Going into work with your Dad when you were a kid

[ianrauk]

I used to love going to work with my dad. He was in the print. He worked a classic old Heidelburg printing machine. Like this

They were so fascinating to watch in action. I can still remember the noise and smell.
My old man passed away 20 years ago now but I can still remember that he constantly smelled of print and his hands were constantly black from the ink & lead. Of course its all changed in the print now what with computers and all that modern gumph.

My mother worked as a barmaid and in the local chippy. I used to help bottle up in the pub, all the little mixers into the fridge and onto the shelves. It gained me my very first job. Cleaning the guv'nors car every saturday for 50p.

For the chippy, myself and my brothers used to go round the houses collecting newspaper for the chipshop to wrap the fish and chips in. We used to get 10p for every shopping trolley we collected and of course a free bag of chips.

 

[Bromptonaut]

Dad was one fifth of a partnership importing chemicals for the textile industry.

Their Leeds office building was incredibly spartan by today's standards. Brown lino everywhere, just a square of carpet under his desk and chair. The pervading smell, outside the lab, was cigarette smoke. Dad was an ex-smoker by then (mid sixties) but his secretary, the other office staff and practically all his colleagues smoked. One of the other directors had a curved pipe apparently surgically atached to his lower lip. They had a small lab at the back and I remember being shown how the colours of dyed swatches of fabric could be quite different changing from natural light to tungsten bulbs and various types of flourescent tube.


The premises adjoined those of a spice works, something to do with Hammond's sauce?, the smell of peppercorns mixed with more exotic stuff still takes me straight back to those long gone buildings near the Queens Hall in Leeds.

 

[Archie_tect]

Never went inside my dad's metal fatigue testing lab. He used to work for Yorkshire Imperial Metals In Stourton, Leeds [the "Copper Works"]but often went with my mum to pick him up when he was on late afternoon shift.

 

[Andy_R]

1970 something, I learned how to dry fire my dads L1A1 SLR inbetween his "business trips" to Cyprus and N.I.

Lying on the kitchen floor aged 7 sniper stylee.........

 

[XmisterIS]

My dad was a cretin, I'm afraid!

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

My dad was a cretin, I'm afraid!

Yes, but is that actually a profession?? (except for being a BNP MP of course).

 

[XmisterIS]

Yes, but is that actually a profession?? (except for being a BNP MP of course).

My dad made it a profession! His own, special profession ...

(being a cretin, that is, not being a BNP MP)

 

[Bayerd]

My dad was a butcher. Once I'd reached my teens he'd ask me to help him clean up at the end of the day and get me scrubbing the block clean of blood. What used to take him about 5 minutes with a wire brush and look very easy used to take me a good half an hour of toil and I used to be knackered at the end of it. All I'd get from him was 'Haven't you finished that yet?'.

 

[snorri]

My dad was a butcher.

Reminds me of a girl in my class at primary school who was helping her father in his butcher shop and allowed one finger to go just a little too far into the machine when making mince.

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

My dad made it a profession! His own, special profession ...

(being a cretin, that is, not being a BNP MP)

How did he do that?

My dad was a butcher. Once I'd reached my teens he'd ask me to help him clean up at the end of the day and get me scrubbing the block clean of blood. What used to take him about 5 minutes with a wire brush and look very easy used to take me a good half an hour of toil and I used to be knackered at the end of it. All I'd get from him was 'Haven't you finished that yet?'.

About the most we got was a look at my Dad's tool cases.

He had (still has, he'll retire next year aged 65) 2 or 3 large suit cases full of tools and various large boxes spare parts, and as kids, my siblings and I used to play with them about the house (on the condition they were put back in the case by morning!).

Our personal favourite was a small extendable mirror which we would explore things with. I found out what the bottom of a door looks like at a very early age for example (it looks like a door)


Because my Dad has had to drive everywhere, he has never owned a car, he has always has company cars, so he is a horrible petrolhead, but hey, we can't all be perfect.

 

[rualexander]

My Dad was a bank manager, in the sixties and seventies.
He sometimes used to take us into the bank after hours or on holidays and take us behind the scenes, let us play with the calculating machines (these were electro-mechanical things the size of a very large cash register), he would also open the safe and show us all the money! I don't remember how much was in there, but it was a lot!
Wouldn't happen nowadays I guess, bank managers are not what they used to be!

 

[Headgardener]

Dad was an electrician for Birmingham Corporation Water Works and Southampton Corporation Water Works and as we lived on site at both of those treatment works we (my brother and I) sometimes got the chance to accompany him round the works on a Saturday morning.

 

[Matthew_T]

As my dad works in the RBS, the times I did go to work with him, I was limited to what I could do. He has had multiple roles in the bank but when I could provide a service, he was a branch manager. I only did little things like errands and transfers.
He then got bored with being a branch manager and now works as a much more important part of the bank, a SEPA implimentation manager.

After him explaining to me about 50 times exactly what he does, I now understand to a certain level. He is implimenting a system called SEPA which is going to replace the current system of financial transfers between different banks. My dad is managing the RBS side.

Fortunately, he has been lucky enough not to loose his even though some of his collegues have. I cannot really assist him in the work he does ATM even though he is working from home. Every so often he does need to go to London because he is phisycally limited at home, but that is only for 2 days.

We are lucky to have him working from home because it has released a lot of pressure on everyone else in the family having the knowledge that there is someone at home, whom we can rely on to be there all the time. Even though he is in audio meetings and always on his computer all day.

 

[byegad]

My dad was in charge of the maintenance of a Steel Rolling mill at Cargo Fleet Iron and Steel, in Middlesbrough.

When I was 15 he got permission to take me and my sister aged 11 around the works. We saw the open hearth furnace and them tapping one, casting the steel and the soaking pits where they kept the newly cast ingots, each as big as a large caravan white hot. Then the rolling mills rolling the steel down to girder sections. Finally the cutting to length of the still nearly red hot steel.

My jacket was scorched by the heat as we stood some 20yds from the open hearth being tapped, there were men behind Pavise like shelters working within feet of the liquid steel being poured into a huge bucket.

Many years later he told me he'd organised the visit to ensure I studied hard at school and got a 'better' job. Which I did. The whole place was like some medieval idea of hell.

 

[Kirstie]

When I was very young my dad worked for Granada TV as an outside broadcast camera op and had a share in a recording studio. My mum was in and out of hospital in my first 4 years and so I spent a lot of time with my dad, and he used to take me into work with him frequently. I used to just sit in the corner of a recording studio playing whilst he worked. I remember the commissionaire on the doors of Granada TV in Manchester, who always used to lean over me and ask 'have you been causing trouble?' in a stern voice, whereupon I would shrink behind my dads legs and shake my head vigorously, desperate to convince him that I'd behaved myself. I also remember spending time in the recording studio with him behind the sound desk and one time when i was naughty he shut me in the vocal booth! Very scary!

When he left Granada he started up a business with a guy selling wine. They set up in Leigh, Lancashire and had a big old garage full of boxes of wine. The smell of wine warehouses takes be straight back to my childhood. My brother and i had loads of fun running around the stacks of boxes - no health and safety in them days!

Nowadays I feel very at home in TV/recording studios which I'm involved with as part of my job. And, er, I don't have an aversion to wine either