Frank is the one with the target on his back; in the background to his right is a Canadian whom I met again at the Blues Point Hotel in 1985 which means he never made it back to Saskatchewan; to Frank's left is infamous Neil Jackson, probably the only person who ever got fired from the project, who's right then telling everyone else what he thinks of them.
I promised to tell you all about "doing a Joslin" which entered the English vocabulary sometime in 1971 when I lived and worked on the then biggest construction project in the world, the huge Bougainville Copper Project, on tropical and always rain-soaked Bougainville Island in the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea.
Our small team of intrepid auditors and cost engineers were exposed daily to the risk of impaling ourselves on lethally sharpened pencils while overeating on strawberry shortbread biscuits as we tried to keep the world's largest construction project within its $300-million budget.
I was senior auditor in charge of several large contracts on the Bougainville Copper Project, such as the construction by Hornibrook of the port facilities at Loloho, World Services' power house construction, the Arawa Township built by Morobe-ANG, Brambles-Kennellys' haulage services, and the concrete production at Pioneer Concrete's batch plant.
Unlike some who found this work dull and repetitive and in the process became dull and repetitive themselves, I treated it as a game of chess. The contracts spelt out the rules but the moves were never the same. Written by engineers who knew everything about building a ship loader or power house but little about how this might translate into billable dollars and cents, it left the contractors' accountants pitted against the auditors to interpret contractual clauses in often unexpected ways.
Not all members of the audit team were as forensic in their work or as delighted with working ten hours a day six days a week. Some started counting the days to the end of their twelve-month contract by running up adding-machine strip lists from 365 days down to zero which they pasted to their office walls, crossing off one number each morning. Needless to say, not many survived that kind of mental torture.
Others simply went through the motion by 'sitting' on their contract claims just long enough to make it appear as if they had done all the checking before signing them off for payment with a boozey florish. One past master of this "trick" was a giant of man but on quite spindly legs who was from Iceland and therefore went by the obvious name of "Eskimo". He left long before the others and word filtered back that he had gone back to Iceland and killed himself in a car accident, presumably still as drunk as he had been every day on the island.
Enter Frank Joslin, the latest and "star" addition to the team on account of being the only chartered accountant, but it soon became apparent that Frank was more interested in chartered planes than in chartered accounting because when he was given the monthly "perk" of hand-carrying a batch of computer punch cards to Bechtel's Melbourne office, he was gone and never seen again.
His dirty deed became known as "doing a Joslin" and was much talked about but never copied. I haven't checked the 'Gum Leaf Dictionary' aka Macquarie Dictionary but wouldn't be surprised if the phrase weren't in common usage still today. Take a bow, Frank (but watch your back!)
