The Makings of a Sound Engineer

By Michael Andrews

Imagine a world where the only rule book is in a language you do not understand. You do not understand why you are different. You try with great effort to fit in, be normal, but you still find yourself sat in a crowded room at a conference, sat on your own watching people talking to each other, busy chatting away, ignoring you as if you are invisible, like you are watching through a television screen from a remote place.
Why was I the target of bullies at school? Why was I always the last one to be picked for team sports? Others were often keen to point out that I was different. Why? I have been searching for that answer most of my life until in my mid-twenties, I gave up trying. I was searching for a label that defined me. An identity. I wanted to know who I was. I gave up. It was over twenty years later at the age of 47 and totally out of the blue that my life was turned upside down. The news that I had longed for came thundering through like a juggernaut had blasted through the walls of my living room. This book recalls the events leading up to that juggernaut crash and I recall going over my past and the missed clues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528981033

Michael Andrews

Michael Andrews was born in the wilds of southern New Jersey. In 1996 he moved to Los Angeles to write movies, and is the screenwriter of two feature films: BLOOD AND BONE, an action/martial-arts film starring Michael Jai White, Eamonn Walker and Julian Sands, (Released 2009 by SONY), and DUNSMORE, starring Talia Shire, Kadeem Hardison, Barry Corbin and W. Earl Brown, (released 2003 by IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT). Both films are available on Amazon, Netflix and Itunes.

Book preview

About the Author

Michael Andrews has been travelling life’s journey for over half a century and has only recently begun to understand himself and why he is like he is. He enjoys writing and his first book explains the unravelling of that mystery that had haunted him for so long. Writing this book has been a new adventure that has helped him on the road to recovery and to come to terms with his past.

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to my late mother, Vera, who put up with me for all those years. I must have been a difficult child growing up, but now we both know and understand the challenges I faced, I hope I can be forgiven for those difficult times. I never fully disclosed the full extent of the bullying that I had endured when I was at school, partly because I felt ashamed and inadequate for not being able to deal with it myself, but also because I did not want my mother to go through any more worry and anguish.

Copyright Information ©

Michael Andrews (2021)

The right of Michael Andrews to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of the author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528981026 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528981033 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank those individuals who actively seek an equal and fair society for all. For those in the public eye who speak up for equality, speaking for those who would otherwise have no voice you have my full admiration.

Chapter One

Mad World

HIV patients to be denied lifesaving treatment or at least that’s what the NHS Trust wanted you to believe. We need to get to grips with escalating drug costs, concluded my former employer. The year was 2012 and the month of July had just begun, and life for me was always a routine. The monthly activity reports I had to produce at the beginning of each month was pretty much a routine. However, it was in the middle of this one routine that my life was about to be turned upside down, the results of which reverberate with me today, seven years later.

On the afternoon of the 3rd July, I was doing the monthly reports as I had always done for the previous seven years when the lead consultant and my line manager came into my office. They wanted me to change the report specification. It was acknowledged later by the line manager that the timing for the request was poorly judged; an understatement in my opinion or perhaps it was a deliberate attempt to catch me off guard? There was no official request for the change as though nobody was to know anything about it. What these people wanted me to do was to lie and give a false representation of the activity for the previous month. I pride myself on my accuracy and attention to detail. I was being asked to do something that I could not bring myself to do at such short notice. Before I go any further, the notion of an ‘HIV Pool’ as I later learnt according to one local reporter, did not exist anywhere in the NHS. The NHS connecting for health model did not make any reference to an ‘HIV Pool’ which explains why management did not like me referring to the NHS connecting for health model. In their view, it did not represent HIV data accurately and was not a correct representation. I was, to their annoyance, inclined to disagree. I shall use what I knew then which was an ‘HIV Pool’. The HIV Pool as it was understood then was the number of HIV patients that were seen by the Trust over an 18-month period, the idea being that patients coming up to 18 months, needed to come in for a routine assessment. There was a concerted effort to get the frequency down to within 12 months but this was difficult to achieve for all patients. So there was a 12-month HIV Pool and an 18-month HIV Pool where we tried over a period of time to get the 18-month to align with the 12-month. In other words, if all the patients in our cohort were seen within 12 months, problem solved. Unfortunately, we had not got the capacity to make it possible. The difference between the 12-month HIV pool and the 18-month HIV pool was about 25 patients and this remained stubbornly consistent. The report specifications were based on an 18-month cohort and the Trust was paid on that basis.

On that afternoon in July when they tried to get me to change the reports, I felt a sense of panic; they suddenly wanted me to report a 12-month HIV pool instead of 18-months which came completely out of the blue. It was as though they had been rumbled, and they were trying to cover their tracks. The fact that they would not commit the request to written form, heightened my suspicion that something was not right.

