Jobs I have done

These are my comments on an exchange on my Face book page.

The challenge was to pick out which on tasks was not related to my paid employment.  I’ll point out in passing that some of these were things that occurred – intentionally or otherwise – in the course of jobs.  They were not all the actual title of the job.

1.     Washed out a milk float;  This was about the worst job I had.  As about 12 years old I got a job washing out the van that our milko in the UK used.  In the course of their work a little milk would get splashed about so at the end of the week I had to scrub the inside of the van to get it squeaky clean.  Even in English climate  5 day old spilt milk smelled bad.

2.     . Got the ABS mentioned in a Sydney Daily Telegraph article along with Bobby Limb and Warwick Capper.  In my first stint in the Census I worked on the document giving the ABS views on the content of the 1991 Census.  I included a recommendation to ditch Registered Marital status.  This got the religious all fired up and led to the Tele running a 2 page article against this idea.  It included comments by Messrs Limn and Capper saying how good their marriages were.

3.     . Delivered Christmas mail In the UK about half the final year students at High Schools used to take the last 2 week before Christmas off to deliver the Christmas mail. A nice little earner, especially as some people gave you a box as well as the regular who got his in the New Year.

4.      Nearly caused the Telstra mobile phone network to collapse;  For the 1996 we set up a call centre as a help line.  It was going OK until Census Day when the population caught on to the idea and the system scored a million call attempts in the evening.  Not aided by mobile phones on auto-redial.  Apparently this came close to killing a few bank ATM networks to fail and QANTAS online bookings were a little hard to work.  Difficult to order pizzas!

5.     Picked 500Kg of tomatoes in a day.   As noted, I never got paid for this so it is the answer!!  I never worked out the arithmetic the way Rob did but we weighed the tomatoes as they got packed for market and we would have a few days a year when we sent off a tonne of tomatoes (picked the previous day).  Dad and I shared the picking load so I reckon I did 500kg in a day.  The day used to start and 7am and probably finish about 5pm so, allowing for a lunch break, about 9 hours 30 minutes.  The hard bit was the temperatures in the glasshouses: on a hot day in July or August it would get to 130^oF  = 54^oC.

6.      Marketed Environmental Statistics.  I accompanied Frances to Canada when she got an exchange and did some work in Stats Canada seeing how they did Environmental Statistics.  After my ABS funded work finished StatCan offered me a contract to develop a marketing plan for the major publication under that project.  It was a hoot – and I still have contact with some of the guys I worked with.  A few people in other parts of StatCan got in my way and were advised to go away.  The book got some award and at the celebration the Chief of the Environment stats unit mentioned – jokingly - to the head of the Publications area that I was emigrating to Canada.  Apparently she didn’t quite faint, but definitely went ashen and swayed a bit!

7.      Shorn several sheep;  I studied agriculture and had to do a practical year first. I really enjoyed it and carried on working there during the uni vacations.  They had a flock of about 200 ewes and a few rams.  When it cameto shearing time I did a few, mainly to give the main man a break.  Probably took me 15 minutes to do a sheep!

8.      Visited Moldova.  After I came back from Tanzania my emplotyer there Statistics Sweden asked me to take a mission to Moldova to audit their plans for a Census.  It was quite clear that their plans were pretty good so I got involved in other aspects of the work like trying to facilitate participation of the separatist Raion of Transnistra (a Russian enclave) in the Census  Martin as diplomat????

9.     9. Been flown at 500m over Dar es Salaam in a light aircraft  One of the aspects of the Tanzanian Census funded by Stats Sweden was taking low level aerial photographs of the country to serve as the base for the Enumerator’s maps.  When the plane was over Dar es Salaam the office folk were invited to up to see how the pilot did his stuff.  Two aspects of this were exciting:

a.      When we got in the plane it turned out that to give it range 4 of  the seats had been removed and replaced by a supplementary 500l fuel tank.  OHAS anyone?

b.      After we had taken off the Dar control tower asked the pilot to keep below 500m as an international flight was due in!  This meant that over the hills we could not only count the coconut palms but also the coconuts.

10.  Thrown up in a light aircraft over Renmark  After the 1976 Census it was worked out that it was more cost efficient to select the next Labour Force sample by counting houses from aircraft compared to driving up and down roads.  This involved looking down at the ground and marking the position of the houses on a map.  It got quite hot in the cabin and when the plane a 4 seater got into thermals quite bumpy.  I threw up several times (as did about half the people who were involved in these flights.  The pilot did well out of it as the company also gave flying lessons and two of the ABS people got their licences after being introduced to flying on this work.

11.    Measured interstate trade in South Australia:  Basically quite a straight forward task within ABS.  The most interesting bits were exploring the recording systems of the big companies to see how they could provide the required data.  It became very obvious that big private companies were just as bureaucratic as the public sector.

Following Carol’s adaptation of this concept I realised that I could have added a couple more interesting items to the list.  They’d probably have replaced #2 and 11 which didn’t seem to generate much interest with others.

A.       Sat next to Al Gore at a Conference:  I went to the 1990 Conference of the American Statistical Association on Environmental Statistics.  One day Senator Al Gore was the lunchtime speaker.  In the session after lunch he took the seat next to me and took lots of notes so was obviously very interested in the topic.

B.       Responded to the Keynote Speaker at a World Tourism Organisation Conference:  While we were in Ottawa the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) held its second Conference.  They had seen some work by an ABS staffer on the topic and had invited him to present the paper.  He couldn’t make it for a reason I can’t remember but as I was on the spot I was asked to present it on his behalf. 

a.     There were about 500 delegates who filled up the hall at the Conference venue.  The order of speakers was the President of the WTO; the Canadian Minster for Tourism, the head of Tourism Canada; Keynote Speaker; me.  Not a problem per se. 

b.     The problem was that WTO disagreed with the views of the Keynote speaker but liked what my paper said,  So in effect I was saying that the Keynote guy got it wrong.  This only really became evident as I listened to his presentation:  that was about the only time I can remember my throat seizing up through fear!