Photo John Madden I joined a manufacturer of aluminium doors and windows around 5 years into my working life. After a couple of years as a management cadet with a plastics company, and having picked up some useful skills in production planning from both my employer and night school classes I'd got restless at the poor pay that good jobs returned compared to "unskilled" occupations. My brother was working in a car plant assembling BMC motorcars and I joined him for 6 months. The better hourly rate bolstered by regular overtime helped my wife and me save the money needed to buy a first house. And raise a first child. At the end of the six months I left the car plant to be the production planner for the aluminium company, my first assignment where I was in charge of a function. Less than a year into that role the management asked me to take on the Purchasing Officer's job as the incumbent was about to be dismissed. What knowledge I had came from academic study and invent
I am the oldest child of seven. The first to lose innocence is usually the oldest, and until the next one down catches up the old fella is at the constant risk of innocent betrayal. Working life is much the same. The new arrival, especially in a first job, comes in clean (mostly) and oblivious to whatever schemes, scandals, scams and sleight of hand the incumbents have been sliding past the various layers of management. A special induction in addition to the official version needs to be carried out way before the tyro is allowed to take the wheel, any wheel. My first full time job was with a plastics manufacturer, and it was right on last year of the Sixties. This was some distance from my long term ambition to be a journalist. That prime aim was missed thanks to the existence of only two daily newspapers serving Auckland and the fact that only one, The New Zealand Herald, was offering a cadetship for the upcoming year. I was promising enough that I was granted an interview with