Posted by Peter Ceresole on June 05, 2011 at 07:29:28 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Commander Walker's eye splices posted by Jock on June 04, 2011 at 00:06:11:
In a similar vein my Royal Engineer's manual on operating military railways is stamped for restricted circulation.
Manuals are going the way of all manuals... When we were filming in Pristina, after the Kosovo war was over, I was chatting with the engineer officer who was looking after the local power station. When we were there, Pristina 'A' was permanently out, but Pristina 'B' was intermittently on. He told me that when they arrived, getting some kind of power going was a priority; he turned up and looked around him, but wasn't quite sure where to start. But they did have sat phones, and he had a brother who was a power station engineer in Bromley, so he called him up. Apparently the conversation went a bit like this:
'Hullo, I'm standing in Pristina 'A'. It's broken. Where do I start?' And it worked; at least we didn't have to carry *all* the gear up to our hotel rooms. One night, I was sitting in a cafe in the half-dark (the climate was soft and beautiful) on a mobile call to London when the power came back on. In London they could hear the 'WHOMP' as all the fridges and lights came back on, and the cheer from the people in the street. A lovely moment.
That mobile call, by the way, went via Serbia, who although they were the enemy- or had been until the week before- were making far too much money from relaying mobile calls to want to switch the service off. Land lines were all dead- the exchange was up on a hill and had taken a direct hit from s cruise missile early in the war, and looked as though a large angry animal had taken a bite out of the middle...