I failed my ELEVEN PLUS exam in 1954, but because I was good with numbers the Corscombe Primary School teacher, Mrs Kaul pulled a few strings and I ended up with a bursary so that I could be a boarder at Shaftesbury Grammar School (SGS), North Dorset, UK.

 

In retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to me.

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The heart-rending loneliness of my early teen years has left me mentally scarred for life. Added to which, my dyslexia isolated me from the rest of the world.

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The exciting discoveries of the normal teenage years were denied me, especially girl/boy relationships. Music and dancing past me by, never to return.

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I essentially left home at the age of eleven for the sake of my education. Mrs Kaul had a lot to answer for.

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I was a miserable failure at virtually everything. Every term end there was a 100-question quiz. The same questions for the whole school. As far as I remember, Gatsby, a dayboy in my year, always came top of the school with 100 correct answers. I always came bottom.

 

I was as notorious in my failure as he was in his success. In the end the school decided to cancel the quiz. I have often wondered if the decision to cancel was sparked by an early recognition of the mental condition of dyslexia in the days when little was known of its existence.

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It was the days of Grammar Schools and Secondary Modern. If you passed the Eleven Plus exam you went to the Grammar School. If you didn't you didn't. Or if you had money you went to Public School regardless of the Eleven Plus.

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In the 1950's the word DYSLEXIA had not been invented. As a consequence, my education was a disaster. I finally emerged from a second-rate college in London University with a "Pass" degree which, I'm sure, they gave me for attendance.

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My INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION up to the age of eleven was fantastic, living in Corscombe, a farming village in Dorset, "far from the madding crowds".

 

My Dad and Mum; my sister, Judy; my best friend, Richard Honeybun a farmer's son, my friend across the road, Keith Childs, and my teacher Mrs Kaul, all made for a healthy child's education.

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My DAD, especially, with his workshop at the top of the garden and the 12 or so volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica on the big shelf he built, provided me with a superior foundation for future learning. Regrettably, this stopped dead at the age of 11+ when I began my 8-year prison-sentence at Shaftesbury Grammar School.

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THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM confined my education to learning thousands of arbitrary facts in such a way that I could recall them in exams and write them on exam sheets so that the answers could be sent away and compared with everyone else's in the UK. There was no need to understand them, just to remember them.

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This is in total conflict with the quote by ALBERT EINSTEIN ..... "Education is not the learning of fact but the training of the mind to think.”

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Needless to say, I FAILED at every level.

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Even my numeracy was stifled such that it came to nothing. Remembering the "Timetables" does not make you a mathematician, in fact it is quite the reverse. Real mathematicians are often unable to penetrate the curriculum process and their genius is consequently lost. 

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When I entered the workplace, I had very little to offer the world. My whole career was a perpetual struggle to prove my worthiness to my "academically elite" peers.

 

On the other hand, I often think there is someone up there or somewhere who is looking after me, when I look back.

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I began my CAREER as a general lab assistant in an old manufacturing plant making Citric and Gluconic Acids, at an old PFIZER factory in Bromley-by-Bow, London, East End, by fermentation using the Aspergillus fungus. It was all I could get with a "Pass" degree.

 

I was rescued when a colleague returned to the office full of excitement after attending an interview for a job for a Chemical Engineer IN THE BAHAMAS.

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I asked to borrow his Telegraph containing the three-line advertisement in the Jobs column and secretly applied for the job myself. To his exasperation, I got the job, and he didn't.

 

I think the reason was because the American testing method suited me being dyslexic and not him being otherwise.

 

A simple sheet of multiple-choice questions where you just had to tick the right boxes. You did not need a MEMORY, you just needed COMMON SENSE.

 

Using the latest technology of laying a template over the question sheet, they just had to count the ticks and then of course check that there was only one tick per question.

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The interview question did not test my memory at all, because my new boss, Richard Eliason, who was one of the interviewers, had an incredible memory and could not understand why I didn't. This became a serious issue during the early days of my job with Syntex.

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The production plant comprised a dozen or so "batch" reactors each processing complex organic reactions which were different from each other and different from one day to the next. At the end of each shift the status of each one was summarised on a blackboard in the shift office.

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Richard was able to memorise the status in every reactor, whereas I had no chance. The brawny operators thought I was a joke and Richard was sadly disappointed in me. It was very stressful with a lot of sleepless nights which is not good when you are doing shift work.

