Nineteen weeks.
HR believed that taking newly-promoted [and presumably fairly proficient] outstation forecasters and swapping them with notionally forecaster-trained desk-jockeys was A GOOD IDEA. In my case they excelled themselves and, remembering my young days as a very indifferent computer programmer, they sent me to the Central Forecast Office on the ‘Intervention Roster’. This roster’s task was second-guessing the very good computer output and inserting bogus observations – bogussing. The team of two per shift was led by a Principal. Most of the bogussing had to be removed, the model was better than we were.
My shifts were often dreadful nights, but one Principal was a joy to work for. I shall name him, because he nursed me through some difficult times, times that recur as nightmares to this day. ‘Tam’ Bradbury was the younger brother of the Bradbury who eased me out of Uxbridge and on the path to a career. Tam, a renowned glider expert, seemed an old man to me, bespectacled and with snowy hair. One night he confessed to being dreadfully tired. Knowing that there was a Rest Room, Principals for the use of, I suggested that he got his head down. “Nobody ever uses it, and I am not going to start” said Tam. “Mr Bradbury, do you not trust me to cover both jobs for a couple of hours?” And I became instantly famous as the man who sent Tam to bed. Thereafter he had a kip most nights. A lovely kind gentleman.
The unique selling point of CFO was the posting letter: “on probation, if you are no good we will get rid of you and [afterthought] if by any remote chance you don’t like the conditions, colleagues, job or the fact that a weeks’ leave excluded both weekends …… you can opt out”.
After 19 weeks of Hell I was told how lucky I was, the job was mine. Two days earlier I had been head-hunted to be a senior lecturer at the Met. Office College, Shinfield Park near Reading. CFO was amazed that somebody could give up the very substantial extra pay, but our mortgages were always taken on the assumption of flat basic income. We lived in Yateley, leafy Hampshire, opposite the church and near the very good Yateley School. Joyce was a full-time mother to our four children. There were periods when another income would have helped, but we coped. Decimalisation meant a very tight few months. The car was a white Viva estate which often developed oily plugs. Perversely, when we lived in Yorkshire, we tended to holiday in the south-west, and when we lived in the south we went to Scotland.