be sticking my head under the bonnets and inside the passenger cabins of brand-new cars, only a few minutes old, to check the quality of workmanship when they came off the production line.

Bullshit. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. ‘Quality control inspectors’ in this context needed to be well-paid and brain-dead so that they didn’t expire from the mind-numbing tedium of doing nothing other than inspecting tiny parts before they go onto the assembly line. All day. For eight hours.

A halted conveyor belt of cars gets VERY expensive in terms of opportunity cost, apparently. Many thousands of pounds per minute in fact, so something as simple as an M6 nut and bolt not fitting together seamlessly when the robot tries to assemble them can cost a huge wedge for Mr Toyota. Consequently, some poor bastard like me had to stand or sit at a desk with a huge blue plastic tub of nuts to their left and another blue tub of bolts to the right. The person must manually ensure that the fastenings don’t cross-thread or jam. Provided the components are perfect, the human then has to unscrew them and throw the bolt into a green tub, and the corresponding nut likewise into its green counterpart tub. Any nut / bolt pair that doesn’t work smoothly first time gets thrown into a red tub to be returned to the manufacturer.

So that was me. With a relatively high IQ, easily bored, and possessing an extremely mischievous nature, with pretty much zero respect for authority, after about 25 minutes of screwing (good by anyone’s standards – to be fair) I was determined that I wasn’t going to return to the job the next day. But in order to get paid I had to work the full eight-hour shift and get my clock card stamped at 5pm. Only seven hours 35 minutes to go…

But it wasn’t all so tedious. After the lunchbreak I was told that I was going to spend the next four hours inspecting tail-light assemblies for cracks and potential bolt hole blocks. Oh joy!

After what seemed like a decade, the lunch-siren sounded. I headed for the canteen with my Tupperware box of sandwiches, intending to get a free hot drink from the coffee machine.

I sat down in a vacant chair. One of the established Toyota employees, as opposed to me being ‘agency’, soon informed me regarding his inalienable ownership of that particular chair. I learned quickly that the people who work on assembly lines most definitely prefer routine to variety. They always sit in the same place, tend to eat the same sandwiches on given days and find the prospect of the unplanned terrifying. I’m quite the reverse. Clearly, I was going to find it difficult working with these treadmill-bound twats for the next four hours.

The next incident was genuinely disturbing. Had someone related it to me without my first-hand experience I would not have believed them in a month of Sundays.

As I sat eating my lunch, one of the regular Toyota employees wanted to reach something like a pot noodle or something off a shelf but couldn’t quite reach. He was slightly vertically challenged at about 5’2”. He pulled up a stool, stood on it, retrieved the comestible and started to boil the kettle. Within two or three minutes, from seemingly nowhere, two guys in hi-viz tabards appeared and took the stool-balancer away for a chat. By the afternoon 15-minute break, it turned out on the grapevine that the unfortunate employee was taken to receive a lecture from the H&S police for not seeking assistance or fetching a proper pair of step ladders. 

Worse still, there seemed to be a weird form of informal workplace bullying that did not seem to be discouraged by management. 

I’ve since discovered that this is a unique form of peer pressure in Japanese companies known as ‘Morahara’ or ‘moral harassment by colleagues’. By the time the shift finished at 5pm, a Polaroid photo of the poor bloke was pinned to a cork board in the canteen, like a wild west ‘wanted’ poster, with a message stating something like: ‘Today our colleague acted in contravention of Health and Safety legislation. His behaviour is disappointing. Only by our unity in safe working practices can we be a happy healthy workforce’. I can’t believe it can have been put there officially by management. Or could it? There must have been some odd stuff afoot.

Worse still, people had been pinning scribbled ‘post-it note’ messages under his photo – either admonishing or encouraging better behaviour. One stated in scrawled uppercase:

“DON’T BE A FOOL, DON’T USE A STOOL.”

Fuck me. I thought I’d stepped into an episode of the ‘Village of the Damned’.  I retrieved my holdall from my locker and started to head for the car park faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg from his local tax office. But just before leaving that canteen forever, I noticed a suggestion box on the wall, much favoured by Japanese companies under their popular principle of Kaizen. Don’t get me started. You can Google it if you like, or see this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way

The locked metal container, with a slot atop the lid, not unlike a ballot box in a polling station, had a wad of A5 pieces of blank lined paper next to it, and a pencil on a neat chain for people to write helpful suggestions. Leaving one’s name was optional.

I wasn’t shy and gave my full name, not forgetting to include the agency that had sent me there for the day. I wrote proudly in block capitals:

Tom Hill – Workforce Agency Derby, QC operator.  “DON’T BE A KNOB – JACK THE JOB”

Having posted it into the Kaizen Container I limped back to the car park feeling oddly liberated.

Fuck it. I got paid my 80 quid and I lived to tell this tale. What’s not to like?

For you gentlemen, ze motorbike tour is over…

Image 230/365.  My BMW R100RS, taken outside my home in Ashby De La Zouch, 2001.

