Chapter 18

Being first isn't always a good thing. Orbitel were an amazing technical company but had no experience at all in making phones for a consumer market. Neither Racal nor Plessey, who were the owners, had this experience, so names like Nokia and Ericsson began to overtake us in the market. Racal sold their share of the company to Vodafone and then one day in July 1996 it was announced that we had been bought outright by Ericsson. Overnight we had become Ericsson employees and suddenly all the things we were missing appeared. We now had email addresses and internet at every desk. We changed our computer systems and started to use 3D CAD in anger. It was an exciting time, and I happened to be in a very good position to be made the Design Manager for the Ericsson UK design facility in Basingstoke. From this point I was regularly flying to meetings in various places in the Ericsson world. Their main site in Sweden was in Malmo, just across the Oresund channel from Copenhagen. So, I was again flying business class from Heathrow to Copenhagen just like I was when working for Idex, the difference now was that instead of getting an internal flight from Copenhagen to Odense, I got a helicopter trip across to Malmo heliport. Cool eh. My other regular trip was to North Carolina. Ericsson had a design and manufacturing division in an area called Research Triangle Park (RTP) near Raleigh. Even though we only had economy tickets for this trip it was rare not to be upgraded to business class and I never figured out why this was, but I wasn't going to argue. I even got a few trips to more exotic destinations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Korea and various other countries in Europe. This was the golden age of business travel for me.

I loved the romance of business travel. I was on occasion guilty of fabricating a reason to need to fly somewhere for a critical meeting. I once flew to RTP for a design review only to be told in the meeting that the design team was not ready yet and left me with nothing to do and a wasted trip. I used this opportunity to my advantage in that I spent three days on a road trip up to Washington DC and back through Virginia. I saw the white house, Arlington cemetery and various civil war battlefield sites. The drive back along the blue ridge mountains of Virginia was also spectacular.

Trips to the far east also brought some moments. I ordered half a chicken in Hong Kong and that's exactly what I received. A whole chicken cut precisely down the middle including half the head, neck and feet, and it was a skinny one so finding meat was a struggle. On the same trip I got into a lift at a hotel and Damon Hill rushed in after me. I felt that I had to acknowledge him and asked if he was doing anything interesting. He replied that he was just doing some promotion work, then the door opened, and he left. This is the only F1 star I have talked to, but I have been in the same room as a few others. Due to my seniority, suppliers sometimes invited me on jollies. One such was as a guest of Stewart racing to a F1 qualifying day at Silverstone. This included a lunch and access to VIP areas and the pits. In the pits I saw Micheal Schumacher, and at the lunch we were entertained by speeches from Jackie Stewart and Rubens Barrichello.

I almost got into serious trouble on another trip to Hong Kong with Paul Smith. We were walking through Kowloon when a guy asked us if we needed a fake luxury watch. This was something I was on the lookout for, so he invited us to follow him to a shop where he had them stored. We were a little bit nervous of this but went along with it. We arrived at a glass shopfront of what looked like a laundry. In one corner was a steep staircase to the upper floor which we were beckoned towards. By this time, we were both on high alert so only went far enough up the stairs to see the floor above. In the room was a table with four guys sitting around playing cards. Our guy was on the other side of the room looking in a cupboard. Suddenly an argument broke out and when I looked around, I saw that there were two guys on the staircase below us. Both Paul and I had the same idea and leapt past the two guys, pushing them aside as we went by. There was shouting behind us as we ran out onto the street and safety. I gave up the idea of a fake watch on that trip, although I did eventually get a fake TAG in Seoul.

China was big eye opener for me. The contrast between the poverty on the streets and the luxury of the hotels was quite stark. We were advised not to walk around unescorted. The factories I visited made attempts to look western, but there were clues if you kept your eyes open. Signs that said, "No spitting in the corridor", and people asleep at their desks on the factory floor. There were stories from other guys about how they were offered girls as an incentive or reward for our business, but they were the money men, us lowly engineering types weren't offered those types of perks. The best I got were some very nice meals.

The process of long-haul flying was right up there as one of my favourite experiences. We always travelled in economy-plus when on long haul, and every now and then I was upgraded to business class. I was once upgraded on a return flight from Kuala Lumpur, and this was a 747, so I did my first and only trip in the upstairs lounge. Unfortunately for me I slept through most of it.

It was about this time that I got involved with a girl in marketing called Gloria Benstead, or 'Bedstead' as she was known, but that was not based on any reputation. We got together on a company outing to a pub in London. We ended up missing the last train home, so got the night bus to my house in Hatch End, which was empty at the time. Marketing girls are strange animals, I soon found out that Gloria was into crystals and horoscopes and all that nonsense, but I suppose that's what marketing is based on as well, so again, this one had to be let go.

Now that I was earning good money and was still single, I had to find things to do with my spare time. We shall take a break from my career to visit some of the other things I did while not working or skiing.

Chapter 18: Ericsson