Odds and Ends

Missing Money

A couple are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary; they go down to their old school. There, in a corner they hold hands as they find their old desk where he had carved, “I love you Sally.”

On the way home, a bag of money falls out of an armoured car in front of them. She picks it up and counts £50,000.

The husband says, “We’ve got to give it back”.

She says, “Finders keepers.” And when they get home she hides it in the attic.

The next day, two CID men show up at their home. They ask, “Pardon me, did any one in this house find any money that fell out of an armoured car yesterday?”

She says “No.”

The husband says, “My wife is lying, she took the money and hid it in the attic.”

She says, “Don’t believe him, he’s a bit senile.”

So they sit the man down and begin to question him. One CID man says, “Tell us the story from the beginning.”

The old man says, Well, my wife and I were on our home from school...”

The CID man looks at his partner and says...”Lets get out of here.”

                                                                            Ed

HOW MUCH???

Due to summer heat, the wooden lattice back of one of my garden benches decided to fall to pieces. Repair time!

I went to a local wood mill and obtained the necessary timber and various fittings to carry out the repair. I paid cash for that purchase and then it was recommended that although the timber had been treated it should have a further treatment to see it through the winter. I selected a suitable treatment and decided to pay for it with a debit card as my ready cash had been depleted. The card was inserted into the Chip & PIN machine and the “mill hand” entered the appropriate amount £6.11, rotated the machine and asked me to insert my PIN number. I complied with the request and hit the ENTER key. The “mill hand” said thank you that will be… Oh your payment has been rejected…HOW MUCH… Oh My God… HELP.

A young lady from the office came out and said “What have you done this time?” She then looked at the till receipt and said “I don’t think that is quite right” showed me the receipt which was for £61,159.35.

Any way, the transaction was voided and I was presented with receipts, the voided one and the correct one. I thought no more of it at the time; thinking that the ham-fisted “mill hand” had had finger trouble.

The following day I started to wonder just how he could have made such a mistake and looked more carefully at the voided receipt and how had he managed to get an additional four figures after the correct amount, and suddenly realised that the last four figures were my input of the PIN number “5935”. When he had entered the amount, he should have completed a further action before asking me to insert my PIN.

If these people had been unscrupulous they now had both my card and PIN number which left my bank account in a precarious position.

You have all heard the Banks admonish us not to display or tell anyone of our PIN number for any account. Do not be alarmed…the PIN number indicated above was in itself voided within 30 minutes of my discovery and I now have a new PIN for that account, and NO…I will not tell you what it is!

Bill Brand

Memories of wartime dispersals.

Part 1-Clevedon 1941-2: wartime humour.

After the Filton factory was bombed the design staff were evacuated to Clevedon, where I was interviewed for a job by Fred Pollicutt.  I had been working on assembly of the Fairey Barracuda aircraft at Hayes, which was not bombed. The rumour was this was because the Luftwaffe, having seen Fairey’s production figures, switched to E.M. I. a mile away!

During my interview I was shown a drawing of the aircraft I was to work on, the Buckingham. With hindsight, I realise that a feature of that drawing was to cause Bristol twenty years later to be only the junior partner in British Aircraft Corporation, despite its having become before then the largest and most diverse part of the industry. What was that feature, can you guess?

We started at the Walton Park Hotel, working a six day week. It was possible to send prints of superseded drawings out to sea as huge paper darts launched from the third floor windows.

Soon we were moved to Clevedon Hall; a girls’ boarding school. Some of the rooms had a bell push with the label “Ring for mistress.” However, this did not produce the result that some draughtsmen desired.

The bathrooms had bidets, which we concluded after discussions were for washing the feet. In one room was a mechanical Teasmade: the clock triggered a flint striker which lit an oil lamp under the teapot, which tilted when it boiled and filled the cup and rang a bell.

There was a clarinet which we used to play (never well!) during fire watching at night.

The grounds were extensive with pine trees and a lake. By the lakeside had been left a wooden pallet, on which a stress office leader decided to punt across the lake. Half way across it slowly became clear that his weight slightly exceeded the buoyancy.

The lake was also the scene for tribal lunchtime wars involving the throwing of fir cones. I dodged downwind and had to have three stitches in my head at the cottage hospital.

The team stressing the wing invented a new game in which an eraser block was thrown hard at the floor; it would bounce around for nearly half a minute.

The fateful feature? Described as a clever Farnborough idea, it was the double reverse flow air intake. When it iced up it was to cause turbine blade failures on the Britannia, as it did ten years later on my return flight from Australia. The resulting production delay and loss of orders left Bristol financially weak and a junior within the new Corporation.

One morning the milkman told us we were to move back to Bristol. He was right, but we were not to move to Filton.

David Farar