Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,
I know quite a few of you from the HATT list and some of you may know a little about moi. For those of you who don't here goes.
I am a British geezer, living in the Midlands town of Leicester with my wife and two saucepans (kids). I am 43, 6 foot 4 and rather heavy (18st), too much rugby in my younger days and too much cider in my later days. Oh yes and my wife is a cracking cook who makes too many cakes and puddings that I can't keep my mits off. At present we have an aging rabbit that still has the bottle to bite your legs when you go to feed him, a hamster and two very sick fantails that I am trying to get off of the bottom of the tank without much success.
Way back in 1979 I left school and started work as a printer's labourer, quickly followed by a technical apprenticeship at the big defence organisation in Leicester that sadly is now a housing estate. After two years I transferred to a graduate apprenticeship and studied at Bradford in West Yorkshire for four years gaining a B.Eng Honours degree. Four years scoffing vindaloo rubies and tetly's bitter had a profound effect on my aspirations upon graduating, I went back to playing rugby and carried on eating rubies and drinking various brews. As for work, after a brief stint as a Design Engineer I made the move into technical writing where I have been ever since, save for one catastrophic year selling life insurance and pensions, believe me not a good move. I have worked in a variety of industries, defence, handling systems (coal, ash, nuclear fuel and airline baggage, but not all at the same time!) fire alarms, payroll software and my current stint in a metrology company.
I have also recently qualified as a six sigma black belt and have had an eighteen months baptism of fire using the darned thing in anger. Not the best thing to try in a gaffe with 200 cynical Midlanders! The training was fun and the initial project work really enjoyable but the follow up work is proving a little bit of a drudge as the capabilities of the toolset do not match the expectations of the management.
I still enjoy the technical writing work on the whole, but find in a lot of instances recently that the Project Managers reluctantly allow for quality documentation in their budgets, preferring to give a two week slot shoved on the end of the project for tarting up engineer's notes and scribbles. I have lost the will to argue with them anymore and have opted for the wait until they retire next year approach, at which point, their successors will be groomed to understand the importance of the documentation to their product. That is the cunning plan but as always happened with Baldrick and Blackadder I will probably be disappointed with the outcome......or maybe not, time will tell.
Anyway that is briefly me and hopefully I'll catch up with youse later, cheers.
John Nutting
Technical Information Engineer
Taylor Hobson
A division of Ametek
Tel +44 (0)116 2763771 ext 2115
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