I became a field service engineer for Fison's when it was the norm for Pharmaceutical companies to have scientific equipment divisions. With car phones (physically connected and wired into the car) still a few years away, the only modes of communication were land lines and pagers. I was issued with my car a Sierra 1.6 hatchback, it was the most basic car that could be sourced by Fison's, I was delighted that it had at least a radio! Still remember it well B380XVX.

Your service contract work for the next month was sent in the post, so you could plan ahead as to when you could visit your customers in between any breakdown calls you had. This brings us on to pagers, the only way back then that someone could remotely notify you that you needed to communicate with the office was by pager. My first pager, a hand me down from another engineer was extremely chunky, like 2 packets of cigarettes stuck together, it was always falling off, especially when climbing behind floor standing instruments to get to some critical part. The British Telecom pager was very unsophisticated, it just had two tones, the first just a boring beep beep, which meant call in the next day and the second a much faster beep beep, this meant call in today as a response time had to be met for a Gold contract customer the next day.

Pagers were usually clipped onto your waistband or belt on one side, as this kept it out of the way when entering and exiting your car, unfortunately this also meant that when one dropped one’s trousers paying a visit to the toilet it was very common for the pager to fly off and drop into the bowl! Once retrieved, thankfully they did eventually dry out! Obviously, you didn’t want to tell your manager that your pager had had a near death experience in the loo and that’s why you’d missed your response time whilst your pager dried out!

How far have we come today, when an engineer can log in to a Mass Spectrometer on the other side of the world because the instrument had sent a message to say there was no flow of eluent from the HPLC and it had shutdown. One thing that has not changed from when I was field service engineer in the eighties, is the same personal characteristics and skills that are required from any candidate looking to make a move into an instrument service role. These are an enjoyment of being customer facing, an ability to work alone, many hours in your car and an ability to think through problem solving in a logical manner. If you have these skills and an interest in moving into an instrument field service role then why not take a look at our field service vacancies on our website or give me or Simon England a call to discuss further.

So finally, the moral of the story is you should always flush your LC with water but never your pager down the pan!

Andy Wilson