Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 2

ON SERVICE

When I finished the six-month's of tech college, and entered the Arnold's workforce, my immediate "boss" was Brian Baxter. He was a maintenance electrician and I became his apprenticed assistant.

If I recall the hierarchy correctly, Brian reported to Tommy Moffatt, the Service Supervisor and Tommy came under Ralph Ledwidge, the Service Manager. I think that's right.

The Service Department had a bloke by the name of Jack Challenor overseeing the admin side of things and there were a couple of secretaries/clerks working with Jack; I think Paula Tulk was in that section.

Brian and I did a maintenance run which took in an area around Martin Place and beyond.

I can recall Mercantile Mutual, which was in Pitt Street, near Martin Place, and also Washington H. Soul Pattinson, further up Pitt Street, closer to Market Street.

The building ran through to George Street

It was in my first week of working with Brian, doing maintenance at Mercantile Mutual, that I came close to seriously injuring him.

He wanted to get on the roof of the lift car to then move down the shaft, checking the guide rails and cleaning any oil/grease.

The lift was controlled by a car switch and Brian had shown me the procedure so I was in the car and Brian then manually (sticking his fingers in the two door locks...one top, one bottom) closed the door lock circuit and instructed me to take the car down, which I did.

He then climbed on the roof and closed the door behind him, which closed the door lock circuit in the normal way.

I can still hear Brian, on the car roof, saying "Take it down, Bruce".

I put the handle over and the car went up.....Brian screamed out "STOP!!!!" and I let the handle go.

Because he had been standing upright, Brian had come into contact with the steel-work at the top of the shaft under the machine-room floor but fortunately he suffered no more than a banged head, with a resultant large lump and a headache.

I, in the meantime, was a quaking mess inside the lift car, thinking that I'd either killed or seriously maimed the man.

What had happened was that I had either forgotten, or Brian hadn't told me, the "Golden Rule of Car-Switches": *down direction is towards the door opening, up is away from the door opening.

A typical car switch

[*EDIT 20th. July 2017: My thanks to Dave Rutter for contacting me with a correction to the above; I had the directions reversed. Come to think of it, that is exactly what happened when I nearly killed Brian].

After getting off the roof of the car and giving me an earful Brian recovered his composure, I stopped shaking from fright, he apologised for yelling at me and we went up to Coles in King Street for morning tea.

A typical 1960s Coles cafeteria but not a lift mechanic in sight!

Coles was the place for all companies lift mechanics working in the city to have their morning-tea break - at around 10:00 AM it was full of uniformed (predominantly overalls) males!

In fact, it was such a tradition that on Thursday's (pay day) Tommy Moffatt would wander in with our pay packets - small brown envelopes which actually contained cash. He knew we'd be there and he didn't have to go chasing around the CBD sites to dish out the pays.

There were no espresso machines back then, no baristas, no specialty coffees....none of what we take for granted today.
After being given the order by the group around the table, the apprentice then queued at the counter with a tray, picked up plates of scones, jam, cream or whatever from the shelves and then small stainless-steel pots of coffee or tea & milk, paid the cashier and then juggled the whole lot as he made his way back to the table.

Looking back from the vantage point of 50+ years, it really was a different time.....a simpler life and, knowing what I do now, perhaps even a more pleasant one.

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Footnote:
With reference to the correction to the car-switch directions (*above), Dave added the following anecdote:-
"Larry Evans almost got my legs chopped off getting that point wrong. It was really my fault for sitting with my legs dangling in the shaft whilst asking him to take the car up. Nevertheless, it cost him a belt across the ears when I got out"!