My very first job

The building where I work now happens to be opposite the building where I worked in my very first job after leaving school. Where I worked is a three story, very 30s-ish looking building and I was surprised to see it still there looking exactly the same as it did  back in '69 when I was there, right down to the "McPhersons" label in metal in '30s-type font. (only now it's surrounded by skyscrapers). The ground floor was a very big hardware shop back in the day, but it has been turned into a food hall now. I worked in a metallurgy lab on the roof. Anyway the other day I arranged a meeting with my SME on the 12th floor and the room overlooked my old building. I could see the old lab building on the roof where I worked very clearly. It's a creche now. It was a strange feeling, like looking down from above on a past life.

That was an enjoyable job, my first job although I didn't realise just how unusual that was in a job until later of course. I was studying metallurgy part time and working in the lab, testing metals in a many sided variety of ways. I used to test in tensile machines specially machined bolts machined out of all sorts of metals. The scariest were large inch or more diameter cast iron samples. You'd screw them into the tensile machine and you'd never know when they were going to break. They would suddenly go with no warning and a huge bang at 30 or so tons, and the whole floor would jump. With most other samples, like steel, the samples would get to a certain point and then stretch like chewing gum and it wasn't so noisy or scary even though it took more tonnage to break them. We had a selection of slide rules to help calculate the test results. No calculators in those days. 

There were all sorts of metal tests, such as hardness tests and shearing tests. On some of the shearing tests, we had to soak the metal samples in liquid nitrogen first. The liquid nitrogen was delivered in a large metal bottle -- a sort of thermos arrangement. There was always loads left over after we had done the testing, and we used to have fun with it. For example one fun thing to do was to nick a prized soft possession belonging to someone, and soak it in liquid nitrogen for a while. That would make it as hard and as brittle as glass. Then you would waggle the object under the person's nose to gain their attention, then hurl it to the ground where it would shatter into a thousand fragments. What a hoot. Well we only did that once actually, with a special soft eraser that my manager was very fond of.

They had a large array of funky tools for cutting and slicing and polishing metal samples to test. At the time, there was a large project to  lay pipelines for natural gas pipelines in Victoria, and one of my jobs was to examine pipe welder test  samples to see if they met quality standards. You would get a half metre sample, two hefty pieces of half inch steel plate welded together like a T and you would have to get a 2 cm square sample of the weld from that. So first there was the large powered mechanical hack saw to hack a cross section out off the sample. Then you would use a sort of angle grinder in a cabinet that you could clamp samples in, close the lid and control how it was sawed with a couple of hand wheels. You would fillet a sample out of the cross section -- a manageable piece of weld about 2 cm square and a cm thick to work with. Then you would use a sort of surface grinder with a magnet to hold the sample and fine control wheels to control the grinder, to get a smooth-ish surface on the sample. They you would use an emery paper disk thingy to get it smoother, Finally, you would polish the sample with a polisher that looked like a turntable with a cloth finish, smeared with black diamond paste until the sample was mirror smooth. Then you would conduct micro-hardness tests all over and around the weld to check the hardness. You would then photograph the sample with a large old camera that used glass plates, develop the plates in the lab darkroom, trace the weld from the photo, add the hardness test locations and results to the tracing, and submit the photo and the accompanying tracing to the standards body. Very amusing way to spend time, that was. They had a serious dark room and a large array of cameras apart from the glass plate one. They had a good 35 mm camera and a light meter. TTL light metering was a new thing back in those days. 

The other guys who worked there were a playful lot. The hardware store personnel downstairs used to refer to us as "the boffins," as we assembled in the canteen at lunch. There were some serious 500 card players in the group, and we used to play 6 handed games over lunch. I had played a lot of 500 in the country where I grew up, and when they realised I could hold my own, I regularly got a game ahead of some of the lab staff who had been there much longer than me. If you stuffed up, either made crazy bids or didn't do what you were supposed to, you were out and never got game unless they were desperate for the numbers. The hard core players took it very seriously. 

We used to have elastic band fights there to amuse ourselves. You had to shoot the band from one hand only, held like a pistol. Once I managed to shoot a cigarette from someone's mouth from about 12 feet away using that method. Man, I'll never forget that -- the joy in seeing that cigarette fly from surprised lips.

There was another lab technician there who was the only man I have ever met who joked about the small size of his dick. He used to carry on when the mornings were cold that he had to take a pair of tweezers to the toilet, and hunt around to locate his dick before he could have a pee. He was most amusing, and an inveterate womanizer despite his much discussed physiology.