18th January 1971

18/01/71

Dear Mum and Dad

Thank you for the letter which took about 7 days to arrive. We had one express from our neighbours in Prague which was posted on Friday and arrived on Monday. They say they have posted to England a decanter and set of 6 glasses so don’t be surprised if they arrive on your doorstep.

I sent a long letter to Paula this evening but I know you will read it when you go to Belton next.

We have the spare part for the Volkswagen- it was bought out by someone from ICL on Saturday. It was only an oil seal worth nine shillings but it succeeded in stopping our car altogether. We are hoping we can get it working in the next couple of days.

On Saturday a whole crowd of ICLites went up the mountain and attempted to ski. We ranged from almost professionals (CM from the Russian branch of ICL who has been skiing for years) to raw beginner like us. Some of the people were quite old but still had a good style.

Peter, one of the engineers, with an RAF moustache, tweed jacket, baggy trousers and pipe (three nuns best no less) looking quite out of place on skis.

Tell Nanny I think of her every morning when I ladle her marmalade onto my toast.

The water was turned off on Sunday so we went for a drive to the dam on the river. Every bit as beautiful as Slapy dam but more remote and less crowded. I had to leave all the washing up for the whole day. It was lovely to come home this evening and find it all clean and tidy because the water had come on again and Mrs ‘do’ had done.

Tony and I are now keeping healthy probably due to the sour milk we are eating every morning. The food is not too bad and I am learning a few words of Bulgarian. Saturday evening we had the country manager and his friend for dinner and had an good evening speaking in a mixture of English, Russian, French and German.

I am asking someone to take this back to England and post for me so you should get it early next week, post strike permitting.

Lots of Love

Tony and Gillian.

The VW saga continues................................... we were always hopeful of a cure. Our faulty VW Variant car had now seized up entirely and was parked permanently outside our apartment in Sofia, unable to be towed because it was the automatic Borg Warner gear box that had locked tight. The Bulgarian repair garage thought that they could get it running again but needed a spare part that, due to the lack of hard currency, they could not obtain from VW in Germany. Using our second car it should have been a simple and pleasant excursion to drive down to the VW agent at Thessalonica in northern Greece to obtain the spare part. However, the car was on Tony’s visa and he could not leave without it. This gave us a real dilemma.

So, being quite unable to leave the country and unable to move the VW to the ‘Customs’ car park at the airport, Tony went to the British Embassy in Sofia to seek help to get his visa stamped so that we could leave the country. Mr. P. the Commercial Attachés response was typically unhelpfully, “we cannot help you, but if you still have the problem in 6 weeks time come back & see us again”. Silly us, there we were thinking our embassy might be able to help a British subject in difficulties!

Tony then went to the US Embassy and explained our problem. They immediately responded, made some phone calls and gave Tony a translator for as long as needed. Within an hour a team of men arrived at our apartment, lifted our car onto a flat-bed trailer, took the car to the Diplomatic Garage where it was locked & sealed in a large cage. We still had problems persuading the Bulgarian customs to stamp Tony’s visa. We refused to leave the office and Gill sat on a table crying which eventually did the trick. We have often wondered what on earth the British Embassy staff in Sofia thought they were there for. Thank goodness for the Americans. The new part from Greece did not work either and we had to request a part from Volskwagon in Germany so another long delay in getting the car mended!

Apart from skiing in the mountains, eating in the posh hotels and going to the cinema at the embassy we also had to work. Gill worked at the Institute of Cybernetic Construction in a huge building in the centre of Sofia. She was allocated an office which belonged to the Vice Minister for Construction with a huge desk and a sofa to sit on. The Vice Minister was almost never there except when he occasionally met with the ICL country manager Terry C.

The customer was very unhappy with ICL and their systems 4 computer. They were trying to run the Pert (Programme and Evaluation  Review Technique which is a project management tool based on critical path analysis)  package to control all their building projects including the new motorways which had just started being constructed. A lot of Gills work was sorting out problems with the PERT software which she had helped to write in the UK. The customer had reasons to be dissatisfied. System 4 was a relatively new computer based on the IBM 360 design and software production was well behind schedule. ICC had been promised a civil engineering package to manage problems like cut and fill in road design and this was being written by one man in London and was well over schedule.

The Bulgarians were adept at magnifying the software problems to get more free support and hardware out of ICL and the sales people from ICL did not have the detailed knowledge to refute what they said. This was the first thing that had to be sorted when we arrived. Gill implemented a complaints control system, where any error in software was logged by Gill and agreed with the ICC staff. The form was then used to record actions taken by ICL and the customer and the results of those actions.  ICC managers had to sign off when they agreed the problem had been satisfactorily solved. Gill came to the meetings with the ICL salesmen and was able to correct the statements by the Fox and the Bear when they said ‘none of your software works’.

We were reliant on the telex system to alert ICL UK about software faults and getting software patches to correct errors.  We always dreaded a new version of the operating system as they always led to teething problems.  (It is the same today with new versions of Window).  Gill was often cajoling ICL visitors to take core dumps back to the UK but by now Gill was adept at reading core dumps herself. The software did gradually improve and the customer stopped shouting at us over the conference table and banging their fists on the table. Not the most stress free jobs for Gill now aged 26. Working for ones husband did not always help as we would lie in bed at night and discuss COBOL problems or how to deal with one of our awkward customers.