Totally not my fault. Misrepresented by the agency.
While escaping the wilds of Cornwall to earn enough money for a divorce, I got a job up in Congleton (Cheshire), a mainly featureless town that nevertheless housed Siemens Standard Drives, a company that made inverters to drive industrial motors at variable speeds.

Running on single or three-phase mains, the drive electronics were compact blocks of industrial design to be mounted in giant cabinets. My job consisted of reworking and rewiring prototype units' PCBs and power devices (IGBT packs) and testing them in the lab. Slightly dangerous as the 415V three-phase was rectified in the DC link so there were voltages up to 560V present in the equipment and we mainly had to work with covers open or off. Still, nothing bad happened.

When that contract had run its course, the next job was working in Oldham reconditioning and servicing all kinds of industrial motor inverter drives that had gone wrong- it was a national service centre.

The company was told by the agency I was going through that I was very experienced in working in High Voltage DC electronics and they were short of time and had a large backlog so they snapped me up.

This led to two things - one, a truly powerful dislike of Oldham where I was working, and two, a truly powerful dislike of Denton which was the only place near enough that I could find somewhere to rent.

Things were OK if a tad grimy (they got through a lot of units from the McCain factory where the cooling fins became clogged with airborne oil droplets which resulted in the units overheating and I had to scrape the vanes clean before fixing them....ewww..)

Then out of the blue the supervisor came over and said- "YOU. Tools down. Don't touch anything. Go to the office NOW."

Went to the office and the manager was ashen faced. "In the job description we made it very clear that you had to be qualified with IEEE 16th edition. Have you got IEEE 16th edition?"

"Errr, no. I never said I did?"

"We specifically asked your agent. They said you did. We asked for proof in the form of a copy of your certificate to be faxed over. They haven't."

He continued "We're being audited by our major client in the rail business tomorrow. You can't be here. Our insurance doesn't cover non-IEEE qualified people. If you'd have had an accident we wouldn't have been covered and would have been investigated by the HSE and we would have lost our contract and the company could have folded. You've got to go."

"But..."

"You have to go. Sorry."

"Err..."

"Go now. don't even pick up your tools, our guy will scoop them up for you and bring them to you out in the car park."

Oh.

Fucking agencies.

Still, every cloud and so on- got to leave Oldham AND Denton in the same weekend.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Fri 30 May 2014, 20:38, 4 replies)

It would one day be nice to hear something good about recruitment consultancies but I think
a Christian has more chance of their Lord returning.
( d.r._and_quinch when will you be famous?, Sat 31 May 2014, 10:39, closed)

^this
although I'd say in this case the manager was just as at fault. What were they thinking, taking someone on without proof?
( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Sat 31 May 2014, 13:23, closed)

How much of a dump is Denton?
After 20 years I moved to a more upmarket location: Hyde, made famous by Brady, Hindley and Shipman.
(Benz, Mon 2 Jun 2014, 15:13, closed)

I've heard of gene pools.
This one was exceptionally stagnant.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Mon 2 Jun 2014, 19:49, closed)