WHAT PART OF ‘NO’ DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND ?
Ours was a country-town electrical firm and Rex was our newest apprentice. His father and Charlie Parker, one of our bosses, were lodge brothers. Rex had been in constant trouble at school and his father hoped that Clarke and Parker Electrical could straighten him out. The firm had a reputation of doing well with their apprentices.
Recently out of my time, I was not given Rex at first. It was Charlie who had undertaken to turn him around but he quickly found himself beaten. Rex was then handed over to another tradesman who was no more successful. Rex when told not to do something mostly did that very same thing. He seemed blindly intent on going his own way.
The end of the period when Rex could be terminated was fast approaching and it had been decided that he was totally impossible and must go but I begged for him to be given a little more time and that he be put with me. I considered apprenticeship a prize and I did not like to see this idiot throwing it away. It was not that I liked or understood Rex. I had been in the workshop with only the apprentices present when Rex had dropped and smashed an expensive light fitting. We all saw it happen but Rex had simply brushed the pieces under the bench with his foot as though it was something of no consequence.
Naturally, I was no more successful and became every bit as frustrated. Rex continually demonstrated that he considered his way better than mine. When working in private homes behaviour is every bit as important as technical expertise and a boy intent on doing his own thing has no place. The only thing that Rex did well was to replenish the van every morning. The two of us were sent mainly on domestic and farm repairs many of them unexpected and met with miles from town. The van needed to be an electrical Aladdin’s cave. Rex’s memory of the parts rhat we had used the day before could not be faulted but I was quickly coming to the point of saying ’enough.’
We were installing a television aerial and fifty-foot telescopic mast at a plant nursery distant from town. It was television’s early days and we were in a fringe area. I was in the propagating shed when I heard a noise on the roof and looked up. The roofing was clear-plastic corrugated sheeting and there was Rex standing mid-way between the wooden purlings. He had no reason to be up there and was liable to fall through. I shouted to him to move over to where the wood was and to come down immediately. He argued that he was standing on the wood although I could naturally see otherwise and, for a time, stubbornly showed no intention of coming down.
The 300-ohm ribbon used between aerial and set in those days needed to be kept clear of anything else on plastic standoffs to avoid signal loss and we had to run the ribbon for a distance under the floor of the house. The trapdoor was in the attached laundry. When we came back out into the laundry again, I told Rex to close the trap and load our tools back into the van. I was going to demonstrate the set and see that it was working properly.
The lounge was at the front of this large and elegant old house and I walked around the outside not wishing to enter any part of the house until I had dusted off. I found Rex sitting on the front verandah on an ex-Auckland-trams seat, arms folded, a superior smile on his face. He had run through the house to beat me. I was angry. “Go and close the trap and load the tools back into the van,” I said. “ AND!!….Go around the house this time not through it.”
After demonstrating the set, I returned to the van to find it apparently packed, the back doors closed, and Rex sitting in the passenger seat ready to go.
The next job was more than ten miles away over back roads, loose metal in those days, and the first thing I needed was my brace and a bit. There was no brace in the kit and also missing were the other tools that we had been using at the nursery.
“Where are the tools?” I asked and received a casual, “Right where you left them.” So I was at fault and I suppose in a way I was. I should have known by this time to assume nothing where Rex was concerned and to check everything. So it was back to the nursery to find the trap still open and the tools scattered about. This episode probably lost us both customers.
Rex’s next job was at the local dairy factory. The heavy cardboard boxes which held the export butter were received as flat packs and Rex had to erect them. A simple job but he did not last beyond a few days.
In desperation, Rex’s father talked his brother into having Rex on his farm which was distant from town. The uncle soon regretted it. I met the uncle later and we shared our experiences. Rex had proved to be not only a hazard on the farm but was seen as a moral threat to his young cousins. He had a supply of lurid, adult, comics and although told to keep them out of the hands of the children this was just another ’no’ that he ignored. The day came when the family had to make a visit to town and there was no room in the car for Rex. It was quite a risk to leave Rex behind on his own and he was told, “Under no circumstances are you to go out of this house while we are away.”
Later when they were home again Rex claimed that he had sat tight but said, “There’s a tree out there that I reckon is pretty dangerous. You really ought to do something about it.” The uncle knew that all the trees on his farm were in good health and took no notice of what he considered to be Rex’s havering. But Rex kept on and on about it until his uncle finally decided that there must be something that he needed to know. He went out to look at the tree.
He found that Rex had been busy while they were away. It was a large tree and Rex had used an axe to whittle around and around the trunk until there was now only a slender centre section that his thumbs and forefingers could meet around. Fortunately, the day was calm and the tree well balanced but it was now too dangerous to put stock in that paddock. It was also too dangerous to fell the tree by normal means since there was no way of knowing which way it would fall. That problem was solved with a stick of gelignite. The more serious problem was shipped back to town.
In remembering Rex I find myself feeling sorry for him, seeing him at this distance as one of life’s cripples.