As I came into work this morning, I saw a telephone engineer by the side of the road huddled up in a box working.

Today’s cold… wretchedly cold.

It was -4 this morning when everyone at Streetwise HQ set out for work. We’ve had a sprinkling of snow but not a lot… yet.

Ice is a different story.

Everything is iced over and the day time temperatures are not going over zero. We’ve experienced several days where the temperature hasn’t gone any higher than -1.

The ice is simply not shifting.

I feel for that telephone engineer and anyone else who has to work outside in this weather. I can only imagine how cold his fingers are.

It’s hard trying to work with thin wires and terminals when wearing thick gloves, that kind of work generally needs the delicate touch of uncovered fingers.

Touching the cold icy metal box isn’t going to be enjoyable.

Andi, our remote worker currently enjoying temperatures of 14 degrees in central Portugal, once told me about how as an apprentice joiner back in the early 90s, his fingers were so cold, it felt like they had frozen glass inside them.

One particular cold winter in 1991, he was pointing up the brickwork (pushing fresh cement into gaps in brickwork) around windows he and his uncle had fitted.

It was so cold that winter that every time he touched the trowel, his fingers hurt.

Seeing Andi doing a decent job of the pointing, the property owner asked if they would do the rest of the house while they were there with the scaffold.

Being the apprentice, Andi was given the job… the whole job!

From the ground right up to the top of chimney stack, Andi spent days scraping out old crumbling cement with chisels made of cold steel, and replacing it with new.

He remembers that the days were filled with freezing fog and clouds of icy mist. The trees were white with frost for weeks.

It was a bitter winter and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep his fingers warm while working outside.

His fingers were in pain and he was miserable. It was a miserable job that lasted several weeks.

Let’s just say, he doesn’t have any fond memories of that particular job. He actually regrets not making the decision then to get out of the trade and do something else.

The failure to make that decision might be that there was no internet at that time.

Any other form or work available to him at that time was mostly manual outdoor work, so he stuck with what he was doing.

Anyway, things are different today.

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