I was fresh out of university and didn't know any better.
Defence Standard 05-21 was in vogue, industrial action was a daily event and nobody wanted to go on training courses for things like SPC, problem solving, trade union shop steward, negotiating techinques, mechanical petrol injection diagnostics, internal auditing etc, etc. My colleagues used me to make the number up and avoid going themselves: for me it was like university but with a paycheck. All of the courses paid dividends in the end.
As nobody knew who I was, they sent me to Solihull to find out how many defective SD1s were hidden away around the factory (over 10,000) and what they were doing with the ones which were badly damaged inside the factory(!).
I searched for a needle in a haystack for a US product liability case (one small green A5 card in a room full of five draw cabinets where they threw stored the production build records in bundles held together with elastic bands which perished rapidly. I learned that the search was never over until you'd dismantled the cabinet to get at the records which escaped the draws to end on the floor.
A survey of supplier quality involved another room full of disorganised paper and a fortnight teaching myself how to analyse and collate information by hand for over 700 suppliers. What better incentive to you need to become computer literate? I retrained in 1985.
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