During my early teen years, I was working as an apprentice hand compositor in the printing industry. Specifically, I worked for Kevin Burns Pty Ltd and started with that company after my successful interview for the job in early 1966.

Against the odds, I passed the interview and got the job

In fact, I was totally amazed that I had actually been accepted for the job given that I did not even pass grade 10 in high school even though I had repeated the year. I still did not pass enough subjects to qualify for a pass. It was just as well that in the mid 60s it really didn’t matter that much. You could apply for most jobs in the industrial sector with a reasonable pass at the end of your primary schooling at year eight. Originally, this year was called Scholarship, and if you had your Scholarship you were considered quite bright and ready to enter the work force and go for the more highly respected although lower paid positions as an apprentice to a tradesman.

Things were quickly changing during these years, but at the time of my application, most employers still considered a good Scholarship result as being a good indication of your learning ability and never mind too much about how you did in high school if you even bothered to try. My overall exam result at the end of grade 8 in primary school was 85% and this made all the teachers and people in the education system think that I must be very academically inclined and insisted that I go on to high school in the academic fields of study. In the broader view over time, this was exactly the wrong direction for me and insisted on by others outside myself for all the wrong reasons. In truth, I never saw myself as an academic scholar, and I felt much better suited to the practical studies of the industrial courses that were offered as the alternative. I was over ruled and went on to do the academic course and it was ultimately to result in a disaster for me in what now appears on my resume for educational standards achieved.

Education requirements and the fear of being a "labourer"

At this point, it seemed that all that stuff about needing a full high school education with top marks at the end of year 12 were just nonsense, or at least, simply did not apply in my case. Here it was that I was almost immediately accepted to take up the apprenticeship as a compositor by this printing company and my family were elated that it looked like their youngest son was finally going to get somewhere in a real job after all. I am sure that my mother’s greatest fear was that I would take a job as a laborer. It wouldn’t matter if it were builder’s laborer, truckers laborer, or just laborer in any kind of work. The major problem was that whenever there was a report of a criminal being brought to justice for all kinds of terrible crimes, they were described as being laborers for their vocation. Laborers were just jail fodder as far as my mother was concerned and she was just so happy that I had a real professional title, that of apprentice compositor. Of course, not many people had the slightest idea what a compositor was, I sure didn’t before landing the job, but that didn’t matter at all, it was a real job.

An apprenticeship is a challenging time financially

As an apprentice, it was a given that you did not earn much money. In earlier times an apprentice actually did not receive any salary, and even paid the tradesman for the privilege of working under their masterful direction just for the opportunity to later land a revered tradesman position and receive the respect and very high salary that such journeymen were given. In fact, my starting salary was $12.85 per week. At this time, the job site was in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane, and I lived in Boval in Ipswich, and the only way to commute was by train, a journey of about 1.5 hours total each way. And the cost of the travel was $5.65 per week.

My mother, being a good parent and wanting to instill the values of good money management on me at this early age in my career as an income earner, charged me $3.50 per week for room and board in the home that had always been my family home. I felt that this was a lot, and a big financial burden for me to have to carry, but I also fully understood that I was the cause of many expenses in the household and that my parents had shouldered the full burden of the cost of me for all my life, so to shell out a part of my salary to mum each week was not unfair and I happily paid my share of the household expenses. After I had been in the job for three months, I was told that I had passed probation, and now the salary went up. Woohoo… how about that? My first pay rise, and it went up by a full fifty cents a week. Now I was right up there at $13.35 per week. That was before tax, and I remember that a chunk of my pay rise was lost to the government in tax and for the first time in my life I felt resentment at having to have my hard earned money plundered by the government for whatever amount that they chose to steal from me and I had no say in it whatsoever. Bastards, and what if they want more? They just take it and too bad for you. I was soon to learn that this is the system that I had to live under. You get to live on whatever is left out of your earnings the powers allow you and you should not even talk about it. After all, this was the “Lucky country” and you should be happy.

The reality of the job I ended up in

There was only one tradesman compositor in this company and he then became my trainer. But about one and a half years after I started, he quit the job and I was left alone in the “comp room” to keep the job of setting up all the type for the printing machines by myself. I was told by the boss, Mr Burns, that he was looking around and would soon hire a new tradesman to help run the comp room but that I should just keep on going since he was particularly pleased with my performance.

