another friday night in the local

[binliner]

mostly the the same characters apart from Alan a friend from days when Benboats used to dock in London where the nearest pub was the the Fernendale(east india docks?) and tought in a local school and after many year s moved back to dunfermline.
the conversation turned round eventually to between the the merch.guys to the what happened to various people during the the demise of benline &atlantic drilling ( we must be boring bastards to the rest of the pub)-- dereck who had been on the ships was shocked at the time of the of speed how it happened while we who were on the the rigs( mostly laid up) realised things were going down hill and possibly were more mentally aware of what was happening and had a plan to what to do what to to do when it did happen.Unfortunatley mine involved getting a nice job shoreside (pressure from my better half) but after a year went back offshore until retirement(very early) which in my mind was the best thing to do.I found working on shore very boring and after working saturdays and sundays etc wundering when my leave would start.anybody else have this problem after moving shoreside?

[celsis]

I came ashore from one of the Grey boats in 1980 and got a job with BT. Problem was that I woke up each morning convinced I was on leave and not wanting to go to work.

I lasted 11 weeks and then found myself in St Mary Street again.....

[forthbridge]

I left Ben Line in 1979 and at that time everything seemed pretty secure though I kept in touch with people I knew in Ben line it was a surprise to hear of its demise so suddenly. It was only later when the company that I was working with was taken over by another and the first we knew about it was on the afternoon that it happened when we heard about it on the radio that I realised there are often commercial reasons for these sudden demises.
in fact recently i discovered some old Ben Bulletins from the late 1970s until the final collapse and realised that anyone reading them could have predicted the end as the various alliances that the company had seemed to be falling one after the other.
I did not find the move ashore too painful maybe that i had spent some time standing by ships in shipyards in the years before I went ashore. I moved to a major oil company in Aberdeen and for the first month was completely bored especially as the job i was doing did not seem anything like I had been told it would be and the drop in pay was really painful however this was more than made up after about 2 years. Gradually things changed and I found it involved a lot of travel mainly within UK but sometimes to other places and also I was left very much on my own to decide what do do which suited me. There were times when I thought I would like to go back to sea but generally I was quite happy. I would not have been if I had spent all my time in the same office. It was also nice to go on a flight and find that all the stewardesses knew me. I finally spent 20 years there taking early retirement when the company was taken over.