For 41 years he has been the man who saves the hospital’s machinery, repairing the range of vital equipment that its doctors need to be able to do their work.
"Sometimes you can be absolutely flat out but at other times not a thing comes in, which makes it quiet but it’s also good because nothing out there is getting broken and everything is working as it should," Mr Foley (77) said.
"You never know what will come in day by day, but just as long as it gets fixed and goes out again that’s fine ... sometimes things are needed on a really tight time schedule, and that’s always when something else will arise as well."
Mr Foley retired yesterday, escaping from a windowless basement workshop which is piled high with a range of dials, hoses, tools and electrical equipment.
Trained at his father’s engineering firm, after 25 years Mr Foley fancied a change and — unsuccessfully — applied for an engineering job with the hospital.
A year later, a similar role came up and Mr Foley was successful in landing a dream job for someone who loves machines.
"It’s about how they work, what makes them not work, and what makes them work again."
A breadth of knowledge was essential when Mr Foley started; on day one he was handed a ventilator and an instruction manual and asked to fix it.
"First of all, you had to find out what it was supposed to do, then find what it was not doing; there was a lot of learning on the job."
Little has changed since then.
"Often things come down and they don’t say what’s wrong with it, it just comes in — it’s like someone going to ED with a sticker on them saying ‘sick’," Mr Foley said.
When he began his new career, the workshop was in the children’s hospital basement. He later moved to the Fraser Building before ending up in the ward block basement.
"Here is more central, and it’s easier to get to places when they ask us to come up and give them a hand," he said.
"I keep in touch with a lot of biomeds in the States and they all say that they get put in the dungeon, but when the hospital gets flooded the first place that gets flooded is the basement, and of course the people who they want to fix stuff that is not working can’t get down there to get their gear out."
Mr Foley will not hang up his tools in retirement; a range of projects are waiting in the garage he said.
"It’s been interesting; it gets to you, doing something with a thing that doesn’t work, and fixing it so someone can go back to using it.
"That makes me happy."
