Harri Puputti – 47 happy years at Oilon

“There was a job ad in Etelä-​Suomen Sanomat [a local news­pa­per]. Oilon was looking for two elec­tri­cians. I was invited to a job inter­view at Oilon the next Wed­nes­day. Back then, I had no idea what Oilon was. This was my second job, and I started working for Oilon on Septem­ber 5, 1973. I was young at the time, only 17 years old. When I entered through the gates, there was no way to know that I would spend 47 happy years with Oilon,” Harri Puputti says.

Early on, Harri’s work involved installing elec­trical com­pon­ents in burners, mostly in the Junior range. For a number of years, he worked at the assembly depart­ment putting burners together, until equip­ment testing became the primary focus of his job. The devel­op­ment of testing sta­tions and test pro­ced­ures was con­tinu­ous work, and con­tin­ued until 2000. Active co-​operation with Mech­an­ical Engin­eer­ing, Elec­trical Engin­eer­ing, and Doc­u­ment­a­tion would con­tinue all the way to the end of Harri’s career.

“In those times, you learned by doing. What made the work inter­est­ing was that no two days were the same. My working days were really varied and chal­len­ging,” Puputti remem­bers. Gradu­ally, Puputti’s work tasks started to change, as he voiced his desire to try out other jobs. From 2002 onwards, he was part of the devel­op­ment effort that helped Oilon estab­lish a new factory in China. In China, Puputti provided work ori­ent­a­tion.

“I visited China at least 25 times, some­times several times a year. The visits lasted for several weeks. I spent half of my work­time in China, and the rest of my time was split between devel­op­ment work and work ori­ent­a­tion at the Lahti factory,” Puputti says.

“It was my first flight when I first traveled to China on busi­ness. I think the flight route took me from Hel­sinki to Frank­furt in Germany and from there, to Beijing. It lasted at least eight hours. The flight from Beijing to Shang­hai took two hours. The last leg of the trip was with a car from Shang­hai to Wuxi, and it lasted three hours. Soon after that, they opened a direct flight route from Finland to Shang­hai, which made it easier to travel,” Puputti says.

“My lan­guage skills really helped me when working abroad. In China, every­one spoke extremely simple English, which I could easily follow,” Puputti con­tin­ues.

When remin­is­cing his time in China, Puputti says that one of the things he noticed was how clean the country was. In the early days, there were huge amounts of bicycles every­where. The last times Puputti visited China, the bicycles had been replaced by elec­tric cars and elec­tric mopeds. In two decades, air quality had also improved massively.

“Oilon has a good stand­ing in China. We had no prob­lems with permits or getting things up and running – after all, Oilon is engaged in respons­ible and ground­break­ing work towards climate con­ser­va­tion,” Puputti con­tin­ues.

“Now that I’ve retired, I could still visit China. I would go visit my old work­places and meet my old buddies. If I had stayed with Oilon, I would’ve prob­ably traveled to the United States as well, but this exper­i­ence eluded me. That’s a job for my suc­cessors,” Puputti says, smiling.

“Now that I’m retired, I can focus on the hobbies for which I didn’t have time during my career.” Puputti has great plans for home main­ten­ance, playing music, taking the summer theater stage, trav­el­ing, and learn­ing lan­guages.

For this story, Harri visited Oilon. When he arrived, he was happy and laugh­ing, and many former col­leagues stopped by to exchange a few words with him. After the tour, Harri left happily to con­tinue his retire­ment and the inter­est­ing pro­jects waiting at home.