David Kremer
"When I was 21 I had just completed university and had taken up my first job at Austin Rover / Jaguar Cars. I could not believe how dull it was and used to disappear into the toilets to read a book for 10 minutes every hour to alleviate the mind killing boredom. I was a computer operator doing design work on the press tool used to stamp out a small support bracket for the rear wing of the Austin Montego. Every time I nearly completed the design the panel was changed and I had to start again. We worked in a temperature and humidity controlled room for the sake of the massive computers we were using – below 19 degrees so you had to wear thermals and yet so dry you left every shift dehydrated! I remember that just refreshing the screen for a different view took more than 5 minutes for the computer to generate the new image. You could now do the job in half the time on a high-end lap-top and never have to wait for any new image to load. However I did get to know a bloke called Keith who had worked his way up from the shop-floor to the design studio having left school at 16 with no qualifications.
His mates thought him completely daft to leave Rover to spend a year travelling through
