“I was 16 and even though I liked the boarding school, I didn’t really know what to do when I had graduated. By coincidence my father worked at a farm next to Risø, he knew some people here, and he arranged for me to become apprentice here at the Central Workshop," says Steen Bang.
The young Steen had a knack for mechanics and found Risø a new and exciting world and a great place to work.
"It has been in many ways a unique workplace where people work interdisciplinary across fields of expertise, and with everyone having freedom to organize their work as we see fit as long as it is done."
Research technician Steen Bang, now retiring from DTU Energy Conversion after 50 years of employment
“The work was challenging in a good way, enabling you to develop and become proficient," says Steen, who turned out to be such a great technician that the laboratory chief of the Physics Department at Risø wouldn’t let him go.
"During my apprenticeship I was always told, that it was a good thing to get out and get some experience in the private sector, but I had only been gone to a private company outside Risø for nine weeks, before the Department of Physics at Risø asked me to come back and work for them. I said yes", says Steen Bang.
He has been part of the engineer corps at Risø ever since, first as a laboratory mechanic, later as a research technician at Risø, then Risø DTU and now DTU Energy Conversion.
At 9 May 2014 he celebrated his 50th anniversary at DTU Energy Conversion.
A unique workplace
"It has been in many ways a unique workplace where people work interdisciplinary across fields of expertise, and with everyone having freedom to organize their work as we see fit as long as it is done."
For five decades Steen enjoyed working at Risø. The couple of years he was assigned the team building and maintaining the neutron spectrometers of the research reactor DR3, but in 1977 he switched to help research into X-ray. The later was done in two laboratories. One located in the basement of Risø, another in Hamburg.
"Back then we occasionally had to load all equipment into a truck and transport it all the way to Hamburg to continue the research. A curious way to do it, but it worked", says Steen, who has always had a very high job satisfaction.
"I've always had very good colleagues who have managed to make it a fun place to go to work, and the work itself has been professionally challenging and flexible enough to allow for a family life."
Steen only remembers one occasion, where his wife through 46 years Bente was very unhappy with his work routines. That was in the aftermath of one of his approx. 100 work related trips to Hamburg.
This particular day Steen and his colleague Jens had just arrived back to Roskilde, exhausted from a full four day around the clock-project at the synchrotron Desy in Hamburg.
“When away on a project, we work 13-14 hours a day, so I was quite exhausted when I got home from Hamburg around 7 pm that day. But I only just managed to get something to eat and then go to sleep at 10 pm, when the phone rang half an hour later. It was the project manager, urging me to catch the night train bound for Hamburg an hour later, as they had a serious problem and urgently needed my help.”
Steen was quite aware that beamtime was costly, then as now, so he stood up and left to do his job and fix the problem, leaving a very dissatisfied wife behind.
”Bente was not happy”, he recalls and smile at the memory.
Smiling, as the marriage stood its test and in four years he and Bente can celebrate a golden anniversary together with their two children and four grandchildren.
It has been good to be here
Fortunately the incident was solitary, even though Steen also provided technical assistance at both exciting and very challenging projects in Grenoble, Hamburg and at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, as his work place always gave him enough room for the family life to thrive.
This is why Steen kept working at Risø, Risø DTU and DTU Energy Conversion for five decades.
”If I am to point out three highlights through the years, the first one has to be the transition from apprentice to real worker. It was a great thing and a brand new experience for me. The second part has to be moving from neutrons to X-rays. And the third was when Risø closed down the DR3 reactor and we had to move two of the instruments to Switzerland. It was a Herculean task with lots of hard work and very tight deadlines, but we managed to do it!"
Steen stays silent for a while, contemplating his many years at Risø. It has been 50 good years that Steen enjoyed so much, that he postponed the retirement to the last minute. But the time has come and now he is ready to leave even if he’ll miss his colleagues. And those he has agreed to meet with two or three times a year
“Yea, it has been good to be here”, says Steen Bang that holds his farewell reception on Thursday 26 June.