 

We agreed to a move for me into project engineering where my memory issue was not a problem. The only retrieval of my confidence was when I started to talk to Richard about the operation of his centrifugal pumps, which is basic Chemical Engineering, he had NOT A CLUE. 

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My boss in Projects suggested I might improve my management skills by attending a local DALE CARNEGIE course, four hours, one evening a week for ten or so weeks, run by Captains of industry. Only the best Captains would sacrifice a week from the office to come to the Bahamas, all expenses paid, to run one course in Freeport and another in Nassau.

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The DALE CARNEGIE course was good, but it was not magic. It was never going to turn a serious dyslexic into a good manager.

 

The technique was simple by giving everyone two opportunities each evening to give a timed (one or two minutes) presentations, mainly preselected topics.

 

The only rule I remember was that everyone had to clap after each presentation, regardless of its quality. A prize was given to the best of session voted for by the class.

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It was all aimed at improving your confidence which was good if you are not dyslexic but embarrassing if you are. I am pretty bad at presenting someone else's ideas, but good at presenting my own. So, I flourished when the topic was self-chosen.

 

I remember well talking about the Dupuytren’s contracture in my hands which causes my fingers to become bent and is normally embarrassing. Telling the class about it helped with my embarrassment. I easily won the prize for that session.

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My London GP had told me that the job in the BAHAMAS would ruin my career prospects. Can't remember my reply, but four and a half years in FREEPORT, GRAND BAHAMA making the contraceptive pill proved my decision to ignore him was correct. Besides, my career prospects being dyslexic with a miserable "Pass" degree were never that bright.

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So, when I returned to London, as luck would have it, I was plunged into the OFFSHORE OIL wave which, like a tsunami was sweeping up every engineer within commuting distance of London. I didn't even know what a P&ID (piping and instrument diagram) was. If they had mentioned it at college, I certainly did not remember.

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In 1975, the offshore oil and gas industry was in its infancy. In America and the Middle East, it was all onshore, so the design standards for offshore were still being invented. This together with the shortage of engineers made my life relatively easy; I was not the only person who did not know what he was doing.

 

In fact, my dyslexia was an advantage there were few rules and that is the way I liked it. Non dyslexic people generally need rules to live by.

 

I operated as an AGENCY engineer going from project to project as opposed to company to company. In the beginning it was because I could earn double the money, but later it was a way that I could steer clear of management roles. Dyslexic people make good engineers and lousy managers. 

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I could count the number of good project managers on one hand. The ability to sit around a table with ten discipline managers and remember each one's name and what each was doing from week to week takes a certain type of memory, which I have not got.

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This is why my favourite kind of work was technical TROUBLE SHOOTING. To be presented with a problem that nobody else was able to solve and knowing little about it myself was the type of challenge I thrived on.

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Out of the blue, I had a call from a manager in Teknica (UK) Ltd [Libya]. He asked if I knew anything about foaming problems in WET SCREW COMPRESSORS. While I said that I did, which was only vaguely true, it got me a nice job for the next 8 years.

 

The three WET SCREW COMPRESSORS were on an oil field in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Libya, North Africa. The contractor ABB had been 3 years trying to commission them. They could not work out how to stop foam in the compressed fuel gas going to the 25MW gas turbine generators, which needed dry gas, to prevent the turbine blades getting damaged, due to hot-spots.

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The compression process was a very complex Chemical Process Engineering problem which few people would be able to understand. You won't read about it in books. I had 3 weeks on site to work it out, which I did by showing that the compressors were not fit-for-purpose.

 

This was against the odds as there were already many identical compressors operating in the desert in similar circumstances. It was just me against a group of engineers from ABB, and of course the client who did not want to be seen to have made a mistake.

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I gave a presentation in the Tripoli office to 40 lawyers, accountants, engineers, and management when the three ABB engineers conceded defeat.

 

After the meeting, the minutes secretary came up to me and expressed amazement that this was the first time she had ever understood what it was all about. I had used a picture of a bottle of Coke as my main example. Someone else might have produced a list of literature references. I had none of those.

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“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein. (Sorry about that; bit tongue-in-cheek really!)

 

I can't say I wasn't helped, because my presentation was all about "stable-foam" and during the meeting, refreshment arrived in the form of Libyan Tea served in glass beaker-type mugs with metal handles, bunched together on silver trays. The tea was clear and there was a stable-foam two inches high on top of each one. When the meeting realised the significance, they all burst out laughing, which was a welcome relief to me. 

