Talking To Doorbells

There’s nothing like real life to create real stories.

This year, I will be 64 years old and three years away from State retirement age. For the majority of my working life, I have been in engineering, although there have been four occasions where circumstances forced me into non-engineering roles. 

Most of my engineering jobs have been in the Automotive sector. I have worked on some prestigious programmes, the most significant in my mind were where I managed the production of interior trim tooling for the Jaguar XK8 coupé and the Bentley State Limousine.

In my last engineering job, I worked as an agency contractor. I was taken on to investigate ways to reduce the theoretical number of operators required to build an updated engine. This was done via time studies which allowed me to break jobs down, and moving certain elements to better balance individual workloads. The work wasn’t especially difficult but it was involved and at times long-winded.

I enjoyed the work, so it came as a major shock when, after the project was completed, I was told my services were no longer required. The irony was not lost on me.

I spent three months job searching in the engineering sector with no success. While I secured three interviews, each resulted in a “Thanks but no thanks.”

One day during this enforced sabbatical, there was a knock on my door. It was a meter reader, coming to take a gas and electric meter reading. This was no “ordinary” meter reader, though. It was a colleague from my automotive days. We’d not seen each other for a long time but here he was, pacing the streets in a completely different job.

I asked how he got there and his answer was quite revealing. Suffice to say, he realised that even the most glamorous job wasn’t the be all and end all. If you’ll excuse the cliché, at our ages, we both realised that life really is too short.

So it was that he phoned me a few weeks later, asking if I was still looking for work. I was and, not for the first time in my working life, I found myself applying for a position I never dreamt I would go for.

I am an inveterate snob and really struggled with this one. When I considered my options, however, I recognised that, in the past, I had been a shelf stacker, a yard labourer and a delivery driver. Clearly, such work wasn’t beneath me. Besides, even at barely above minimum wage, it was more than I was earning at the time (that would have been nothing).

I was interviewed by phone and sent to a hotel in Sussex for training. That was followed by two days of shadowing my old mate who had put me onto the job. The work isn’t difficult, although it’s important that it’s done right (as with most jobs, really) but I was soon into the swing of it.

So now, my days are spent pounding the streets of Kent, knocking on doors and politely asking permission to read people’s meters. On an average day, I can walk twelve miles during my shift. It was agony for the first two or three weeks but my once silky soft feet are now hard as nails. I’m probably considerably lighter these days, too.

I have come across people from all walks of life in the short time I have been doing the job. Some are happy, some are sad. Some, especially older people, can be lonely and others can be angry. Some can be very angry. Still, it’s a job and I often tell clients that “it’s only a meter reading.” If they don’t want me there, that’s fine.

Most people are, of course, more than accommodating, although many are surprised to see meter reading is still a thing. Many of those, however, are pleased to know people like me are still around. Which is nice.

With that long-winded preamble out of the way, expect a variety of posts, from the amusing to the apparently absurd. Even a humble job like this can be surprisingly entertaining.

One thing this experience has taught me is that no job should be dismissed as irrelevant or menial if it gives the person doing it a sense of worth. After more than forty years in engineering, that’s a lesson I perhaps should have learned a long time ago.