19 Dec “I can’t imagine not being on the road.”

Dan is one of our engineers and for him, travelling through the countryside of northern England is one of the big draws of the job.

“I can’t imagine working in an office,” he said.  “I’m based in County Durham, but I get to go all over the north east, across to Cumbria and the Lake District, and even into Scotland.  I see some beautiful places.”

Dan has been part of our team since 2022.  His days are varied – he could be carrying out a site survey in a community centre, doing maintenance checks on counter hearing loops in a supermarket or fitting a window intercom system in a GP surgery.   His favourite jobs are at National Trust sites.  Because our engineers often carry out work outside of opening hours, he can sometimes enjoy the historic properties in peace and quiet.  But sometimes, they are quite hard to reach.

“Dunstanburgh Castle is on a beautiful headland in Northumberland so it’s a bit difficult to get to,” he said.  “I had to park in the village and walk through the fields, past all the sheep, for about a mile and a half, carrying all my tools!  There’s no mobile signal so although fitting a hearing loop at the visitor centre till point wasn’t a long job, I couldn’t explain to the office why it had taken me so long!”

Dan takes immense pride in what he does and is pleased when his work is so clean and discreet, customers can barely tell he’s been there.  He says doing the best job possible can mean things take longer.

“When we carry out a site survey, we fully assess the space.  We bring a ladder as we might need to have a look at the ceiling, and we lay a test loop so we can check the signal strength.  I did this in a village hall in Yorkshire where the staff told us another contractor had just looked at the room and said a loop would probably be OK.  The staff were really impressed with how thorough we were and had confidence that the loop we installed would work well for their visitors.”

Dan says he’s ‘blessed’ with the locations he visits, and he gets a great deal of satisfaction knowing that he’s having a positive impact on venues and their users.  His job has added significance now that both his mother and mother-in-law use hearing aids.

“I love knowing that where I’m going could be a making a difference to them, and I can tell them where the hearing loops are.  Loops are the gold standard of assistive listening – there’s no passwords, no additional technology, and they make a massive difference.”