In 2013, I wrote and published as an ebook titled “On One Occasion…” Ivory Tower and Road Warrior Stories. The summary of the ebook read like this:

Summary (2013 Edition)

I’m a retired electronics consultant engineer. During my post-doctoral career, I spent ten years as a researcher and lecturer at Southampton University (the Ivory Tower) in the UK and a further twenty-eight years in industry, mostly as a one-man-band consultant roving the world (the Road Warrior). During this period, I helped develop new test strategies and technologies for electronic products and educated many designers and test engineers in what has become known as Design-For-Test. Along the way, I met many impressive people and experienced many unusual situations.

These are my stories: some funny, some sad, and some just interesting.

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In the book, you will read about drinking with vodka-drinking Vladivostokians in Varna, Bulgaria and with beer-drinking Australian naval personnel in Sydney, Australia,…tussles with company confidentiality in Shenzhen, China,…Clive and the can of Coca Cola at a Cirrus Computers’ board meeting in Fareham, UK,…Buxted chicken capers in Philadelphia,…the effects of adrenaline drain down after a day’s teaching,…tangles with a speed cop in Massachusetts – “What seems to be the problem, officer?” – and an Immigration officer in San Francisco who called me Bud,…getting the giggles at a conference in Písek, Czechoslovakia,…singing Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da in a karaoke bar in Seoul, South Korea,…challenged to write good English by the editor of an American journal,…culinary torture in Sofia, Bulgaria,…preventing one of my students from committing suicide at Southampton University,…an all-expenses-paid family trip to Disneyland, courtesy of Eta Kappa Nu,…being ripped off to the tune of $1,125 by a shop in Lahaina, Maui,…teaching design-for-test techniques while naked in Espoo, Finland,…eating ice cream in a park at 2 o’clock in the morning in Oslo, Norway,…presenting a technical paper to an audience of over 2,000 people (gulp!) in Baltimore, USA,…falling in love with a hotel receptionist in the Regal airport hotel, Hong Kong,…tasting the Swedish smelly herring, surströmming, in Stockholm,…competing with Mr Booze in Las Galletas, Tenerife,…beating the system and subsequently passing the Californian driving test in a borrowed car in San Jose,…refused entry into the USA at Vancouver airport which resulted in me becoming a 2.1kg superstar,…a deeply religious experience in the Gents toilet in Terminal 1 at London’s Heathrow airport,…being propositioned in a night club in Roppongi, Tokyo,… and many more such incidents.

Over the last few weeks, I have reformatted the book into a paperback version and added the following foreword:

Foreword (2020 Edition)

I published this book originally as an ebook in 2013. In September 2020, I decided to republish as a paperback. In so doing, I took the opportunity to tweak the grammar, add a few more photographs, insert an appendix and an index, and add a few updates in the form of just under thirty 2020-prefixed footnotes. But the stories remained unchanged; just as true today as they were in 2013.

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The 212-page paperback edition is now available on Amazon.co.uk, priced at £20/copy or Amazon.com, priced at $26.15/copy. If you are interested to obtain a copy, you can do so from me at the author’s price of £10.68 plus p&p. Contact me at ben@ben-bennetts.com Note: the 2013 ebook version is still available on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle Store, $3.66/£2.86. It’s not so beautiful as the printed edition however!

Footnote

You can read the Písek conference story in an extract from the book in an earlier post on this blog. Take a look at this story here.

(^_^)