The Japanese auditors had determined that our factory had too many people on staff. They decided that the staff must be reduced by eight people. Also, there was a problem (among other things) with the new final line. It was sometimes running too slow and would barely manage to pack windshields into waiting trucks, threatening to upset the “Just in time” delivery system. Obviously they only looked at packing sheets and didn’t ask anybody what the real problem was. So the company decided to kill two birds with one stone and among the eight people to be fired were the two engineers who were responsible for the final line.
I never liked to play office politics, wasn’t good at it, didn’t believe in kissing my boss’s butt, and thought that my work would speak for myself. Now I learned the hard way that everybody was replaceable and when chips are down, your boss will drop you like a hot potato.
Many years later, NPG, now called Pilkington Glass, had an open house so I went to see how much the Final line had changed. I was flabbergasted, there were no changes. It was running exactly as it was originally installed, with three loaders, using the one man loader now called the lift assist, packing the W/S. “How is the line running now?” I asked an old-timer who recognized me. He hit the stop switch and the line stopped. “It’s the same bullshit like before. I have to make sure the foreman is not around when I stop the line” He replied.
Getting a full time job in Collingwood seemed to be impossible so I decided to try working on my own. I had a stack of business cards printed with a logo that said “J&B Engineering” and started a one-man engineering business. At that time there were still a few factories in and around Collingwood: Goodyear, Goodall Rubber, the Alcoa wheel plant, Bendix, MacLean Engineering and Kavski Engineering. To my great surprise I found enough work to keep me busy. However it wasn’t easy and the job was quite stressful. Many times I was asked to do a rush job, or as a mechanical engineer I was supposed to know everything from ventilation to tool design. I couldn’t turn down jobs and so I burnt a lot of midnight oil making drawings, getting information, and was always worried about making mistakes. The best company to work for was MacLean Engineering. They had just changed their design work to 3D (three dimensional) AUTOCAD and my job was converting drawings to 3D drawings. They even let me download their 3D software onto my computer and I could work from my home.
Then I got a call from Temporary Engineering Services: their business was to contract technical personnel out to different companies, would I like to work for them? Of course I would, and over the next two years they sent me to five or six companies. The
drawback was that the jobs were too far away from Collingwood and I had to stay in a motel during the week. Staying in a cheap motel could cause problems as I discovered when I worked for Gyptech in Stony Creek. I found a cheap, sleazy-looking motel but I wasn’t going to turn up my nose after I negotiated an extra low weekly rate.
One day there was a power outage in the office so I went back to the motel to pick up something. The door to my room was locked from inside! I got the motel owner to open the door and inside was a man and woman. She was a hooker ! “Sometimes I let the woman use the room. But we always change the bed sheets” the motel owner tried to explain the whereabouts. Needles to say I changed to a different motel in a hurry.
Finally I had a lucky break, MacLean Engineering offered me a full time job. The company was manufacturing equipment for underground mining and I would be working in the design department. It was an interesting job and the company was using the latest 3D CAD design software. The fabrication shop was under the same roof and what we designed could be seen a few weeks later being fabricated. My life became easier and less stressful by living at home again. A couple of years went by and I started to think about taking an early retirement so we could go sailing in faraway places from Mexico to Alaska. But that wasn’t written in my fate…
It was a hot, muggy August night and we both had trouble sleeping. Sue decided to sleep downstairs where a ceiling fan was cooling the air. I stayed upstairs in our bedroom, tossing and turning on the bed, finally falling asleep. I woke up in the Toronto General Hospital with my head throbbing, all bandaged up. How did I end in a hospital? Sue was beside my bed and told me what had happened.
We had a home invasion, somebody broke into our house! They tied Sue up and were going upstairs. The noise probably woke me up, I surprised the intruders and one hit me on the left side of my head, beside the eye, with what the doctor described as a “blunt object” like a baseball bat. “You were very lucky; you could have lost your eye or suffered brain damage.”
Who did it and why? The OPP drug squad was called in to investigate. They went through our house with a fine-toothed comb, decided that it wasn’t drug related and passed the investigation to the Collingwood police. The detective (yes, the Collingwood police had a detective) immediately suspected that it was a case of domestic violence and put pressure on Sue to confess. After he ruled it out, the investigation seemed to hit a dead end.
We were wondering whether it could be a case of mistaken identity, someone broke into the wrong house to settle a score? Or maybe some friends of our daughter should be investigated. At that time she was living on her own and when we went on a sailing holiday she asked if she could have a party in our house. The party got out of hand; many uninvited guests crashed the party and were able to have a look at our house. But the detective was not interested, “I would not speculate”, and he probably closed the file because he never contacted us again. The break-in was a very traumatic experience for us and we tried to forget about it, put it behind us and luckily we managed to do that.
I was off work for three months and it took me some time before I was able to function normally again. Time went by, we had settled into our usual ways, but suddenly the world started to change in front of our eyes. The Berlin Wall came down, Czechoslovakia had a Velvet Revolution and the Communist government had fallen. Twenty nine years after my escape I could go back home for a visit…
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| MacLean engineering Rock Buster |
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