So my dilemma. I was in the middle of doing my reports, and I had a verbal request to change the requirements for those reports. No written request, no change-control procedure, no time to assess the impact that these changes would have on what was a very complex system which produced as many as three dozen different reports which revolve around an 18-month HIV cohort and GUM generally. At this point my mind froze. I could no longer think very clearly at such an abrupt request. My immediate thought was that it would fail the change-control procedure because firstly, the request is not in writing which means the auditors would have me taken outside and shot. Secondly, I was not being given sufficient time to assess what changes to the system were necessary to minimise the risk and possible disruption. This line manager and lead consultant wanted the changes done now. It simply was not possible to do at such short notice.

They then asked me to go into the system and alter the figures which would have created an imbalance, a scenario which the system was not expecting resulting in unpredictable consequences. It was most likely the system would crash. I have never in my life hacked into a system before simply because I can be clumsy with technology, and I am bound to make a hash of it while in my frequent moments of not thinking clearly. I would not know what I was doing and the system would have definitely crashed. Life for me was becoming all too complicated. Despite this, it still seemed like a good idea according to my line manager and lead consultant. If the system did not crash, the figures still had to balance and having so many reports to produce, there were bound to be anomalies and questions were bound to be asked. It turned out that this line manager and lead consultant holding senior NHS roles, did not know who received these reports. In fact, they later conceded, they did not know what time of the month these reports were due. And when they came to me, they were unaware. I was in the middle of doing the reports. A comical double act in the making. There were various recipients of these reports, both within the trust and external bodies such as the health protection agency (Now defunct) and the department of health. It is important that these reports were consistent because the different departments do compare notes and if there are anomalies then questions will be asked. If there are no credible answers to the questions, then the firing squad are called upon once more. So it was important that these figures balanced and made sense. The first recipient I told them was finance to which the line manager responded by saying there were people in Finance that could be persuaded to look the other way; in other words just pass off the reports regardless. As for the other recipients the trust board, the HPA, the department of health, the health secretary and the prime minister, they would all have to be ‘in on it’ to allow these figures to go through unchallenged. It would take the mathematical genius of Diane Abbot to convince the public that these unbalanced figures made sense.

It still could not be done. The pair convened for a quick meeting just outside my office. They were whispering to each other in the doorway. The words were barely audible but the gist of it was, how far up the chain of command people knew about this. A name was mentioned, to which the response was that if this person found out, would go ‘berserk’. I was completely oblivious to what was actually going on and the language such as ‘in on it’ and the whispering was making me feel uncomfortable. I began to realise that something definitely was not right and that my line manager was trying to rope me into some dodgy practice.

I had a sickening feeling that I was going to be bullied into doing something that was wrong and could not be done without people finding out. I was going to be the sacrificial lamb. The whispering seemed to go on for ages. I just sat there. My routine on hold while the deadline for these reports were getting closer. I was beginning to get very anxious and stressed. After their mini conference, they came back into my office and the lead consultant ordered me not to submit the activity figures for June. Some of these reports have legal requirements and the Trust could effectively lose its star rating if they failed to comply. The line manager and the lead consultant did not have the authority to make that decision. If I missed the report deadline, people would come knocking with a firing squad in tow. Again it was not possible to do this. In their desperation to find a quick fix, they were not thinking clearly as to the long term consequences of their actions. It was clear they had been rumbled, and they were desperately trying to cover their tracks. Were they going to pass the blame onto somebody else? It was raised at a prior meeting that some PCTs were questioning why we were the most expensive clinic outside London for providing sexual health services. There was growing suspicion about how our services were being run.

My routine was still on pause and the clock was ticking towards the deadline. I had to provide activity reports. The line manager and lead consultant then contrived a plan so ingenious it would make the village idiot look like Brain of Britain. They are NHS employees admittedly but in such high positions making decisions about patient care it is a cold sobering thought. The plan was to suppress any new HIV patients coming in to the pool from June until the end of the current financial year, nine months in total. We averaged about eight new HIV patients every month so over the nine months that would mean seventy-two patients would have been kept off the system. If they were logged on the system, then they would have been reported as new patients. So there would have been no electronic record of these patients until the start of the next financial year. In those days, New HIV patients had to be reported to the health protection agency so they can monitor infection rates around the country and the government could then target funding in areas that need it most with regard to preventative measures. It was a legal requirement to report all new cases. So come the second month of the next financial year, having for the past nine months reported no new HIV cases, the trust board, the health secretary and the prime minister are about to break out the champagne in celebration of our achievements, then comes the bombshell that 80 new HIV patients had been reported for the previous month. The balloons go up, panic ensues a new epidemic and newspapers report HIV infections are out of control. Is there a terror link to these infections? COBRA are called for a meeting to discuss the situation which appears to have only occurred in the West Midlands. The intelligence services are called to investigate a possible terrorist attack. I guess it would not go down well. Despite this, the line manager and lead consultant were still determined to go ahead with this ill-thought-out plan. A plan that had potentially sinister repercussions.

The grievance that I was to raise with the trust soon after, did not get to the truth. I sensed there was a cover up. They never took my grievance seriously which fuels the conspiracy theories as to what they were hoping to achieve and implied the trust had a role in the deceit.

So what did they hope to achieve by this? It was believed that by suppressing the new HIV patients, the 18-month HIV pool would remain static and that by the end of the financial year, the 12-month HIV pool