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It was pointed out to me today that its so cushy now! Sat Nav, Mobile Phones, Post Codes, Self Diagnosis, Computers, UK Whitegoods,etc etc
Think 30 years ago went out on ten calls without all this still have ten calls but still don’t finish earlier.
Well is it easier now than then? I know customers aren’t, use to get more than my wages in tips, could call after 6pm and not get moaned at.
Kirk
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
I await Martin and Jim starting on thsi one! 😆
I don’t think it easier, if anything it’s a lot harder.
The demands that customers make are, at times, beyond belief these days. The service that’s expected for what we get paid (which they don’t know, they think we’re paid a lot more. I know, I’ve tested that.) is just silly. In fact the level of service expected on a £200 washer is ludicrous in the extreme.
Try getting the level of service we provide on that £200 washer on a £20,000 Mercedes. Crazy, people will wait a week to get the car booked in yet are screaming blue murder if you can’t get to the washing machine or dishwasher in 24 hours or less. We even travel to them!
Then there’s sat nav, well there’s more houses now. They’ve built a few in the past thirty years and they all look the same too. Kinda red generic brick, with white trim and a BMW at the door.
That aside there’s the increase in traffic “safety” like cameras, traffic calming, traffic lights, roundabouts and insane one-way systems not to mention the fact that the traffic on our roads (from memory) has doubled since the late seventies. Not so easy to get about now.
Postcodes have been with us since Victorian times, nothing new there. We just use them now as there’s so many of those damned red houses.
Self diagnosis… uh huh. Have you seen any Indesit “fault codes”? Often “pin the tail on the donkey” is an easier task than finding the fault on some of the new electronic machines.
Mobile phones, let me just ask this… how many times have you almost (literally) launched it out the window? Mind you, you’d probably get done for littering by one of the damned cameras and if you do answer it when driving you get done for it. It’s a funny old thing, I always had this daft notion in my head that drugs killed more people than mobile phones but apparently I’m wrong.
Even then we’ll die sooner as our brains are all irradiated by the signals from the phones, as well as other assorted electronic devices.
Further, how much time during the day do you spend on the phone and not working just because it’s there?
Computers, just another bit of it you have to lug around and a theft risk from some little hoodlum eyeing up the van in the more downmarket area of town. (That was the politically correct way of saying the bit where all the druggie scum lives ;))
Oh that’s right, they didn’t have druggies all those years ago because life was so much better. I fear some areas deeply and almost every large town or city has at least one of “those” areas, you know the ones, where all the crime is but the police can’t go in case they get a beating. But we have to ’cause some mother of five needs her washing machine sorting.
And usually it’s not too pleasant when you get into these places either. I still shudder at the thought of some I’ve been in.
Oh yes, of course it’s an easier life. NOT!
K.
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
I still have my contract from the time I started at Hotpoint or BDA as it then was. May 1969. salary £810 per annum, hours 40 per week. 😯
I was given a large, Perkins diesel engined Ford Transit, three weeks training in Nottingham ( happy days & nights 😉 ) Then after three days with a field trainer I was released on the unsuspecting public of Manchester. Initially a Basic (Vacs, wringers, twin tubs, table ironers etc) engineer. after 18 months I was given a box of fridge thermostats, bulbs and the odd fridge door catch ( many times stronger than a dishwasher door latch) and informed that I was now a fully trained fridge engineer. In those days we did not do any regassing, the whole refrigeration unit came mounted on a metal frame and you swapped the full gubbins in one go. The advent of two temp, auto defrost later made that impractical. I have to say that it was one of the happiest times of my life. I enjoyed the job then just as much as I still do today. It was a time when you still had pride in the company and the customers gave you respect. I later did the auto course at Nottingham and when Hotpoint reintroduced a range of Bosch made dishwashers became the first engineer in the Manchester area to go on the D/W course in Peterborough.
Today, I don’t have sat nav, I have ‘The Knowledge’. I do not give my customers my mobile number but use it for my convenience only. There are only a few benefits to being self employed and one of them is that you can choose your customers. Almost all of my customers are polite, friendly ( its a Northern thing) and aggro is something that is I do not get, nor would I tolerate it for the sake of a few ££’s.
