AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!! I'm losing the will to live!

[Davey]

Just need to have a rant somewhere.

I have a trainee at work, its his first week and he wants to be a mechanic. Today we were doing a service on a 23 year old Talbot Express petrol. After he'd removed the spark plugs I showed him how to check the gap and then asked him to fit the new ones. 10 minutes later he asked me to check them as he couldn't get them to tighten up ( I ought to explain that on this engine the plugs are deeply recessed in thin walled steel tubes) so I checked them by slipping the plug socket down the tube and turning the extension bar by hand, sure enough none of them seemed to be tightening. I got a mirror and torch to have a look down the tubes and guess what? He'd only put the plugs down the tubes upside down:confused: .

I understand he's new to the trade but I ask you, who could possibly think that plugs would do anything upside down? How did he expect them to screw in with the threaded bit uppermost?

Later on I asked him to refit the air filter housing he'd taken off earlier, after half an hour I looked to see what the problem was and he'd got it back to front so nothing lined up:confused: :confused: .

I really want to give this kid a chance but I just can't foresee anything but spending the next 18 months bringing him up to the stage where he might be able to start his apprenticeship which is no bloody use to me:mad: .

Rant over, D.

[Enoch]

Trouble is, you can't polish a turd.:)
Deep breaths, count to ten, slowly. Then twat him with the biggest spanner you can find:D

[HandyAndy]

Then twat him with the biggest spanner you can find

:eek: :D
I,m glad i wasn,t your apprentice Enoch :p :D

Tho after reading of Davey,s day ........ Enoch,s suggestion is probably justified....lol

Enoch..... you have a way with words indeed....like you say...."you can,t make a silk purse out of a sow,s ear.....lol

cheers
andy

[Enoch]

I was an apprentice once. It never did me any harm getting beaten about the head. Must go, I have to feed the unicorn:D

[Bonzo]

Ohhhh ..... What hard task masters :D

Although I am not known for having any patience, for some strange reason I tend to have plenty when it comes to new trainees .... Probably why I was the one that always got lumbered with them :rolleyes:

I can relate to how frustrating it is when you get one of the clueless ones !!?? .... Most of em come good in the end if given a fair chance ;)

One of my most memorable moments with a trainee .... I had been doing some serious cutting ( Gas axe ) in a very high fire risk area of a ship.

The trainee was left with on fire watch .... Strict instructions not to leave his post untill someone comes to relieve him, what could be more simple !!??

whilst I was away from the ship, all hell broke loose .... Smoke everywhere & fire brigade on it's way.

Trainee nowhere to be seen .... Eventualy located him in the canteen !!??

When asked " What part of not leaving your post did you not understand "

He said " Oh I understand OK but it was dinnertime " :D

[HandyAndy]

A little tale ........

when i raced bikes for a team we had a young lad who always wanted to be part of the team ( not as a rider ), anyways.....at a race meeting he was given the task of putting the front wheel back on after I,d asked for "wet tyres",
this is normally a very easy 1 bolt & 1 nut task as its all designed for quick changes.........I get the nod to get back onto the bike ready to go on the track, so i threw my leg over the bike & just happened to glance at the young lad who was holding something in his hand......my sixth sense took over, I gestured to the team head mechanic (very noisy when bike is running)....I shouts to the mechanic thru my helmet "whats HE got in his hands"?
Mechanic opens the lads hands only to find 1 of the brake caliper bolts :eek: (no reason to undo the calipers ).
needless to say I made sure the lad never touched a bike I was about to ride at upto speeds of 190mph.
The thought of "what could,ve happened" still makes me quiver :eek:

but like Bonzo has said they do usually turn out good when given time ,
The said young lad was great at keeping the bikes clean for the rest of the season:D

cheers
andy

[Enoch]

Ok, as it seems to be story night, here is one that happened to one of my fellow "appos" back in the good ole days.
I was an apprentice at RAE Farnborough back in the 80's, the first two years were spent in dedicated training shops before we got sent out to work in different departments. We would do 3 months in 8 different departments eg attack weapons, defence weapons, space dept etc etc. Anyway, in one particular department they were concerned with ejector seats. These were made by a company called Martin Baker - they were not cheap. What happens when you pull an eject cord is that you basicaly get fired out of the cockpit by a small but powerful rocket motor.
That's great if you eject from level flight but not so great if you happen to be inverted.
What we came up with was a system that could fire smaller rockets that would tilt the seat so it was upright when compared to the terrain below.
Anyways the guy that was the boss of the department always used to get nervous on trial days but he was particularly nervous on this day when a seat was to be sent along a test track at high speed and then the eject sequence was to be initiated. He just did not want to hear that a key sensor had been installed upside down:) "Piss off and stop bothering me" was what he said.
So the trolley with the seat on it comes down the test track and accelerates to about 120MPH, the rocket fires, the seat goes up, the turning motors fire, tilt the seat through 180 degrees, the main rocket fires and the seat had to be dug out the ground by a JCB:)
The moral of this story is that the apprentice can sometimes know better:)

[Blade]

I used to be the manager of a company(many moons ago) that made agricultural equipment and always liked to train any new starters myself for the first few days then pass them onto one of the experienced welders , One new lad starts monday morning and i start with the basics and proceed on to some offcuts of steel for him to practice on , after about 15 mins of trying to get him to try and weld 2 bits of steel together so he could get a feel of how the mig worked he said (his words) piss off i'm not interested and in the next 10 mins said the same thing another 5 times , so I pointed out where the main gate was and told him nicely to leave through it,
About an hour later my secretary pokes her head round the office door and informs me that the lads mother has turned up and would like a word with me, in comes the mother shuts the door and for 5 mins shouts her mouth off at me for firing her son, I explained to her how all new starters went through some basic training ect and then told her how her son had acted and that was why he had been fired, she then tell's me i'm a f*!king idiot and should have trained him on how to act in the work place before training him to do the job :eek: :confused: , is it any wonder that some apprentice's are braindead when they have parents like that ????