This classic motorcycle was built in 1986 in Bayerische Motoren Werke AG Munich. The Austrians have a fierce pride about their engineering skills and, above all, being Austrian. The following short story is an uplifting tale of that level of Germanic passion…

In 2002, me and several friends went on a European motorcycle tour, starting in Dover, over to Calais, through Belgium and Luxembourg, into Germany, through Munich, Salzburg and the Austrian alps into northern Italy for a day, then back through Switzerland and France. Anyone who has been on such a tour with a bunch of male motorcyclists will know about the 14 days of man-spats, hangovers, arguments over routes, jealousy of better hotel rooms at the same price, quarrels over restaurants and the like. It’s all part of the immense fun.

My Beemer was already 16 years old by this tour and hadn’t done any serious long mileage stints in years. Somewhere on the autobahn between Munich and Salzburg, on a high-speed cruise of over 100mph – just ticking over for the RS, I suddenly had a terrifying emergency. The handlebars went into a ‘tank-slapper’, almost throwing me off the bike, the front wheel wobbling horrendously by a few inches side to side. Using the rear brake and going down through the gearbox I soon came to a safe halt. The front wheel bearings had disintegrated.

Fortunately I was in the RAC European scheme, they identified a BMW motorbike dealership some 25km away from my location. I told my companions that I would text them and catch up at the next day or two’s hotel and not to worry about me. With that, my friend Simon and I, on two bikes, limped at 20mph to the BMW bike dealership.

On arrival, two mechanics were working in the garage. The salesman / manager out front understood that it was an emergency, but regretfully said that there were no workshop bookings available for several days. At that point, one of the mechanics came out, looked at the wheel, said that they had a spare exactly the same from an identical machine they were using for parts, and that he could easily fit it in and swap the tyre in a few minutes of his own time after 5pm.

“Please, sir, just get me some beers and pay 25 Euros for the wheel, it is a bit corroded on the rim…” he said, in perfect heavily accented English. I was so grateful I could have kissed him. I walked into the nearby village, bought 24 bottles of something around six percent ABV, Teutonic and fizzy, then went to the cash machine to take out folding money for the wheel.

A typical day on a boy’s motorbike tour…

Immediately after 5pm, the two mechanics fell upon the bike like hyenas on a wildebeest. They loved working on ‘an old classic’. I watched them work in perfect unison, like a surgeon and an assistant, barely talking to each other as they replaced the wheel and tyre, then checked the brake discs and bearings with ease. They told me that they were brothers, both semi-professional motorcycle racers sponsored by BMW – the mechanic work was their day job; their passion was motorbike racing.

After about 25 minutes the first mechanic seemed happy with the wheel swap and asked if it was OK to road test my bike. “For sure!” I said.

He removed the heavy luggage panniers and mounted the bike, taking off from the yard onto the quiet mountain road nearby. Ten minutes passed. I was starting to become worried. Had the front wheel collapsed again, had the guy come off? A couple of minutes later I heard the unmistakable exhaust note of a BMW boxer-twin on full song, the mechanic was going through the gearbox and obviously red-lining the bike in every gear. There was a long sweeping curve in front of the garage entrance, and then I saw the mechanic flash into view, my Beemer doing at least 80 or 90 mph with the rider’s knee perilously close to the ground and the exhaust pipe on the nearside sparking off the tarmac. I’d never seen a road-legal motorcycle ridden so fast or handled so expertly. It was as if my bike was on rails around the sweeping left hander. The guy gave me a barely perceptible nod under his helmet as if to say ‘all good’.

10 minutes later, the bike was back on the garage forecourt, making that ‘tick-tick’ sound as air-cooled engines do after a good thrashing.

“There is a slight problem…” said the Austrian.

“With the wheel?” I asked.

“Nein, nein…” he said under his breath, taking off his helmet whilst pushing the bike back onto the hydraulic ramp. He pumped up the mechanism so that the cylinder heads were at his chest level. Removing the rocker covers, he then took a pair of feeler gauges and started making adjustments.

He then replaced the covers and fitted new gaskets, started the engine and produced a stethoscope from his tool box. He let the bike tick over and rev, while listening intently to each cylinder, nodding to himself in satisfaction after a few minutes.

“You had a tappet-clearance problem, causing a lag at higher revs.” He said.

“Oh, OK, is it fixed now?”

“I will ride once more for five minutes.”

Same story, high speed road test, howling past the garage entrance. On his return, the mechanic coasted back into the forecourt and killed the engine. He dismounted, fetched my luggage panniers and re-fitted them. He looked over at the beer on the bench. I handed him 30 Euros in notes. He gratefully accepted.

“Thank you, Mr Hill.” He nodded and shook my hand.

“The machine is now acceptable. Good day to you, have a great trip home.”

Acceptable?! Not half! It had never run so smoothly nor handled so well in all the years I’d owned it.

That experience remains my definition of the word ‘professionalism’.