That time I worked in a nebuliser factory
Terrible jobs I used to have - episode 3
The story so far:
That time I worked in a truckstop with strippers
That time I worked in a German steel plant
I spent one of my summers working in a nebuliser factory in central England. A nebuliser is a kind of motorised inhaler – you put your medication into a compartment, and the machine administers it to you in the form of steam through a facemask. So it’s basically vaping for 1990s asthmatics.
And in 1996, these life-saving pieces of medical equipment were all built in a little factory in Northamptonshire, a modest two-storey red brick building outside an otherwise unremarkable village off the M1.
If you weren’t around in England in 1996, it’s worth pausing to explain what an amazing summer it was. There was an actual zeitgeist, a combination of Oasis, Chris Evans on the radio and TV (and literally everywhere else), England hosting and coming close-ish to winning the Euro ’96 football competition, and the Spice Girls.
The music was fantastic – a constant supply of new, melodic guitar and dance bands, many of whom disappeared without trace within a couple of years but who at the time had just enough great songs to soundtrack the long days assembling nebulisers. Dodgy, Kula Shaker, The Longpigs, Verve, Suede, Blur, Ocean Colour Scene, Manic Street Preachers…it seemed like everyone in the country was in a band.
This golden age of Britpop culminated in Oasis’ two gigs at Knebworth on 10th and 11th August, and a gang of us from the factory got tickets for the Sunday. In 1996 you could just buy tickets for great gigs without having to fire up seventeen devices and refresh them all, all morning long to find yourself 75000th in the queue. You literally just walked into your local ticket shop and bought some tickets with your money. Progress, eh?
So we all stood by the roadside at the crack of dawn waiting for the coach to arrive.
The line-up was stellar – a terrified-looking Kula Shaker opened, then Dreadzone (an aforementioned one-hit wonder in the right place at the right time). Then Cast, the Charlatans. Manics and finally Oasis. We were so far away from the stage – there were 250,000 people there over the two days – but it didn’t matter. We were there.
“This is history!” announced Noel as he came on stage. “Right here, right now!” he wasn’t wrong. Even Liam looked like he was actually making the effort.
Of course, being a summer from my memory, the sun shone all day, every day. I cycled six miles each way to get to and from work, along country lanes with the occasional van driving past, blaring Oasis and Chris Evans.
Even the awful tabloid newspapers seemed to be a force for good that summer – sharing the latest from the England camp, or which Spice Girl was dating which member of Take That. Real news, not today’s nonsense about interest rates and tariffs.
Anyway, the work was easy and paid adequately. The banter on the factory floor was ribald, and the bosses largely left us to it. Life was simple. My role was stock control – keeping track of all the components, recording them on a computer when they came in (a proper computer, with green writing on a black screen and a menu-driven database), and sending the right combination of parts upstairs for the team to assemble into prehistoric vape machines.
My counterpart and supervisor on the stock floor was Mick, a jovial brummie rocker with tight stonewashed jeans who was glad of the company. He and I were both well aware that we could probably get the day’s work done in a couple of hours, but there was little point in overachieving – the managers weren’t interested in anything other than getting a set number of machines out the door each week. So we chatted, got on with the work we had and enjoyed what was on the radio.
I was delighted to discover that there was a stock of small notebooks among the parts – why wasn’t clear, but I popped a couple of them in my pocket and adjusted the stock accordingly. When I got them home and opened them up, a shower of small metal disks – shims – fell on my feet. It seemed the pages were just there to protect the shims, a critical part of the live-saving equipment we were assembling, and to stop them scratching against each other.
What a waste of a notebook. I’m not very good at stealing things.
One of the great things about that summer was the sheer simplicity of life – we knew what we had to do, we got it done, and the factory floor was almost entirely self-regulating, with only the occasional threat of a management visitor. Cycle in, work, have a laugh, go to the pub in the evening.
During August, we started to get occasional visits from something called a ‘management consultant’. None of us knew what that was, only that he was paid an unimaginable amount of money to tell people how to run their business better. Actually, that’s pretty much it. He stalked the floors, asking pointed questions about what we did, how much and for how long. He asked about our skills, qualifications and ambitions.
It was clear that this was this was an uncomfortable time. The local boss, a demoralised husk whose one pleasure was demoralising others, was himself even more dishevelled than usual after a visit from the nameless consultant. He looked under siege, his usual domain of power infringed by this interloper.
Sure enough, one day in late August the boss shuffled on to the floor to mumble that the whole company was moving to Harlow within a few weeks and that this factory would be closing almost immediately.
I took this on the chin – for me this was just another temporary job, and the summer was coming to an end. I knew normality would have to return soon. I moved to London to share a microscopic flat with my friend, where we lived in companiable squalor into the following spring, when I finally got a real job.
But this was seismic news for most of my friends and colleagues, most of whom had not seen it coming and who were working there because it was the only place you could get a steady job for quite a few miles around (not, in fact, because they were passionate about nebulisers). The new location was commutable but unremittingly awful. We would all go our separate ways. The wonderful summer of ’96 was over.
But like Dreadzone at Knebworth, we were in the right place at the right time. And like nebulisers, sometimes the most modest components – the work, the people, the circumstances – fit together to make something life-changing. Terrible job, great summer.
Verdict: Great people make any job fun. I’ve never felt the urge to go back to factory stock control, but we had such a good time.