[Davey]

Its kinda reassuring to see others having similar-ish experiences with trainees. This kid is the third we've had since last December, first one was pretty good, knew his way round a tool box, did what he was told, could even think for himself. Then he decided he'd rather be shot at than work for me so went off to join the army, I thought I was a good gaffer:( . Next one they brought for interview, seemed ok, agreed a start date, start morning arrives no trainee. Training company say "we've had some problems with his attendance":mad: .

So they bring another for interview, seemed ok, talked the talk, agreed a start date and he turned up on time. Two weeks on and I had to kick him into touch, no knowledge whatsoever, no interest except in his appearance (checking his hair in any available mirror every ten minutes) and no flamin' work in him.

Interview another candidate, looks good as he's brought all his C&G certs with him from the training outfit. Only downside I could see was that he was about 4 foot tall and 5 stone, will he really be able to pull a torque wrench up to 150 n/m? My concerns were wasted as he didn't turn up on his start day either and guess what, ypu the training company had problems with his attendance too!

Which brings us up to this kid. I really want to give him a decent chance but for the life of me all I can see in him is hard work for me. I don't expect a 17 year old to be able to strip and rebuild an engine unsupervised (although if he could it wouldn't necessarily surprise me) but I do expect him to know the difference between a 10mm 1/4 drive socket and a 24mm 1/2 drive.

We'll just have to see what next week brings, D.

[AshG]

i think its all the ott health and safety dicks and do gooders causing the problems with these kids. i was stripping lawn mowers and playing with chainsaws at around 10. even at 10 i was bloody well aware that they were dangerous and could lop bits of me off in seconds. i also had knives and matches, i never burnt the house down or stabbed anyone.

[twinturbo]

We don't have trainees anymore, when we did they gave us 16yr olds who thought they knew a bit about computers... Problem is, as I run I.T. support in a school, having a trainee who probably knows the pupils as friends just aint safe in all sorts of ways.. And they just leach time.

They also get fed up doing the running arround fixing the mundane stuff ( the kind of thing we all started off doing ) and complain.... And they have crap time keeping ...

Ohhhh I could rant for ages,,, best stop.

TT

[Davey]

Naah go on TT have a rant, that's what started this thread after all. I just want a trainee who can read a tape measure and not refer to inches as "the big numbers" and Millimetres as "the little numbers".

D.

[fabbyglass]

We were all young and stupid once don't yer know..trouble is some of us are still stupid but a bit or is that a lot... older:o

[Davey]

Fair comment Mark but I could read a tape measure in mm or inches and fractions from the age of about 5 and a micrometer (imperial of course) from about 6 years old. I'm getting 17 year olds who can't read a steel rule in mm FFS!:p

D.

[twinturbo]

We had one lad, he got lost everytime he left the office. I once sent him to the canteen to get bacon butties. he cam back 20 minuets later empty handed as he could not find it. ( out office, right, left into courtyard straight ahead.) barely 50 strides!! and another time he got lost going to the office above ours. and the staircase was next to the office! He looked younger than half the pupils too!

Another one complained for months that we gave him no formal training, so we aranged and spent money on a course. It required him to do one day a month in Lancaster ( train trip ) and do a pice of work for each unit. He complained after the first one that it was too hard, so I had to nanny him on the first unit. ( it only required a bit of internet research and some thought ) .. He failed to go to the 4th month.

We had one good one, she came with no computer knowledge at all. But by the time she left she could do basic rebuilding of system, sort printer, do cctv etc..

One went fruit loop and thought he was Neo from the Matrix, we had to get shot before he tried to take down the computers..

TT

[twinturbo]

p.s. we never did get teh bacon butties..

TT

[flyerncle]

My brother begged me to take my nephew to work (in the garage I run) for his work experience to put him off,it worked a treat.
There must be some kids willing to learn out there somewhere in the hordes of Corsa/Punto driving little tosser's who think society owes them something.

[CaptainCrash1971]

Not sure about rebuilding engines, but most of the kids around here can strip a car of anything valuable in about three and a half minutes. They can also get into a locked car with a screwdriver quicker than I can with a key.
Ferrari should employ them as pit crew for formula one. Only problem is, not only would they change the tyres in 9 seconds flat, but they'd have resprayed the car silver and flogged it to McLaren for a six pack of stella and a topless picture of Lewis Hamilton's bird.

[flyerncle]

One of the perks of living in the North CC :eek:

[aerosam]

i think its all the ott health and safety dicks and do gooders causing the problems with these kids. i was stripping lawn mowers and playing with chainsaws at around 10. even at 10 i was bloody well aware that they were dangerous and could lop bits of me off in seconds. i also had knives and matches, i never burnt the house down or stabbed anyone.

Agreed, we have the same problem here. i work in a plasma spray shop in an aircraft engine overhaul factory. Apprentices are not allowed to work in here until they complete their training as it's considered too dangerous, but then they come in here completely full of them selves as they are now qualified fitters, but have no clue about the process.

Some are willing to learn but most think they know it all already.

[aerosam]

A few years ago, we had a new engineer start here - had a degree and everything. He decided to spend a few days with us monkeys on the shop floor to get a feel for what we do.

I was building a large axial flow compressor, bolting some big discs together and gave him some nuts and bolts to put in. After about 5 mins I find him on the computer looking in the parts catalogue. he tells me I must be fitting the wrong bolts as he can't get them to do up. I take hime back to the assembly, and show him "lefty lefty loosey loosey - righty righty tighty tighty"

Plank.