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Written by Rod Lins
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Sunday, 08 October 2006 11:32 |
- Finished high school in 1960, started Government Apprenticeship for Office Machine Mechanic (4yrs) . Worked for Prushaw Office Equipment for 11 years serviceing and rebuilding mailing equipment, mimeograph machines, Multilith printing presses. This sometimes involved manufacturing parts , welding and lathe work, also spray painting to get the finished product.
- Started with Xerox photocopy company and they trained me on 9 different product lines. After my first training period on high volume duplicators I was given a territory in downtown Vancouver. Myself and another tech were swamped with 18 service calls each per day to start off so had to develope a plan to bring the call rate down to something reasonable. We suceeded within two months to get the call rate down to 6 calls per day each by alternating each morning one of us doing a complete preventative maintenance to one maching and all other call were started by changeing the filter bag and drum cleaning brush.
- The next training course was for the microfilm enlarger printer, this is an engineering copier that prints 11"x22" sheets of paper. Only had one of these to look after along with the duplicator territory.
- After 11 months of Vancouver, an opportunity came up to go to Kamloops so I took it and moved there with my family. Wife and 4 boys. Spent the first year there mostly in Los Angeles training on the equipment used in Kamloops. I spent most of my time traveling a hugh territory which covered from Merritt to Jasper and Williams Lake to Revelstoke. Again my partner would travel one week and then I would travel the next week. I spent 3 years there and one day I got a flyer from head office with a picture of a guy in a canoe in the middle of a lake fishing, the caption said that you could work on Xerox machines in you spare time. Of course I took the bait and moved north to Fort Saint John. No more training just lots of traveling the triangle of Hudson Hope, Chetwynd, Dawson Creek and Fort Saint John. 3 days a week I would fly to Fort Nelson, get there at 3pm and work on as many machines as I could until the flight back at 8pm. Of couse I burned myself out after another 3 years, I resigned from Xerox and used my pension money to start my own busines selling and serviceing CB radios, car stereos and burgular alarms.
- Ran the business for 4 years with good sucess but when Trudeau squashed the oilfield exploration in 1981, 80% of my customers moved out of BC within 2 months so I had to shut down and declare bankrupsey.
- Locked the doors and walked accross the street to Quasar Communications to see if they could use me. They just asked me how come I didn't bring my tool box. I woked for them for 4 years mostly traveling to Tumbler Ridge setting up Repeaters and looking after 50 contractors and their fleets along with the mining fleet of Quintette Coal.
- My family was getting to the age of needing college so we moved to Kelowna. Worked for some office equipment companies, then got on with Omega Communications sales department. Shuffled around with various posts with them for 9 years.
- Moved to Chilliwack working for Airtel Communications but the territory didn't produce enough sales so I went to work for Freeway Communications, had a company vehicle and traveled wherever I wanted to generate sales and service. Most of my business came form Bostom Bar logging industry. Freeway management wanted to cut costs and change my job description from salesman to sales agent. I figured with this arrangement I might as well start my own business again so made up a web page for www.rodlins.com for all my product lines. Omega called me out of the blue one day and asked if I would represent them for the Motorola line so now I had all radio lines available to me.
- Took early retirement at age 60 and continued doing service call out of my house in Agassiz until the logging industry wound down. Decided to sell and move to Kelowna to be around family more.
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Last Updated on Friday, 03 July 2009 05:20 |
