FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 4 Laying the Foundations

With the new yard, we had space for new vehicles: but they had to be right in every way, and that included the colour. One morning, when I got out of my car, I saw five shiny new, green Kia vans that had just been delivered. ‘They’re not mine, are they?’ I asked Darren. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘No, they aren’t,’ I told him. ‘Send them back.’ Someone has to maintain standards. Any old green isn’t good enough. It has to be the right shade: Conway green. S o, things were moving forward in the yard, but they were beginning to fall seriously behind in the office. We needed to invest a little time and money in what was going on behind the scenes. First of all, for our future tendering processes, we would require a Quality Assurance Accreditation from the British Standards Institute (BSI). Sharon Field took charge of this for us, achieving our accreditation in December 1995. Secondly, we needed to migrate some of our systems, including payroll, onto the new Ibis system. And for some people, computerisation was just a step too far. In November 1996, some time after her 65 th birthday, Mavis Paterson decided to retire. She had looked after our wages and salary system since the early days at Ancaster Road, and knew the old Kalamazoo system backwards, forwards, and probably sideways, too. There was a party for her; and at the party, the person who wrote and sang her farewell song was, of course, Peter Haynes. He used the tune from ‘Hello, Dolly’, and changed the words to ‘Goodbye, Mavis’. Peter wrote and performed all the Christmas songs, including ‘We did it Conway’ and ‘Michael Conway had a Firm’ (to the tune of ‘Old McDonald had a Farm’). Peter had come to us from Bromley Council,

An old Kalamazoo pay slip: a memento of the old pay system that Mavis dealt with for so many years.

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