Just About Me 11

Well another new job beckoned, it was 1973 and I was now 17, I joined Total Oil, at 33 Cavendish Sq, W1. I was once again in the post room, I worked with a guy named Victor, Victor was in his 50s and was from Ireland, he was a cracking chap and never once lost his temper as I mucked up the run of monthly invoices, in those days their were no computers, well one but that took up a room on its own, and we had to feed a large box of continuous paper through a machine that placed each one into a windowed envelope for posting. Inevetably this would also come flying of the spokes and go all over the floor, Victor would calmly collect it all up and straighten it out, whilst I shouted, swore a bit and walked off for a fag. We could fill up to 30 complete sacks of outgoing mail and receive a similar amount of incoming mail everyday, compare that to today and the pouches of mail that companies receive today, and half of that is junk mail. We had a lot of temps working at Total Oil, one of which was an actor whose name escapes me but, he played the Judge on the successful afternoon TV drama, Crown Court, I just could not stop calling him Judge and Your Honour as I was totally star struck at the time.

Around this time, my Friend Paul Stevens from Elliott school had looked me up, and we both discovered pubs, we used to go to the White Lion in Putney a lot, we had some great times, Paul was a butcher at Tesco's at the time and would always be playing pranks on the women and girls in the pub, things like turning up with pigs trotters up his sleeves or pigs ears slung over his head, they sound silly now but it was pretty amusing then. Paul went on to become a bus conductor on London Transport and whilst I was earning about £18 - £20 per week he earned over £100, remember this was 1974-75. So you guessed it, I wanted to be a bus conductor too. I went along for the interview as they were crying out for staff, and, got turned down because I was too tall, I would have had too stoop over on the upper deck, but they needed staff so badly that they took me on as an Underground Guard at a better rate of pay than the buses. So it was bye bye Total Oil and hello London Transport.