I've had a fairly interesting technical career since leaving the army, although I never expected anybody else to find it actually enthralling reading. I went on leave in March 1964 and found an employment agency specialising in electronics technicians in South London. They got me five interviews and four offers in the space of a week, and I took a job as a test technician with Wayne-Kerr, which was starting a new division in West Sussex. The army gave me four weeks demobilisation leave and four weeks for a rehabilitation course during which I could work for the company I was going to, so I actually started work in the middle of May despite being paid by HMG until mid-July.

The technical experience was good; W-K specialised in laboratory test instruments and I got to learn about LF and RF measurement bridges as well as harmonic analysers, Wien Bridge oscillators etc. in great detail. They also had invented a modulation depth calibrator for use in civil airports on the Localiser and Glide Path systems, so I was able to learn the transistorised equivalents of all the electron tube circuits we had used in 47, except for cavity oscillators.

I found the army training and experience had actually been quite good, and I was able to hold my own with the other technicians and design engineers. The company gave me a day off each week to go to college, but I couldn't register for a ONC or HNC course as I didn't have sufficient (i.e. any) qualifications and would have had to do at least a two-year GCE course first. However I found that the City and Guilds Institute allowed local technical colleges to exercise judgement over prospective students, and I managed to convince the electrical department head at Worthing Technical College that I could maintain the standard he expected if he would only let me onto his course. His mandate was to use taxpayer funds justifiably and not waste them on any old begging ex-squaddie with an imagination. His faith was rewarded when I finished the 4th-year course in Industrial Electronics and Controls and won two of the three first prizes, which surprised the poop out of me and which turned out to be gift tokens to the local book store. The book store seemed to have a dire shortage of the prescribed technical literature so I think I ended up with a great tome on iron-displacement galvanometers and an AA Guide to the Lake District.

So, armed with my newly-won certificate I got a job with a nuclear research company just outside Paris. As a sideline, they got the contract to build the fuel monitoring system for Concorde. While still living in Sussex because most of the work was in the UK, I had to visit Paris for about a week each month and I was able to travel all over Europe. Some of the guys in that company got sent to various places in Africa, Mozambique, Russia and China, returning with a consistent library of horror stories.

I eventually became Service Manager of a department with nine field service engineers. Trying to keep track of that lot in the days before cell-phones was not easy, and some of the people they had hired before I came on the scene just weren't up to it. They had, for instance, hired an ex-NASA technician who talked up a good line at his interview but who would go missing for days at a time. He was the only person I have actually fired. I also had to design and build the 'specials' e.g. interfaces to existing equipment etc. and translate manuals into English. I became so familiar with technical French that until recently I found it easier to write notes in French rather than English, a habit which has caused irritation among peers who can't easily figure out which bits to copy and paste.

The work was mostly with nuclear physics measurement systems, and the customers were government and university research laboratories, power stations etc. Some of the instruments appealed to the medical markets so we started to dabble into gamma-scanners and gamma-cameras for clinical research.

By this time my wife and I had become parents to two sons, keeper of a marmalade cat called Marmaduke and master of a very faithfull and protective black mutt called Zimba. We had also managed to purchase a small house in Littlehampton; however the marriage went south. I think she got lonely while I was travelling and developed a fairly regular habit of inviting the neighbors in for the night. The divorce quickly became extremely messy, despite the promises, and due to a mix of my naivety and the unbelievable incompetence of my lawyer I survived the ordeal with no home and no money.

A mutual friend introduced me to Gina and we hit it off immediately, having similar interests and humor. She says she was impressed by the sound of my voice and the trips to France, especially the waiter in a Paris bistro who knew me quite well by name, which was a great relief since if she had been influenced by the size of my bank account we might not have lasted so long. Gina's divorce had left her looking after three children who all seemed to get along with my two when they came for weekend visits. Due to a series of complications Gina and I also ended up with Zimba.

After working for IN for about nine years I found a similar job with less stress working for an Israeli company with an office in Crawley, Sussex. They weren't too happy that I had lived in Egypt as a kid, but they got over it. They also had a main European office in Wiesbaden, Germany, and I continued to get trips to Spain, Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Norway and Israel. They paid for Gina to come with me to France and Germany, and we had a belated honeymoon in Versailles at their expense.

One Thursday they called me up to their London office and offered me a job in New Jersey.
Only One Problem: they needed a reply by Monday and me in Belgium on Sunday.
Basically, Gina and I had Friday and Saturday morning to decide whether we wanted to emigrate to the U.S.!

When I got to the office in New Jersey I found the sales manager was an ebullient egotistical idiot who irritated every customer he met, and the management had already lost patience with him. After six months and with only one order to show for his miserable efforts, they fired him and gave me his job. Piece of cake! I had watched several salesmen over the years all screw up consistently. Now it was my turn, and I applied every lesson I'd learned. A year later we were installing two systems a month in USA, and I had opened sales channels in Saudi Arabia (the Israelis couldn't go there!), Yemen and a very lucrative market in China. I started to get involved with their medical imaging systems (MRI) and some other things, such as bomb-sniffing devices and a widget to measure the predictability of babies to survive in free air before they are born.

I can't imagine how I found the time, but I did some part-time consulting work as an instrument designer, mostly for General Foods to test the quality of biscuits and candy, and saved enough money to put a deposit on a house in New York, where we still live.

