LAUGH ABOUT IT NOW PART THREE

THE RING MAIN CIRCUIT

Assessment One was basic: on a wall of plasterboard, construct a ring main circuit adhering to the 17^th Edition of the Electrical Regulations.

Your basic ring main circuit

Now, you may think from past experience, I would panic. Ha ha! You’re wrong! Because the panicking about building a ring main circuit according to the 17^th Edition had already happened and been overcome on the pre-course. I had already built one! 

And now I even had the invaluable electrician’s on-site guide manual to help me (once I realised the red book was the on-site guide, not the green one I'd been using). 

Your on-site guide

What I did not have was any facility with tools. Sedentary Gentleman had barely ever used a power drill and the one time he did (at the Hampshire Youth Theatre in 1982 when as a painfully unlikeable youth he had offered to help out a bit) – the pointy bit at the end had fired out like a bullet and embedded itself in a wall. Since then, Sedentary Gentleman has stayed away from power tools. 

This is more my experience

Saws, knives, hammers, the metal things you bang to make objects stick to walls, spirit levels, screwdrivers – there’s probably a word for the phobia I have towards such items.

During my time with my colleagues the electricians, and previous experience with practical men, I had heard a lot about ‘making good’. This, I understand, means making a wall or whatever look nice again with plaster and paint or something. once the complex electricianing stuff is over. 

Now, I had a deep unease about my ability to ‘make good’ but I figured if I vaguely sorted the wiring/circuit thing, the ‘making good’ would somehow get resolved.

In front of me was a bare plasterboard wall, like an unpainted theatrical flat or a vertical table. There was no ‘making good’ required here. Assessment One was just me and the electrical task; mano a mano.

Before I could build a ring main circuit, I had to work out how to stick the CU – or Consumer’s Unit – or Fuse Box to you – to the plasterboard wall without it falling off. Then I had to work out how to stick the wires in. Then wire an electric socket in at the other end. The difficult, incomprehensible job of testing the circuit with probe machines I would panic about later.

Trying to control my breathing, I looked at the tools. I was acutely aware the South African boy next to me had actually completed the whole assessment and was moving on to the next one. Ignore him, I told myself. Just get this done a bit at a time. I reached for the drill.

Men watched me as I worked

KEEP ON KEEPING ON

By lunchtime that Monday, the rest of the group had finished. By finished, I mean they had finished all eight practical assessments. All of them had finished all of the tasks. No exaggeration. I only realised this at about four o’clock that afternoon when I finally emerged, sweating, angry and tearful, with a basic cobbled together never stand up to any form of scrutiny ring main circuit. Just to be clear: I was still on Assessment One. The most basic kind of circuit there is.

Our friend the Cockney ‘tutor’ had remained hidden for the bulk of the day. In fact, I hadn’t seen him at all. I had occasionally heard him in my aural periphery telling people they had done a good job, but I was so absorbed in not fannying up this ring main circuit I hadn’t looked up. I’d skipped lunch to get this damn thing on the wall.

Suddenly, he was on my shoulder. I gave him a really stupid smile. A weak smile that appeared to enrage him. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘That’s no fucking good.’ He proceeded to tug the wires out of the CU. ‘What the fuck have you done here? These are the wrong width. How have you trimmed these?’

I didn’t know. I don’t know how to trim wires. I don’t even know what that means. And that’s what I told him.

With a deep sigh, our friend picked up a Stanley knife and a piece of twin and earth and neatly carved the plastic sheaths away, exposing the bare wire. I had seen him do it but as to how, I knew I had no idea. ‘Tear that down,’ he said angrily. ‘Fucking start again. Jesus!’

He stomped off, knowing he wasn’t getting away early tonight.

COMPLETING ASSESSMENT ONE

Just after Tuesday lunchtime I completed Assessment One to his satisfaction. Luckily, a couple of the other electricians – bored of hanging around – had suggested how I put a ring main circuit on a plasterboard wall. They were nice. This was my seventh attempt.

‘Thank fuck,’ said the tutor, until he realised the second assessment was much more difficult and involved cutting Steel Wire Armour cable.

I had to cut and connect this bad boy

I should point out at this point, I was suffering from an absolutely brain annihilating hangover. I was staying at a friend’s flat nearby and gone out round Exmouth Market with my oldest mate Grant with the express intent of obliterating the memory of that terrible Monday from my mind. I succeeded. Already I was planning to drink as much as I possibly could every single night of this hellish week.

A very lovely part of London

So for Assessment Two, I was hardly in a fit state to tackle walking to the workshop, let alone actually pass any assessments. But for once, luck and preparation were with me. The Steel Wire Armour cable thing. I  had had such a nightmare with it on the prep course, I had focused what energy I had on getting that right.

Okay, by the time I’d manked it up over and over and kept cutting and cutting it down to start again, the cable was about twelve inches long (and this is the cable you use to electrify your garden lights) so was of no use to anyone, but it DID connect the two electrical things it was supposed to connect. You switched it on and a light came on. It didn’t kill you when you used it. The tutor was relieved.

The rest of that Tuesday afternoon was easy. It was easy because the tutor threw the assessment book onto a table and instructed me to go through it and fill it in myself. I no longer had to build anything. Just test and write down results. A couple of the electrician chaps told me the answers and I wrote them down. Funnily enough, I passed all eight assessments.

I was surprised to discover that Tuesday night that the practical part of the ‘becoming an electrician’ was over and I had passed everything. All that had to happen for the next three days were written exams. Thirteen written open book multiple choice exams. As my colleagues groaned, I inwardly cheered. The right kind of tears came to my eyes. I could pass these exams. Of course I could. The pain was over.

I got drunk a lot happier that night.