The modern machines are to me, just another challenge, sometimes you do feel that it is not worth the effort on one of the spaghetti munchers finest, when you feel that you have to run back to the car and do an F1 racing start so that you can get round the corner before it breaks down again. 😥
The one thing that is different is the traffic, there is no rush hour now in this area, it is virtually crawling along at all hours of the day. Although I did once do a month long secondment in the London area at the time of the 3 day week, around 1971 if my memory is correct. Power cuts happened without warning, driving round Marble Arch in my big tranny with no traffic lights working was quite enjoyable at the time. 8)
In conclusion I would have to say that it is not a lot easier today, nor would I agree with Ken when he says it is ‘a lot harder’. Its just a different world, some things are better and some are not. On balance I would say that I would not like to be starting out in this business today, but then that could just be my age. 😆
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
I can’t comment on how things were 30 years ago. I was repairing twintubs in 1976 but not for a living. In the 8 years I’ve been doing this work some things have made the job easier, others have made it harder. One of the things I find absorbs a lot of my time is watching computerised machines to observe symptoms. In the extreme, I once stood over a Zanussi for over an hour, waiting for it to leak, which it obligingly managed 4 minutes before the end of programme. If it had been an old fashioned model with a mechanical timer I could have just clicked it round manually until it came to the leaking stage.
The Internet is the main thing to make life easier. I used to make lots of expensive phone calls to find out part numbers, order goods etc. Then when they were ordered there were usually one or 2 parts wrong as the person at the other end of the phone wrote down the numbers wrong.
Fortunately we don’t have heavy traffic, conjestion charges, parking meters or speed cameras up here, athough there are plenty of roving speed traps about.Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
‘Twas a cold, grey October day in 1967 when I set out in the company van (Morris Minor 1000 – very posh!) out on my own. 6 jobs for starters just to break me in as it were? Swanmaid and Dishlex dishwashers and Bendix Autowashers mostly (Type D etc – the ones bolted to the floor!). around a 100 mile a day round trip, posh houses, country lane driving, no traffic, no maps, few road signs (not replaced since the war don’t you know? 🙂 ) No phones either, just amble along asking directions from the odd farmer and perhaps a postman or milkman? Can’t remember exactly what my wages were at the time but it was around £20 a week.
Ambled along doing a mixture of field service calls and workshop repairs. Unfortunately for me I took to repairing a hell of a lot of the new Hoover Keymatics (3224’s) as we were appointed main Hoover agents. My services were more useful in the workshop doing ATH timer conversions and Tub & Drum changes. At the time I could complete 5 or 6 T& D jobs per day and the manager and I didn’t see eye to eye on many occasions over the pressure of work I was subjected to. I left in 1969….!
Got a job as a field service engineer for Hotpoint. 3 weeks training in Nottingham (like Iadom) Then out on the road with that lousy diesel Transit Van fixing lousy twin tubs. By 1970 I was promoted to Field trainer and was working like some deranged parent nappy training raw recruits from training school and spending my days out on ‘screamers’ and meeting up with engineers and sorting out their cock-ups, day in day out.
Then I commuted daily to Bristol on a so called ‘Service Managers Course’ (Ha! Ha!) in 1971. Fortunately having had the ‘insight’ of a service managers lot, I never continued the option (sod that!) I continued Field training for a while then took the decision to chuck it all in and start out on my own.. to hell with Hotpoint!
The rest is history, I’m my own boss and have been since 1973, I choose my own customers, do what I want, when I want. My lot today is very very easy indeed, a cruise even, that pays pretty well that’s for sure!
Yes! this ‘engineer’ finds it easier now than ever before -thanks! :rotl:
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
I have made my working life so much easier by making the simple decision not to do any bearing changes for the last 2 years. If one of my customers insist on having the job done I have a mate who is willing to do any make as long as he makes £50 in cash, And he does a good job too.
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
I’m not qualified to say whether things are easier, stuck in an office all day.
There was a lot less traffic in the days of yore.
Customer probably did not have a phone, and you could guarantee someone was home. Usually the lady of the house, you would never meet the other half.
Finding places was just as easy, as you could always ask, and someone always knew. There would be a local post office, and they still delivered the post, if not the milkman or newsagent as they delivered to every house in the area. Ask someone in the village, and they knew who you were looking for, and if out, call just down the road, and she would be in her mother’s, or sister’s.
These days, there are no milkmen, the newspaper came from Sainsburys, the post office doesn’t deliver themselves, and the name you have is unheard of because it is a “dormitory” area, or a Mr A living with Miss B.
The products, I think the job is cleaner. No messing with oil from twin/tubs. No stripping motors to replace clutches or armatures. Alvania grease on hoover 3224 drive shafts. (That was for Martin’s benefit). Timers with 80 odd wires, all the same colour. Remember the early Candy/Zanussi’s where you would struggle to get to the hidden side of the timer.
