A Prankster In Paradise

By Geoff King

I have written this book to record my experiences at a few of the places that I have worked around the World, and to make some kind of official record of my working life. I am an engineer and specialist industrial welding is my trade. I have lived and worked all over the World, with the primitive tribes of Papua New Guinea, the rough and tough lumberjacks of Canada, the oil rich but war torn Kuwait, the lawless towns of South Africa, Malaysian deserts, Australia, New Zealand, and everywhere in between. I consider myself very fortunate to have survived. I am approaching my twilight years now and I have had a wonderful life, with no regrets. I have worked hard and i have played hard. This is the story of the working hard; the playing hard is the subject of another book. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoff King
• Release date: Sep 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476234434

Book preview

A Prankster in Paradise.

By Geoff King.

Copyright 2012 by Geoff King. Smashwords Edition.

Edited by Jude Van Vliet and Keith Facey.

51,656 words.

Dedication.

I dedicate this book to my wonderful wife Kath, who has been my rock throughout my life; she Gets me, and understands my weird sense of humor. Kath has made all this possible and I thank her for our wonderful children, her patience, understanding, and contribution to our happy and fulfilled life together.

Introduction.

I have written this book to record my experiences at a few of the places that I have worked around the World, and to make some kind of official record of my working life. I am an Engineer and specialist industrial welding is my trade. I have lived and worked all over the World, with the primitive tribes of Papua New Guinea, the rough and tough lumberjacks of Canada, the oil rich but war torn Kuwait, the lawless towns of South Africa, Malaysian deserts and everywhere in between. I consider myself very fortunate to have survived. I am approaching my twilight years now and I have had a wonderful life, with no regrets. I have worked hard and I have played hard. This is the story of the working hard; the playing hard is the subject of another book. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

CONTENTS.

ENGLAND. EARLY CHILDHOOD.

FIRST JOB.

SECOND JOB.

NATIONAL SERVICE.

MILITARY POLICE.

ADAMSONS ENGINEERING.

NEW ZEALAND. ROBERT STONES.

HUNTLEY POWER STATION.

CANADA. WEST EDMONTON. ALBERTA.

NEW ZEALAND. WHANGAREI. WAIUKU.

AUSTRALIA. KARRATHA.

SOUTH AFRICA. DURBAN. ENGLAND. MOSSELL BAY.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA. KUTUBU.

MALAYSIA. DUBAI.

KUWAIT.

MALAYSIA. MALLACA.

MALAYSIA. SARAWAK.

WOWANDULA.

England. Early Childhood.

As a child, I grew up during the Second World War, in England, and one of the things that has always fascinated me, is that I can never remember fear. Now maybe most of you that are reading this were not around then, because I am getting rather old. Hitler used to send what they called Doodlebugs over England, and the idea was that it would keep going to a supposedly pre destined target, and then they would run out of fuel, and drop. I remember quite frequently lying in bed at night, and hearing these things coming over. They were coming over very low, rattling the house and shaking the bed, and the only thing that used to go through my mind was, Oh good, I can have a look around tomorrow morning, to see what damage has been done, and if any factories had been hit, and what I could collect. Now I have often seen war zones overseas at various places and compared to what happened then and the punishment that the UK got, the rest are a walk in the park. I went out one day, there was a toothbrush factory hit by a doodlebug, and I wound up coming home with a sack full of toothbrushes. There must have been hundreds of them, we distributed them of course and kept the neighborhood going for a long time. I collected shrapnel and other stuff like this, as young boys do, it was just a passing hobby. They were quite tight days then, and there was rationing, which most of the younger generation could not comprehend now. Cardboard stuffed in your shoes because the water was coming in, going up the tip looking for bits and pieces, picking for coal, queuing up for everything, even clothes, everything was rationed anyway, and sweets were unheard of, so there was not a lot to celebrate once the war ended. Oh, by the way, no mobile phones, no computers, no TV. If you had a radio, you were well off, and if you had a car, you were one of the noble people. I remember our toilet paper made from newspaper, which we used to hang on a string from the cistern. We were lucky to get a bath once a week, in an old tin tub that hung from the kitchen wall. We would half fill it with hot water boiled on the coal or wood fired stove, and then add some cold to get the right temperature and then Mum would get in first, followed by Dad, and then the kids after that. The water was cold and dirty by the time I used it. Enough of childhood, this is about my working life.

ENGLAND. My First Job

I did manage to survive childhood, and I wound up becoming a boilermaker of all things. That was quite interesting and a very heavy job, which I paid for in later years. One day I was working on some rather large tanks, welding away and it was smoko time. What they called snap time in England. This meant you, had ten minutes to get off your job, and brew yourself a cup of tea. That allowed you about five minutes to drink it, and then the buzzer would go and back to work you would go. So they were good days. This particular day I was coming down off my tank when the manager came out and he yells across the workshop, KING, TEA, NOW! Well that went over very well as you can imagine considering most of my mates were around, and why he singled me out I will never know. I thought well OK, I’ll do him a cup of tea, so I brewed him a cup of tea, and gave it to him in his billy can, and went and had mine. I said, Do I get any extra time for this? NO! was the reply. I thought well this is fun. The next day the same thing happened again, and I was that annoyed the first day it happened that I had taken some laxatives to work, not that I needed them, but I thought he did. He yelled KING, TEA, NOW! So fair enough, I brewed the tea and put a laxative in there, stirred it all up took it to him and said, There you are Mr. Macaulay. He said, Good, better go and get yours now. Fair enough, went back, had my tea in five minutes and its out on the job again. Next day it was the same again. Now it was two laxatives! I thought well that should drop the hint, but it didn’t, so the next day he repeated it again. This time there were three laxatives went in, and then for some reason he did not come into work. Apparently, he could not get off the toilet. He had to have drips put in to re-hydrate him, so he must have, to put it bluntly, shit through the eye of a needle. It was amazing that he never ever said anything to me, and he never ever asked me to brew him a cup of tea after that, which made me happy. Now I could have my full ten minutes to have my cup of tea. It did not make him very happy, and if he could read this now, he would no doubt hunt me down if he is not already dead!

