I Have to Thank the Colonel

Taking the Opportunity at Tait Electronics

I’ve just finished reading Radio Fidelity, the story of Angus Tait and Tait Electronics. It rekindled a lot of memories of my 7 years in that company. It was also fun to read about people I have worked with directly and indirectly including Paul Monk who was a leader I enjoyed working for, as well as Ben Rumble who would tell me about his exploits, Phil Holliday and David Ffowcs Williams who I would have the pleasure of working with in the future but didn’t meet until long after I left.

My career got off to a flying start thanks in part to a guy we called the Colonel.

No, not that Colonel, who welcomed my daughter and me to Jamaica, but we wouldn’t have got there if it wasn’t for the opportunities I took in 1980. But now that I’ve gone there, we were Bob Marley fans and going to his home and studio in Kingston was a treat.

Anyway, my boss's name was Jack Pearce and he was the Auckland Branch Manager of Tait Electronics. He had a Yorkshire accent and a presence that he cultivated, of someone to be looked up to, the Boss, The man in the corner office. We never knew what rank he had obtained, but he had the presence of a leader. A boss to be admired and perhaps a little scary.

I used to think that Angus Tait had helped make my career, and he certainly did as a role model. I learned a lot from him directly and indirectly. I will talk about him in another post because he was peerless among the excellent leaders I have worked for. But the enabler, in a single moment of synchronicity, was the Colonel.

I was working as a radiotelephone installer. I took the job when I had completed my training as a TSO and couldn’t leave fast enough. NZPO / Telecom gave me a fantastic education in every aspect of telecommunications from components to networks. I also learned about leadership and towards the end of my time was often Acting in charge of the Auckland City Fault Control Centre.

I loved the people and made some lifetime friends. But it felt like a place where people quietly work until they get their gold watch. For example with annual reporting, our HR system was that you would report on the performance of people above you in rank and below. Several senior people would come to me and say “How about you give me a good report and I’ll do the same for you?”

It was a bit like a rest home for young people. I took my qualifications and ran, despite several senior managers trying to persuade me to stay. It was a great education and I would do it all again, but I did not see myself still doing that job in 5 years, even if I had moved up the hierarchy.

So back to Taits, on Crummer Rd in Auckland’s Ponsonby. I worked with some awesome people. Peter Sharp the Service Manager, loved to run marathons and coached his wife Helen’s hockey team. Our storeman was George Bourne, Possum Bourne’s uncle. He was looking forward to retirement and had a great sense of humour. Unlike Pete, he saw no point in running. He used to say “Whenever I feel like going for a run, I like to lie down and wait until the feeling passes.”

There was Geary McCullum who introduced me to the TRS 80, Fala Anamani who introduced me to the umu, the late Steve Leeves, a good mate with a sense of humour worse than mine, who loved Phil Collins.

The radio was often very loud in the workshop and we would hear several of the songs that are in my Spotify playlist that accompanies this Substack. If you were around in the 80s you will enjoy listening to some of these songs.

There was Chris, a fellow Frank Zappa fan, who liked to take his glass eye out at parties and accidentally drop it in his drink, feigning shock and pain. We listened to Zappa cassettes in the company station wagon on the way to base station installations. One of my Spotify In My Life #Top 500 songs that we both liked was You Didn’t Try to Call Me. I had performed that song in a couple of bands. Chris introduced me to Flo and Eddie. I think I might still have a mixtape of them that he gave me.

Also to my surprise, when I joined the company, randomly, in reception was Pat Bridgens, who was the mother of my good school friends, Mike, Carol and Leigh. We became good friends in our own right and I really enjoyed having her there. It’s a small world after all.

We had a good time and we were a good team. I got to the point that I was very fast at installing RT’s and got my quantity/quality bonuses each week.

My favourite job was test riding the Honda 650 and 750 Police Specials, to test for engine noise in the radios. That meant riding the bikes down through to Western Springs and onto the motorway. I loved riding those bikes.

One day, I was summoned to the office. The Colonel wanted to see me. I had never been in his office, even though I had worked there for a year. I was pretty worried, I thought I was in trouble.

The guys and I had made powerful homemade rifles out of Yagi aerial pipes, in our quiet time. The result was a few decent dents in the concrete wall of the workshop. We were careful, but it would be absolutely unacceptable today.

We used big fat capacitors as the firing mechanism, charging them with inverse polarity until they exploded, and the projectiles were solid metal thumbscrews that were used to hold the Miniphones in their cradles. Pretty dangerous, but we put it down to the practical study of electronics.

Anyway, I got summonsed and went to the office, where the receptionist asked me to wait. After a little while, she got a call and told me I was to go upstairs to his office.

I walked into his office, which was a little bit on the dark side, only having a window looking down into the installation bays, but no outside window.

Jack told me said that he had received good feedback on my work and had his eye on me. He asked me why I was installing RTs and where I wanted to go in life. I replied that I wanted to be a people leader.

Long story, short. He said to me that we lived in a sales world. If I wanted to get into management, I would have to be a successful salesman.

He told me about a 3-year diploma course in Sales & Marketing Management and I thought the next thing he said would be to come back in 3 years. But no, he said if I enrolled in the course they would see what they could do.

I enrolled in the course at AUT which was one night a week for the first year with David Lewis, a highly respected man who was based at Whitcoulls, and 2 nights a week for the next two years with my future friend and colleague, the larger than life Richard Gee, who wore a jacket which included a New Zealand flag.

I joined SMEI, which was a prerequisite. More on SMEI in future posts. I got very much involved with the organisation and was a committee member and a Vice President for New Zealand for a number of years.

Within a month of starting the course, Taits created a new role, especially for me as a ‘Sales Cadet’. This role had never existed before and there were a few murmurings from some of the salespeople who felt I was getting special treatment, some who took pride in telling me that I would never make it in sales.

Boy were they wrong. I survived most of them and made a lot of money for myself and for Angus, which helped me buy my first home at a time when the mortgage rate was 21%! But all of that is the grist for future posts. I have lots of stories to come about my days at Taits.