One night duty, summer of 68, it was too hot to sleep up in the ATCAs' penthouse suite at Drayton so a couple of us went walkabout. We found a door, unlocked in the cellar so wandered through for a look, . We came out into a theatre sized room, dimly lit. Unfortunately our explorations were terminated by a Rock Ape and we were taken back to a very unhappy freshly awoken, Barney Jobe (sp?) to be identified.
There was a particular D Man, John ?? (he came to work on a moped and everybody had fun trying to knock him off) who was almost universally hated who caused me a lot of grief on DO. Luton was phoning details through on a dep routing via DVR at the same time as requesting clearance on the flight. There were about 10 strips to write, in pencil, he insisted ATCA 3's only used that, and had only just started on them when he started complaining about my incompetence. This was followed shortly after by the strips all being thrown back at me as being totally unusable. He was screaming at me over the top of the DO Suite, which he had climbed on top of, so I "hung one on him". Visit to Mr. Field this time and shortly after a posting to Sopley, after spending 3 months on NMU at Gatwick (didn't mind that, plenty of overtime)
I remember Mediator used to be switched off at nights for Maintenance, and also to calculate the salaries it was rumoured. The first anybody at an adjacent centre knew about it was when several aircraft would call and we had received no ACT data. This was almost always followed by a complaint from LATCC that they had no details on a couple. It took a helluva long time to get them to re-program their system to send back a warning to us if the ACT was not accepted.