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My career ended with two and a half years in the engineering department of Chevron in Perth, Australia, involved mainly with the Gorgon LNG (liquified natural gas) Project, which is one of the world’s largest natural gas projects. My speciality was MERCURY, which is the curse of the LNG industry.

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I first became involved with MERCURY some years before on the Conoco Britannia Project in the UK North Sea, which exported condensate into the British Petroleum (BP) Fortes pipeline complex which fed a million barrels of oil a day into Grangemouth Refinery.

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As Conoco's Process Engineer, I was part of the team reviewing the expected specification of the condensate for compatibility purposes. BP's spec. called for zero MERCURY. I said, "what do you mean, zero mercury?"

 

The reply was something like "What bit of "zero" don't you understand?"  

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I replied, somewhat hesitantly, "There is never absolute zero".

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The next 16 weeks I enjoyed a journey of discovery along with the BP engineer with weekly meetings alternating between London and Aberdeen. The Grangemouth operator had said zero and he meant zero. He had "Cold Boxes" in the refinery made of aluminium which forms an amalgam with mercury with devastating consequences as demonstrated on January 19th, 2004, in the Skikda LNG plant, Algeria, North Africa.

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The Britannia production wells were still being drilled and no thought had been given to testing the well production fluids for mercury. It suddenly became a matter of urgency. I had a crash course in well testing for mercury which had never been done before.

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We used a 40-meter-long sample unit which was pushed down the part-horizontal drill hole, thousands of feet long, from the drill rig. It took five or six days because it got stuck in the horizontal part which cost about a million dollars in the mid-90's, so ten times that today.

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For our money we ended up with ten one-pint samples of "mud" which is the name given to the drilling fluid pumped down from the rig.

 

Ironically, the situation has not much improved, even with all the leaps in technology. Mercury will do its own thing. Gorgon is producing more mercury than predicted, despite my protestations. 

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I retired early from Chevron. I was on a four-year contract but left after two and half years, even though I was making "shed loads". Being dyslexic, I could never feel comfortable in Chevron.

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Like most corporations, Chevron has the dubious luxury of being able to skim the "cream" of the university graduates. But the "academically elite" do not make good engineers. They may be better at following the rules, but they cannot see the big picture.

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Then there was the Chevron "Way" which was a set of rules more intent on your personal conduct rather than your technical expertise. To a dyslexic it is all common sense, but all Chevron personnel have to go through school-like ritual of learning the rules and passing exams.

 

I found it particularly depressing, especially as your performance rating is based on peer-reviews.

 

My boss, Chris was always at pains to reassure me that two minus was not less than satisfactory. On the scale from one to three, where one gets fired, three gets promoted, I can only believe that two is satisfactory and two minus is not. 

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It was because of Chris's patient understanding that I did not quit earlier.

 

I believe that Chris is, to some extent, dyslexic. He did not enter Chevron straight out of college but was a mature entry, like me. He recounts his interview as all about him wearing a bow tie which a friend had advised him to do, because that is how you are remembered in a crowd.

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I began to write my autobiography about the time I left Chevron. I was inspired by the Chevron Way in a negative sort of way. After all the years struggling with it, I finally began to realise what dyslexia really is. It began to add meaning to the quotes by Albert Einstein and the reason for the twinkle in his eyes.

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I remember telling one my friends back at college that I could not understand the concept of fire. He replied with the typical mocking answer quoting straight out of the textbook about excited electrons and so forth. It was all words and no picture. As far as I am concerned, atomic theory is still in the realms of the hypothetical. Like fire, it is all just words.

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I could never be an electrical engineer because you cannot see electricity. So many words but no pictures. Alternating current is way beyond most people's imagination. People don't give a second thought to the speed of light. On the mobile phone from UK to Australia, it is really annoying if there is the tiniest delay in the conversation.

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This all leads me to wonder if Albert's Einstein's theory of relativity is just one big hoax. In fact, the hoax of the century?

 

I'm sure many academically elite people can explain the theory in words but there is really no picture. For instance, "curvature of spacetime" are just words accompanied by imaginary diagrams. Nobody really knows.

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Albert Einstein was the world's most famous dyslexic genius. He was surrounded by academically elite scientists like Isaac Newton, with his apple and gravity, who live in a world of make-believe. They cannot accept the theory of attraction-of-masses without knowing why. People believe in a god without knowing why. 

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Not “the end”. There is no end. 

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