I recall the Swan-maid D/washer though. Brilliant concept, crank the door handle whilst loading, and the kettle in the base would heat the water in time for you to close the door. The rinse water would then heat up in the kettle whilst the main wash was happening. Timer was a ticckety-tick affair, and in the early days, no pump, just a “dump-valve”.
Alex
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
I find it much easier now back then there was no information available for all the other makes, spares were so difficult to come by delivery every two weeks very small range.
I worked six day’s a week and sunday was spent building spiders timers motors gearboxs etc, we had much easier mechanical machines but you did have a very dirty job.
Servis quartz was the first simple to repair electronic machine with its row of triacs that a monkey could fix, now half your life is spent waiting for them to start and of course the customer can’t tell you where the timer stuck.
But do I miss the old refrigeration, the first firm I worked for if you failed on washing machines they made you a fridge engineer,who else thinks fridges have gone backwards, I also remember getting the fridge unit complete all you did was unscrew the liner lift it out and drop in a complete sealed unit about 20 mins.
Kirk
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
iadom wrote:.
In conclusion I would have to say that it is not a lot easier today, nor would I agree with Ken when he says it is ‘a lot harder’. Its just a different world, some things are better and some are not. On balance I would say that I would not like to be starting out in this business today, but then that could just be my age. 😆More frustrating if anything Jim, having to work on cheap crap is not my idea of a good time. As engineers we probably don’t get as much satifaction as we used to when appliances were well built.
There are more and more built in appliances which are so badly fitted by John Wayne’s mates, three built in DW’s today, the installation would have been done better by the Early Learning School 😥
The jury is out for me if I am still enjoying what I do, I suppose if my numbers came up on the lottery I would be biased to kick it all into touch :rolls:
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
Kirk wrote:I also remember getting the fridge unit complete all you did was unscrew the liner lift it out and drop in a complete sealed unit about 20 mins.
Flippin’ heck yes! Hotpoint Ice Diamond fridge units all bolted up in a transit frame, drop the evaporator and the stat phial, remove the insulated panel behind and pull the whole lot out!!!!
Before that on the early John Lewis (Jonelle brand) fridges you had to remove the entire plastic cabinet liner. Wind the extra long evaporator pipework under the cabinet then press it into the fibreglass lining before fiddling the cabinet liner back in.
Washing machine valves where hefty brass jobs that had to be fully stripped apart, clear away the limescale and stuff it all back together again. No such thing as a replacement inlet valve, all the component parts were available seperately. An hours job on a Keymatic!!! 🙁
God help you if on a Bendix LTA, you had to drop the gearbox because the spin solenoid had jammed (very often let me tell you) And a likely 2 hour job in prospect for sure! These days it would be classed by these youngsters as “A two man job!!” 😆 😆
Jim (iadom) how many HL2468 spin cans have we changed in our time eh? And stripping a 1502 gearbox just to replace the clutch spring, rock on! English Electric Liberator with a heating element up the swannie, a hell of a job that will take you 1 & 1/2 hours at least, followed by a bad back and 2 weeks in hospital for a hernia operation. ( I speak from experience there :rolls: )
For all you youngsters that wrestle with Bosch appliances these days, its like playing in a kindergarten compared to changing the drum bearings on a Bosch VT550 back in the mid 70’s….(You’ve probably never heard of such a machine I bet?)….??? The most common fault on those was complaints of clothes getting wetter the longer the dry cycle went on? Bloody nightmare job, the inner drum had to come out just to scrape away a bit of limescale build-up off the water tube and put it all back together again…sweet cheeses what a job!
GV121E dishwasher water softener change?….. Oh please boss no, can’t you give it to someone else to do, I’m still having nightmares over the last one you sent me out to fix!
It’s a walk in the park for anyone these days fixing whitegoods, an ideal job for old godgers like me who is not quite ready yet to don the B & Q uniform…. :rotfl:
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
Yeah, loads easier these days.
20 minutes to get it out the housing due to the idiot kitchen fitters, 10 minutes to do the job and 20 minutes to get it back in. Then another ten minutes trying to get it to line up for the picky customer as it looks to be a fraction of a mil off at one side.
They didn’t have those in your day. 😉
To be honest one of the biggest changes that I see is that the customers have changed as the machines are less well respected and, it seems, so are we. It appears that we’re expected to jump through hoops for the customers, which is fine if you’re charging for it but for warranty customers, especially on the cheap rubbish stuff, that expect same day service, out of hours and every part for their appliance on the van as well as a replacement in case you can’t fix it on the spot, what’s expected of us is totally out of proportion to the “reward”.