Since arriving in the U.S. I've been to 46 of the lower 48 contiguous states, and most major U.S. cities, as well as several trips to Canada; Gina has travelled with me some of the time. We never took a holiday, but combined sales trips with a few days touring. Some fantastic experiences and sightseeing!

But I hadn't gone unnoticed, and the competition offered me a position as Nuclear Instruments Product Manager in Connecticut. My job was training the sales force both in product knowledge ( I knew much more about nuclear instrument applications by this time than they did!) and sales techniques, and writing specifications for the next generation of whatever-it-was. However this was a company whose long-range business plans sometimes lasted until well into the afternoon, and on a whim they fired twenty sales and marketing types, including me, in order to save a measly couple of million dollars in salaries. Fortunately I had a couple of acquaintances in California who were starting a company supplying superconducting magnets to roughly the same (physics research) market, so I joined up with them. After a couple of years they fell by the wayside, and I ran my own sales and engineering company on a shoestring budget for about ten years. One of my claims to limited fame during this period is that I designed the magnet cryostat housing for the U.S. Standard Ohm, in what was then the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland. There is a similar one in NBS in Canada built by a competitor, but it had serious installation problems.

There were some other interesting projects, especially in the Dept of Defense labs during the Ronald Reagan Star Wars era! Some genuine Star Wars weapons were in the offing, but gradually they all got dropped. Around that time I could count several (physics) Nobel prizewinners as friends and started to make contacts at almost government levels in the ore seperation business.

The London supplier went belly-up (no fault of mine - they wouldn't listen!) when the bone-heads in England simply wouldn't adjust production to keep up with sales, and delivery times started to get out of hand. You can't get a contract worth several hundred thousand dollars with the Federal Government to deliver something in 180 days and then expect them to wait 3 or 4 years, it screws up their budget and installation plans. Then, to ease a cash crunch the company started to deliver systems that they knew wouldn't meet contract specifications, and the end came when they got sued for it. I sidestepped that one, but they went belly-up anyway and left me with a mountain of business debts which I've only just recently managed to clear up.

So, for the first time since 1967 I had to get a real job, unfortunately at the height of a really bad economic depression. Just my luck!

I found a low paying job (control systems) after nearly a year of miserable poverty in a company making compressor and propfan blades for aircraft jet engines. They specialised in complex nickel-chromium coatings applied by immersion of the blade in a metal gas-cloud caused by boiling an ingot with a 180 kilowatt per square inch electron beam. I got to work on some interesting projects even though the company was a terrible employer and the pay was appallingly low. I re-designed some of the control systems and sources including a 30 kiloVolt, 6 Amp electron beam controller, some magnetic field balancing circuits and a 12 Volt, 5,000-Amp source controller. The 180kW beam was supplied by 15V 200A electron gun controllers that were biased at beam potential that I re-designed and re-built, together with some process feed mechanisms. The beam current was controlled by a huge ceramic rebuildable water-cooled tetrode, the standard type you find in commercial A.M. radio transmitters.

That was okay, but they were caught cheating on their specs (not me though!) and the FAA shut them down putting 1,200 people out of work in the process.

So I was back out on the street again. I now work as a programmer (mostly PLC and VBA) and electronics geek for Budweiser in a high-speed production plant where they make 12 million beer and soda cans a day! The work is technically boring, and the occasional free Budweiser isn't much in the way of compensation. Interesting paradox - they give us free beer if we haven't had an accident for a few weeks. Go figure. I still can't get used to taking orders, and I miss the traveling badly! Most of the workforce are local rednecks; you know, the type that stare at orange juice cartons because it says 'Concentrate'. I swear one of them thinks that '8 to 10 kg' on the side of a diaper box is an indication of how much they will hold. I also do some software programming as a consultant. Gina and I have now been happily married for more than thirty years. Her three children came with us to USA, but they're now grown and left home and have children of their own, and until recently we had a 100lb mutt called Chopin for company that we rescued from the local animal shelter.

I got into motorcycles again a few years ago; I've got a (they say!) collectible 1978 Honda CB400A, and a 1981 Gold Wing, currently in pieces. I was doing about 60 mph and frightened two deer off the road by hitting the third one in the ribs with the headlight. I was OK apart from a broken left hand. So far the score is Deer - 1, Motorcycles - 2, i.e two dead deer to one dead motorcycle. Yes, this was the second deer I've hit on the bike. Hopefully I'll find the time and money to re-build it someday soon. The only commercial lesson I ever took was the Under-Achiever's Guide to Very Small Business Opportunities, and financial insolvency has been a persistent feature of my life, although I do like to blame the divorce for most of it, as it gave me a severe pain in the wallet and I don't think I ever really recovered.

We've been back to England a few times, but not often. We got invited to a couple of Moody Blues Christmas parties in London, which provided an excuse to go.

Update Oct 2009
About five years ago I invented a device to calibrate high-speed rotary printers during active operation, as an alternative to the time-consuming and inaccurate static methods common in the industry, and I built three prototypes in my basement workshop that I've had since 1978. The company totally ignored it until this month, when I announced my intention to patent it. Then they presented me with a demand to sign a letter acknowledging that I had stolen the idea from them, and assigning all invention, patent and use rights to them, which I refused to do. Under United States Patent Law the whole invention is mine, not theirs.
So I gleefully joined the ranks of the stress-free unemployed.


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