Well, that did make me feel pleased, and it was interesting to have the full compositor duties to myself, and I was actually finding that I could cope with the job just fine so all seemed well. I still thought that I was filling in and covering the work in the interim while they were looking to get the replacement tradesman. After all, it was written into the apprenticeship papers that I would always be working under the direction and supervision of a tradesman to act as the teacher of the craft so surely it would not be long before there was a new man employed.

But there never was. In a five year indentured apprenticeship I had received just one and a half years of instruction, and after that, I was on my own. I had to learn what I could along the way from the printing machinists and anyone else that I could find if there were anything that I did not understand. It was said that Mr Kevin Burns himself, our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director was a compositor himself and started out in the business just as I was starting out now. Any questions that I had or processes that I needed to be shown I could simply ask him. Well, that was the story, but the reality was that I almost never saw the guy, I never particularly liked him and I think that was mutual, and he certainly would never wish to spend his time getting his hands dirty showing the lowly employees anything at all. He paid them a salary after all, so that was as far as he was going to go. If you couldn’t handle it, get out. That was the kind of incentive program that the company offered.

My nemesis was a bully production manager

In the absence of a tradesman for me to work with, and who would normally be my immediate superior, I was now responsible to the production manager for the entire factory. The man in this position was Mr Kevin Wilson. To the tradesmen and other “older” persons in the organization, he was “Kev” or “Kevin” but to me, it was strictly “Mr Wilson”. Younger people, and most certainly lowly apprentices, were required to show their subservience by always referring to those of higher status as “Mister”. And you just did without question.

Now Mister Wilson, in my humble opinion at the time, was a real jerk. I disliked the man, I disliked his mannerism and style of management, I disliked his attitude and especially his attitude toward me as being a lower class of being to himself and those like him, and otherwise I found no reason whatsoever to respect him or anything he said. Clearly, this was not a good relationship and was sure to cause conflict that would ultimately have to be resolved, and of course, the lowly person would get “resolved” and the higher status person would just go on about their business as usual.

Choosing the wrong way to deal with my work situation from both sides

So I spent my work days doing everything that I could think of to avoid actually doing any kind of work and he spent his days trying to catch me out and extract as much work as possible from me as he could. Clearly, the battle lines had been drawn and this was going on every day for about a year. I would turn up at work and rush in at about 5 minutes after actual starting time – late enough to get away with it but not quite late enough to be severely reprimanded for it. Before lunch time, and knock off time, we were given, by union decree, 5 minutes of hand washing time, and so I would stop work about 10 minutes before the actual time, mess about and get things together for departure, and then, spend the full 5 minutes washing my hands so that I could walk out the door on the stroke of the time to go to lunch or time to go home.

Then it happened. It was sort of the crescendo of all the pep talks, riding and bawling out that had gone on for months. I was standing alongside one of the printing machines during working hours and chatting with the machine operator. These guys were often bored with long print runs that meant that the only had to monitor the machine and take out the finished stack of printed materials and reload the feed site with a new stack of paper. The machinist’s name was Dudley Manwearing, and we all remembered him because he was a guy who had no money, drove an old VW Combi van that he bought at auction from the PMG as an ex delivery van, he never washed or changed his clothes. This latest characteristic was quite impossible to miss since you could smell the guy a clear ten feet away. But he was an honest worker, and had good tips to offer about all kinds of life situations, so I enjoyed talking to him, and he was happy to have someone who was prepared to come within ten feet of him just for the purpose of conversation.

Then a voice boomed throughout the factory calling my name. “GRAHAM!!”. I snapped my head up and around to the source of the sound, and there was Mr Wilson staring at me with a furious expression on his face and his arm extended and finger pointing back to my work area. It was clear that I was being told in no uncertain terms to get back to work, that he was not at all happy with me, and everyone else in the entire factory heard him, looked up, and was now watching me and what I would do next.

Well, what could I do? I cut off my conversation, Dudley sort of sadly smiled at me, and I hung my head and got back to my work space and got on about doing whatever work I could find for myself that would appease Mr Wilson and maybe save my job.

A time to reflect on my situation and make a new plan

The impact of this experience on me mentally was huge. I couldn’t stop thinking of what he did by yelling at me so that everyone in the work place could hear it and humiliate me totally in the process of him enforcing his position as the production manager. He was, I am quite sure, very satisfied with himself and that he had really brought me to heal and now had me under his thumb nicely, just where he wanted me. I kept thinking of ways to extract my revenge on him, but all the obvious frontal attack ways were surely not going to work. All that would happen would be that I would be fired from the job and he could then feel even more superior and that would really make me sick. There had to be a better way than that.