In essence I think that we are often regarded and treated as a commodity, just like the machine.
Many companies treat us like that as well IMO.
It is however massively interesting how the attitudes of the customer change from being under some warranty or another to paying for service themselves. In almost all cases the latter means a nicer customer.
That’s strange until you understand that the customer seems to think that we get paid lots to do warranty work (:lol:) and we get paid for each visit (:lol:) as well as often thinking that you work for the big company and have endless resources at your disposal.
Aside from that there’s still some right horrible jobs to do out there and, with the proliferation of more advanced technologies becoming cheaper, such as RFID etc., on the way I don’t see it getting any easier. As ever the business will change, but easier? For now I’ll reserve judgement on the actual appliances.
But when I think back to my days starting in the field about the worst jobs we got were drum lifts on the Candy machines. Other than that it was fairly straight forward and very little, if any, integrated which takes far longer as a rule. And in those days we needed an awful lot less stock on the van to repair a lot more machines.
K.
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
Ken paints a pretty clear picture of an engineers lot that deals each day with under warranty work and the dreaded built-in stuff at that. Its hard to assimilate that anyone would get job satisfaction out of that type of work day in day out? Bodgy kitchen fittings, miserable unhappy clients, difficult in the extreme at the very least. All pretty grim stuff and doesn’t make easy encouraging reading overall.
However I suspect most engineers these day are a pretty hardy bunch and would let most of these day in day out problems simply ‘wash off’ (pardon the pun 😳 ) and will get on with it maybe? I know I would.
Time and tide wait for no man and if it takes 2 hours to fix the problem, then 2 hours it is. You win some and you lose some. For the most part guarantee work is a doddle, 5 minutes to figure it, 10 minutes to fix it. 10 jobs a day, home by 3pm at the latest. That is a day in the life of an employed whitegoods ‘engineer’ in essence. (That 2 hour job means its home by 5 pm though 🙁 )
Job satisfaction is where its at and fixing something that don’t work is the prize, if you get a kick from that and someone is willing to pay you for it? Not a bad job really is it?
kwatt wrote:They didn’t have those in your day.
Today is my day, tomorrow know doubt will be yet another easy fixin’ day for me! 😉
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
kwatt wrote:
To be honest one of the biggest changes that I see is that the customers have changed as the machines are less well respected and, it seems, so are we. In essence I think that we are often regarded and treated as a commodity, just like the machine.
K.
I can’t say I agree with this totaly, maybe the younger generation have little respect for us, but in general most customers are so pleased with the service we give.
What gets my goat is people asking me to do the odd plumbing job when I arrive to fix an appliance, toilet leaking, overflow in loft leaking etc. When I explain to them that they need a plumber to do those jobs I get the answer ” oh are you not a plumber?” 👿 no disrespect to plumbers but give me strength 😥
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
Martin wrote:
Time and tide wait for no man and if it takes 2 hours to fix the problem, then 2 hours it is. You win some and you lose some. For the most part guarantee work is a doddle, 5 minutes to figure it, 10 minutes to fix it. 10 jobs a day, home by 3pm at the latest. That is a day in the life of an employed whitegoods ‘engineer’ in essence. (That 2 hour job means its home by 5 pm though 🙁 )
Cripes Martin, all of my work is chargable, 5+10 minutes in and out of the house, in this area I would be linched if I presented a 40+ bill for 15 mins I wouldn’t have time to dunk a second rich tea 😆
Re: How easy we engineers have it now!
I can only see it from the customers we have to deal with and I can’t always pick and choose who or what we deal with sadly. That’s one of the joys of contract work. Mind you I am often told that the central belt is one of the worst areas in the country for customers being a PITA.
But working in that contract environment means that there’s pressure to do so many calls per day and complete so many calls per day. Working on your own you only have to answer to yourself, which is where the different opinions creep in as you guys have the options that we often don’t.
The same applies to many employed engineers, just look at some of the stuff from the Indesit/Hotpoint and British Gas guys. They don’t always get an easy ride either. Everyone wants their pound of flesh. 😕
But as a yardstick I would expect my engineers to go out with 8-10 calls per day and return a minimum of 6-8 complete respective to the number of calls issued. But with the ever increasing range of products out there that is becoming very hard to maintain which directly affects the profitability of the business. Add to that mix the increase in integrated stuff eating up time and you might start to see where I’m coming from.
Short of it is that a one man business can operate in a totally different way to one that has multiple employees and, in general, will more often than not deal with a different type of customer when you’re dealing directly with the end user. That was the point I was trying to make in a way earlier.
K.
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