The pain – the real humiliation was done. The rest was standard frustration, and coming to terms with the realisation that I would never, ever be an electrician. The pain and humiliation was scarring; I couldn’t see past it yet but at last, it was over.

AFTERMATH

I only failed two out of thirteen written exams. I finished the course second highest in my group.  I passed one of the two some weeks later but I never finished the final exam. It was only twelve multiple choice questions but I had no idea of any kind what the answers were. I even memorized the questions and four possible answers and after each re-take (at 10 quid and a train to London a time) wrote them down. I then showed them to an electrician I had got to know. 

Even after that, I still never passed that final exam. After five attempts, I gave up for ever.

I think the company went out of business. I never checked.

LAUGH ABOUT IT NOW more

PART TWO

THE LOW POINT

I believed at the age of forty two, a grown man in UK society would be beyond being so humiliated he could cry. I didn’t actually cry – I really didn’t. Neither did I walk out and ask for my money back. I couldn’t. I couldn’t because that would mean I would have to face the fact I been stupid enough to give thousands of pounds of someone else’s money away for nothing.

The is the most painful part of the ‘becoming an electrician’ story. This part is about the week long ‘practical’; in Clerkenwell in London.

Now, I’ve had some low points. We all have. Becoming a teacher. Countless professional rejections; mundane jobs that stretch days into weeks, all the while knowing contemporaries are that precise moment are filming TV or getting writing commissions. Leaving London.

Everyone has lows. However, I have always remained firmly committed to the idea that eventually, one will get through; get to a point one can look back and say – it was tough but we made it. We got there in the end.

I’m still waiting.

I often remember a second hand quote from Nabokov when someone congratulated him on becoming a success. His reply (roughly): ‘yes, but it should have happened twenty years ago.’

So. The week long practical training course to become a qualified electrician.

I had been forewarned. The ‘course’ requested I attend a voluntary weekend pre-practical. I had gone a few months before and although scary, these two days had been possible. It was designed to help those poor souls who had limited practical experience. Or so I believe. I cannot remember anything I experienced but I can definitely state that whatever it was comprises the sum of everything I presently know about being an electrician.

The old 'twin and earth' cable. Lots of this in electricianery

THE WORKSHOP AND THE OVERALLS

Alarm bells began to ring when I turned up. The building was more like a Clerkenwell literary agent’s arty Georgian house.

As ever, I presumed from the off I would not be able to find the front door or any reasonable method of entry, which would involve the beginning of a familiar humiliation involving phone calls to bewildered and hostile call centres imploring me to ‘press buttons’ and so on which I would be unable to fathom until some flustered, angry receptionist would eventually open it for me. At which point I would understand how simple the whole process of getting into the building would have been with an ounce of thought.

But none of that happened.

I went in and immediately the terrifying aura of practical men was palpable. The reception area was un-carpeted and scuffed. There were stained plastic chairs and a coffee machine I knew I would never dare attempt.

A coffee machine roughly like this but much more battered

Tough looking young men in hard hats and boots and leaned against walls. Nobody spoke. Many were rolling cigarettes. They looked like they worked on building sites already. Everyone was waiting, more or less patiently. A few were tough looking Eastern Europeans.

The unease I had experienced when I purchased an alarmingly tight brand new pair of overalls and shiny bright steel work boots on my first ever visit to a Wicks, was entirely justified and now blossoming into proper sick-inducing fear. I had only ever worn them once to try them and realised they were way too small. I didn’t take them back because I don’t take things back. I didn't want to face Wicks again.

The course notes said I had to wear overalls, so I bought overalls. I generally unfailingly do what a course asks me to. 

No one else had. Not one other person waiting here had bought new overalls. 

A South African boy of about twenty was talking to me. I couldn’t really hear. He was saying how he had just rewired his house in Hammersmith and wanted the paperwork from the course so he could sell it on. Apart from that, he repaired motorbikes. What did I do?

I couldn’t tell him I had written some Doctor Who books. I just couldn't. That was it. That was what I did. And what about these overalls?

These overalls from Wicks

I was going to spend a week in the company of young, aggressive practical males. Dressed as an old gay actor.

I could not wear the overalls. To wear the overalls would be suicide.

The waiting was terminated by a squat Cockney, apparently cursed with both narcolepsy (such was his indifference towards us) and Tourette’s. In between the swearing he invited us to follow him to the ‘workshops’. The group nonchalantly stood up and wandered down a drab corridor. Posters of smiling, multi-racial men in yellow helmets smiled at me from a line of posters. They didn’t look like anyone in this building.

The posters had photos very much like these

ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

I walked through a corridor of heavy duty plumbing equipment into a room the like of which I had not seen since the few craft lessons at school I'd endured until being selected for  a Latin O level class got me out.

My fellow trainee electricians quickly set themselves up in their booths. They nodded knowingly at the tools, cable and hardware that lay in wait for us. 

At last I realised: the other men here were all actually already electricians. They already worked as a job at being electricians. They needed a certificate in the Seventeenth Edition of the Electrical Regulations to help them sign off work on site. This was the course. They already did this stuff every day. For a living.

An electrician tests something

I was carrying the overalls. I couldn’t put them on.

‘Put them on,’ said Tourette’s man, pointing at me. Already he knew; already he understood. And he didn’t like it. He knew I was going to be inconvenient.

I put the overalls on. The garment stuck to me as I struggled; both the sweat of fear and the wrong size conspiring against dressing. My arms and legs stuck out like oversized clown’s limbs. I looked like an old, gay actor.

Roughly what I looked like to the others

It was literally true that if I passed this course, I would be a qualified electrician. The salesman had not actually lied to me. However, they weren’t here to teach me anything.

Tourette’s man made it very clear in a little speech: get a few practical exercises out of the way and piss off early for a drink. Get everyone home early. 

This was not a week-long practical training course. This was a week-long practical exam.