When was the first time you ever used a power tool? Chances are, that like me, it was an electric drill. And I guess that whatever tool it was, drill or saw or whatever, you had a few dummy-runs on some odd bits of wood or waste metal. Well let me tell you, that's for sissies. The first time, and I mean absolutely the very first time I ever held an electric drill in my hands, I was asked to drill a hole in the casting for the high-pressure section of a steam turbine. It must have weighed twenty tons.
I was an apprentice on the shop floor of a massive engineering works in Manchester, and I'd just arrived in this particular department to do a few weeks as a trainee. Now admittedly the hole I had to drill was trivial - one of several that would accept screws to hold on some sort of pressure gauge, and no doubt the blokes on the shop-floor thought they'd given me the easiest of easy jobs, but I can't help feeling that the question "Have you never done this before?" might have been asked before I'd made a kind of 20° off vertical hole and then broken the drill bit off in it. I suppose I could have refused to do it until I'd done a bit of practicing, but I was just 18, and this was 1963, and you did what you were told in those days.
This happened right at the end of the shift, and I was so paralysed with fear that I had ruined the whole casting, or that I would be the victim of some horrible retributive ritual by the full-timers, that I took the next day off sick. When I went back the incident only got mentioned by one of the craft apprentices who made some disparaging comments about my abilities, both specific and general, but all in all I felt I'd got off lightly.
Since then though I have never been able to pick up a drill without remembering that horrible day, even though I became quite handy in the end.
I was an apprentice on the shop floor of a massive engineering works in Manchester, and I'd just arrived in this particular department to do a few weeks as a trainee. Now admittedly the hole I had to drill was trivial - one of several that would accept screws to hold on some sort of pressure gauge, and no doubt the blokes on the shop-floor thought they'd given me the easiest of easy jobs, but I can't help feeling that the question "Have you never done this before?" might have been asked before I'd made a kind of 20° off vertical hole and then broken the drill bit off in it. I suppose I could have refused to do it until I'd done a bit of practicing, but I was just 18, and this was 1963, and you did what you were told in those days.
This happened right at the end of the shift, and I was so paralysed with fear that I had ruined the whole casting, or that I would be the victim of some horrible retributive ritual by the full-timers, that I took the next day off sick. When I went back the incident only got mentioned by one of the craft apprentices who made some disparaging comments about my abilities, both specific and general, but all in all I felt I'd got off lightly.
Since then though I have never been able to pick up a drill without remembering that horrible day, even though I became quite handy in the end.
