(This story relates to a part of my life as a Serviceman Electrician and how I totally lost my self-confidence.)

The Limeworks.
One day I was sent out into the country to service electrical machinery at a lime works quarry. They were a new customer for us, so no one from our company had been there before.

They had problems with a conveyor, which was one of three which carried limestone rock from the large primary crusher up on the hill to the grading machines down below.

The lower conveyor had stopped, and I had a lot of difficulty finding the cause of the problem.

On attempting to trace the control circuit, which ran from the control centre below to control buttons up in the primary crusher control room, I discovered that the cable run consisted of one kind of cable at one of the control rooms, arriving at the other control room as a different type of cable. As they were joined and buried in the ground this made it impossible to trace the cable's cores visually. And because the machinery couldn't be stopped for production reasons, I was stumped as to how I was going to trace and fix the problem.

To make matters worse, whenever the lower conveyor stopped the one before it continued to run and empty it’s load onto the stopped conveyor, which then had to be cleared by hand by two men with shovels, about an hour's work.

Taking the bull by the horns, I turned the power off and got stuck in, and interlinked all three conveyors so that if one stopped, they all stopped. This solved the difficulty of having to clear the lime from the stopped conveyor each time a fault occurred.

I felt that this action was an achievement, but being conscious of the time it took, and the likely cost to the customer, I felt really bad. Progress had been slow, and the repair took all day to complete, which included the time fault-finding.

At the end of the job my morale was so low that I remember saying to the works foreman - "I don't think you will see me back again." He smiled sympathetically but made no unpleasant comment, and didn't seem upset at all.

I really believed that I was useless after that job, and never expected to be sent there again. I told my foreman that I never intended to go back - he could send someone else.

A few days later another call came in from the lime works and my foreman insisted that I go, in spite of my feelings of incompetence with that company‘s equipment. I went, and became their main service electrician.

Conditions there were muddy when it rained and dry and dusty when it was fine, but I didn't mind, as lime is a clean-looking cream-white powder which dusts off the overalls quite easily.

The guys working there were the finest bunch of men I've ever worked with. They were rugged, but considerate with great senses of humour. I liked them,  and they seemed to like me.