This is an utterly pointless post.  But as of Friday, I've spent 30 years working for the same employer I joined straight out of school.  One of the Irish High Street Banks, and today someone has produced a photograph of me taken on my first day in the training school. 

Sadly (I won't be able/don't want)  to reproduce it here (it won't scan very well and too many people would laugh at me)  but it was interesting to look at the photograph and think back. 

Of the eight people in the picture, three of us are still working in the bank ,all of us having graduated to Head Office departments and sitting barely 15 yards apart.

Of the others, one, the one we used to tease about having fat ankles, became Miss Northern Ireland and now runs a model agency.  Another is dead while a third, the only one I ever worked with again, left the bank almost fifteen years ago to be a full-time mother.  One guy left within two weeks and escaped into the real world never to be seen again.  Not really a surprise, as he wasn't able to do anything that we were being trained in,  A bit ironic because, as far as I can remember, he was the only one who wanted a career in the Bank.  For the rest of us this was the best place to make money while you thought what you would do after screwing up your A Levels.

The only alternative with the same level of pay was the Police and you thought very hard about that in the Northern Ireland of 1979.  About a year later a Bank Manager was killed when a bomb was planted under his car, the car he'd bought from a Policeman that very day.

The last girl in the photograph, the one all the guys fancied, eloped to the Isle of Man with the Assistant Manager of the first branch she worked in.  They'd known each other six weeks.