After drawing the conveyor system, I had a lot of fun putting trees and cars in the carpark

My first big project was with a large food retailer at Barton-Under-Needwood. I learned very quickly that each sales engineer had his own ideas about a design – it went through three major design changes before it was finally sold. By now we were using an early version of VILA. I also worked on many of the UK parcel sites (all the same, but not quite!).

One lowlight was a group of us staying late in the office because the potential customer wanted 25 copies of the quote, which had to be spiral bound (each quote was about 10cm thick). I had to leave at around 9.45pm otherwise I would have missed the last train home, plus I was getting very hangry. Both printers in the building overheated and ran out of ink, and we had to hire a van to courier the quote to the customer the following morning, who then went with a competitor anyway… Thank goodness we now use PDFs!

Highlights have including working on the original quotes for large e-commerce and food customers plus many other quotes, too many to name, and the great social events organized by the lovely team at the office. Now one of my roles is to create e-learnings of the various ESOT functions, as a background job to designing new systems, to hopefully pass on my knowledge to others. Thankyou to everyone who has helped me on my way, and here’s to the next 75 years and those who will come after.