I just kept my head down and tried to work along, but with my work ethic of doing as little as possible, it was really a chore. I had even earned the nick name of “Lightening” which was a sarcastic name for me since I was labeled as being the slowest person they had ever seen in any print shop.

An idea, a stratety, and a whole new approach

I pondered my options for a very long time and suddenly, like a real bolt of lightening, which really would seem ironic, I had an idea that I worked up into a strategy. I figured out that trying to go against the flow was not going to work no matter how much I tried, and I had tried a lot. The answer seemed to be for me to not only go with the flow, but to rush along in the direction of the flow as hard as I could go. On the first Monday morning of my awakening, I got to work early, hurried over to my work place, and put on my work apron, got my tools all in order, and was actually fully working on the first job of the day at starting time. This was something that had never happened before in my working history. I don’t remember if that first day was even noticed, but it didn’t matter, it was for me just the start of the new way of getting back at my persecutor Mr Wilson, and the plan was going to work for sure because it could not fail. I even chuckled to myself at how clever the plan was.

As soon as I was finished the first task of the day, I put together the work ticket, filled in the time allocation log for the job, and hurried up to the desk of Mr Wilson and put it into the appropriate tray and asked him for the next job to go on with. “Huh? Oh… um.. yes… well… here it is. Go away and get on with it,” he said in his usual gruff way of talking to me. “Oh yes, I will get on with it for sure,” I thought and hurried away.

I had that job done within 20 minutes, carefully checked that it was fully finished and all details carefully completed, and strode confidently up to his desk again and put it in the tray on top of the first one that was still there and said, “Okay, done, what’s next?” Mr Wilson was clearly not used to this, and he had to interrupt the work issues he had confronting him at that moment and attend to me and find something for me to do next. Finally, and in a somewhat distracted and frustrated way, he handed me the next job to get done. Of course, I needed to be sure that I fully understood what was required, so I kept him busy for another few minutes going over the job at hand and getting all instructions clearly conveyed. All good, and I smiled and happily went back to my work space without delay to get this next task done in the fastest possible time.

The plan was going really well, and I was finished this next task within half an hour and was back to his desk with another loud and enthusiastic “Okay, done, what’s next?” Mr Wilson, who wore dark rimmed reading glasses, looked up from the paperwork that he was concentrating on at that moment with a really pained look of expiration on his face. It was clear that he didn’t want to interrupt his work at this moment to again have to supervise me and get me started on the next task. Of course, he couldn’t complain since the company had cheaped out and refused to hire a tradesman compositor who would normally be my trainer and supervisor, that job fell to good old Mr Wilson and I was letting him know in no uncertain terms that since you embarrassed me in front of everyone in the factory, you were going to get what you wanted. I was going to be diligent, get my assigned tasks done promptly and thoroughly, and going to hang around his neck all day long just in the interest of working hard as clearly he insisted that I do.

The new stratety almost shocked me with its success

It was just amazing how fast this plan was showing results. Before lunch on the very first day, Mr Wilson was totally sick of me and just wanted me to get out of his sight for a while so that he could get on with his own work load. I turned up at his desk yet again with another “Okay, done, what’s next?” when he finally cracked. He just stared at me with unblinking eyes and commanded me to go to the loading dock and clean up all the rubbish. I was elated at this success and very quickly ran over to the loading dock and got into cleaning the place up with enthusiasm and vigor. The job was fully done within another half an hour and I couldn’t wait. Back to his desk and… “Okay, done, what’s next?” at which point good old Mr Wilson couldn’t handle it any more. He just quietly said to me that there was nothing more and just disappear for a while.

This was my first big lesson in how to get along with bully people, especially those who think that they were in authority over me. I marked it as my first victory in the “fuck you” strategy of giving people exactly what they demanded whenever I thought that they were being unreasonable. I think of it now as the same as the principles that I saw applied in ju-jitsu where you use the inertia of the attacker against them.

The life lesson learned from this experience

Given how well this strategy had worked in my workplace that I started to apply it in other situations. I started to see that most people have no idea what they want but love to make demands and expect others to help them. I came to learn the truth in the saying "When you get what you want, you don't want it." and that this can be used so well to your advantage when handling many situations.