(a tip: I am NOT the one with the handbag!)
Click on image to enlarge
Some years ago, a former colleague sent me this group photo of the Braunschweig branch of the Hamburg-Bremer Feuer-Versicherungs-Gesellschaft where I served my articled years.
The photo was taken in early 1963. I was a non-conformist already then as evidenced by my crossed legs. Or was it just a bursting bladder?
Having left school at the tender age of 14, I'd leapt large areas of formative experience, both social and intellectual, but my brashness helped to conceal the fact that I knew almost nothing about anything.
I had just completed my articled years with top marks, but even at 17 I was still younger by at least two years than anyone else who had only just started theirs. Call me the Mozart of the Insurance Industry!
P.S. I'm just months away from turning 78. By the time Mozart was 78 years old, he had been dead for 43 years. That I didn't suffer the same fate must have something to do with the fact that I left the insurance industry shortly after graduation, and the "Vaterland" two years later.
