Jack Dickson, technical service engineer, scotland

Lockdown saw the majority of Quads technical service engineers furloughed. But Jack Dickson was one of three ‘techies’ who continued to work. And he took on the whole of Scotland.

 

I love my job. I fix and install beer lines and cooling systems for our own pubs and our free trade customers. I usually cover the west of Scotland, from Glasgow to the other side of Fort William, including west coast islands like Mull and Islay. But during the pandemic most of the team was furloughed, so I covered the whole of Scotland by myself. I was clocking up around 500 miles a day, easily.

I’ve been working for Belhaven, now Greene King, for 17 years and been a techie for 23. We are known as the Quads team – Quality and Dispensing Services. Essentially, we’re the ones that keep the pumps in good working order. Our services cover all kinds of pub premises… and the whole spectrum of the business. Up here in Scotland, that’s almost 2,400 pubs in total.

So, when we went into lockdown and the team of 10 of us went down to just me here in Scotland, it was a little bit strange. I went from chatting and seeing team members at the depot, to working more or less entirely on my own. Although I’m being 100% honest when I say that even when working alone, I always felt supported.

Remote service

During lockdown times it was an emergency service only. Initially, I was troubleshooting over the phone, covering the whole of the UK, supported by two others tech guys. We had to talk to pub managers and try to verbally guide them through how to sort problems out for themselves. The main issue was my accent – an engineer with a strong Glaswegian accent talking technical stuff to someone in England and telling them what to do was a bit of a challenge. But we got through it.

There were a few very typical problems that I’d encounter time and again. For example, publicans were going in to clean their beer lines and then finding that nothing was coming through. You need to pressurise the gas so that the cleaning system can push the water through: and if you don’t, you can’t clean the lines. And then there were issues with reopening pubs because the systems aren’t designed to be hibernated for long periods of time. I also saw a lot of electrical faults and problems with thermostats not working.

Over the first lockdown, I had calls from Penzance, Durham, London… I remember talking to one woman in a pub in Camden about a problem she had with the gas pump that works the cleaning system and I told her to go and find a hammer and stand in front of the black gas pump. She said, ‘You’re not going to ask me to hit it, are you?’ and I told her that yes, that was exactly what I was telling her to do. She thought I was a mad Scotsman joking with her and couldn’t believe it when she gave it a thwack and it cleared the problem. She burst out laughing.

Can-do attitude

Once lockdown eased in Scotland I hit the road to resume pub visits. I had to organise my own working week as there was no one else to do it. A typical day was: do the store run, where I’d pick up any parts I might need; move on to do a survey at a new premises we’d taken on to see what condition their equipment was in, then drive to a pub 150 miles away. I live just south of Glasgow and know my way about Scotland, which was just as well really. I think the longest day I had was when I to drive four hours each way to a pub in Inverurie, the other side of Aberdeen.

I didn’t feel scared about working during the pandemic. The company had some great communications talking us through what we needed to do with PPE, distancing and stuff, which I was thankful for, as I was worried about my elderly parents.

I did their shopping for them and I’d have hated to think I was putting them at risk in any way. Realistically I think my wife would have been more at risk working in a supermarket, as I had more control over who I met, where and how.

I’m guessing I was asked to work during the pandemic because I’ve got a reputation for being someone who’ll go anywhere. I had one situation when I’d booked in a job in the Borders, but they’d had eight inches of snow down there, so, I just put the snow chains on and got on with it. The boss man, Jimmy (who’s been working here 50 years), has probably got a better word for me, but I guess I’d say I’m fairly flexible.