Another day, same person, we had made some covers, but they were, best way I could describe it, they were about the size of a truck and made out of quarter inch steel plate. When welded, they have buckles in them, so I got the job of heating them up, and what they call spot shrinking them. He came round the corner this day and I was having a cigarette and talking to a mate, and had the big heating torch in my hand. He came over, and said, Look, I want this job doing in a hurry, got this chalk out of his pocket and drew these bloody big circles on it, and said Heat them up there, there, there, and there, OK! With that, he went out of the workshop. I lit the big torch, and heated them up. I had just put the torch out, and back in he comes, and he just lost it! He called me all the names under the sun, lazy this, lazy that, and said I told you to heat them up and he went bang with his hand, and bang with his hand again. By the time he had hit the plate twice, he realized he had no skin left on his hand, and the smell was, well I found it quite tasteful, but I don’t think he did. I had just finished the job, which had gone off from red-hot to black, and here he is smacking it with the flat of his hand trying to press the point that I had not done the job! So it was off to the first aid room for Mr. Macaulay.

I was working on a tank one day and what we used to do was use the bigger electrodes because then you could weld faster. I was welding inside this tank using a fourth gauge electrode, which is a very thick electrode and it takes about 350 amps. I’m welding away and sweating like a dog, and I thought I fancy a cigarette. So I felt in my pocket and got my ciggies out, and I thought bloody hell I am sweating, they are damp. I put the cigarette in my mouth, struck the electrode up so that it was glowing on the end, turned it around and went to light my cigarette. I got 350 amps through my mouth. Well my jaws closed so tight it bit my cigarette in half, which really annoyed me, but it felt like my bloody ears had fallen off, because I can assure you that 350 amps going through your mouth is not a pleasant experience. So I didn’t do it after that. I learned very quickly, because I’m quite smart.

Some of the people I used to work with were hard men, and some were as rough as guts. One of their favorite pastimes was to wait until somebody had his back to you and was marking something out. We had two colors of marker paint, one bright blue and one bright yellow. It was quite amusing to see how many people were walking around the workshop with the base of their shoes painted one blue and one yellow, or two yellow, etc. You had to be very careful you were not caught because these guys would not hesitate to give you a smack on the nose. I don’t know if you can recall hobnail boots, they used to have studs and a steel back plate on them. If you saw somebody stood on a steel plate, which they nearly always were, and you happened to have your welding gear in your hands, you would just tack it to the plate, tack the back plate of the shoe onto the plate itself, and then just stand back and wait for them to move. When you think about it, it was bloody crazy for the simple reason you could break their legs falling in a steel workshop, but it didn’t seem to matter at the time.

During serving my time in the early years of the trade, I saw some horrific accidents. One guy was rolling up some three quarter shelves to make into cylinders, and what they did was what we call lip the plate, so they put a radius on it, and then feed it into the big rollers. I am talking big rollers to bend three-inch plate! When he entered it into the rollers, sometimes the rollers skidded on the plate, so the common practice was to go to the other end of the plate and bounce on it, or jump on it. I was working with a lad one day, and we were bouncing away there trying to get it to take hold in the roller. You know on a trampoline when you get your timing wrong, well this poor bugger did, and he fell over and his hand went into the roller! First, there was mass panic to stop the bloody thing, and by the time we managed to get to the kill switch, it had taken half his hand into the roller. Now we faced with the problem of how to get him out of it. It would have been no small job to take the tension off the rollers, because everything was manual, so the decision was to put it in reverse. You can imagine this poor bugger with his hand stuck between rollers, with his hand rolled flat, now having to be rolled out of it. Anyway, he lost three fingers in the end and the use of most of his hand, but unfortunately, they were the type of things that did happen in engineering. There was another day when one of the men was doing expanding tubes in a boil plate, and we were on night shift at the time. The expander on the tubes has a universal joint connection like you have on a car, and apparently, he had it under his arm while he was guiding it into the tubes to expand them. The universal grabbed his overalls, and we heard him shouting for help, but we were at the other end of the workshop and by the time we got to him he’d done I don’t know how many revolutions, but too many, because he was dead, and very badly smashed up. What had happened was, once it grabbed his overalls, it picked him up and smashed him down, and picked him up and smashed him down with disastrous results.

The main thing about those days was there was always a lot of jokes or sarcasm going around and I remember one day it had just started to snow and I’m sat in this boiler shop with a couple of the guys, and I said Look isn’t that beautiful, it’s just started to snow. My mate said, I’ll be checking in the morning.

Checking for what?

Outside the back door.

Checking for what? I asked again.

Footprints!

I said You miserable bastard, don’t you trust your wife or what?

He said Oh well, you can’t be too careful can you.

I got home next morning and the first thing I do is have a look out the back door! I went to work that night, and as soon as he saw me, he said, Did you check?

I said I would like to tell you no, but I’d be telling you lies, yes I did.

He said, I thought I had set you up!

This sort of thing was going on continuously.

The type of work we were doing was heavy and you got your kicks however you could, it was that simple. There was a lot of fun. The company I was working for closed down and that meant that I had to go and do something that I had never done, I had to go find a job.

ENGLAND -Second Job.

Now I was good at what I did, but had never been for a new job. So I found a job with a couple of my mates at a place called R & J Dempsters, which was a tank manufacturer. We go in and the boss would tell you if