Friday July 23/Jobs

 After my usual crawl out of bed, coffee, and bathroom and shower, (all with considerable painful difficulty) and then my breakfast,  I had a consultation with the doctor that yielded nothing new.

Basically the news was that I would have to move on to a neurosurgeon and expect the possibility of back surgery. Great...it would have to wait until we are back home in good old DC. He did suggest some physiotherapy, and recommended a person to contact. I have an appointment on Monday at 1.00pm. Let's hope that helps.

So there we are. 

Back to jobs. I made one trip as an export salesman with a very jolly and out-going guy who wanted to take all our customers out to dinner. We went to the Lego factory, which was a very small enterprise at that time. And when he tried the 'let's go out to lunch' ploy the Lego boss replied that they ate sandwiches for lunch. When we got back it was reported that I did not have the jolly social qualities for a salesman, and I was reassigned to work for the Financial Controller of the Viscose Rayon Division. I have very little memory of what I did there. I visited the Cologne factory, and I was impressed by the fact that they had interpreters in three languages on each shift--Turkish, Portuguese, and, I think, Polish. The work was rather unpleasant, and they had difficulty in maintaining an adequate work force.

I saw an advert in a newspaper for positions in the Financial Department of the Ford Motor Company. I applied, was accepted, and we moved to Basildon, in Essex, where I bought a house. I commuted by car to Dagenham each day. Later I started sharing commuting with my neighbor, who also worked in the Financial Department. Daniel was born in the Basildon house. The snow was on the ground--it was a very bad winter--and I had to walk to the mid-wife's house in order to help her carry the gas-and-air machine to our house.

Kinny crashed the car on ice in Basildon City Center --not too seriously, tho' she was taken to hospital. She had a cast on when we went to Germany at Christmas before Daniel was born. Her father (a doctor) took it off.

At the start of my time with Ford, I was doing very time-consuming and routine work with sales and production data, and I was bored stiff. And then my boss moved me to managing the spare money that  Ford had...putting it into treasury bills and later into deposits with the American banks in London, and then with Local Authorities. This was much more interesting work, and it showed me how money markets worked in the City--the financial heart of the country. This  led to my next job...working for an investment bank--Henry Ansbacher and Company.