Bertram is a shop teacher and utterly unaware of how far down the list of attractive occupations his daily work is rated. Divorce Lawyers, traffic cops and women’s shoe salesmen, are the only people who are lower on the scale than he. Despite this, Bertram has an ego the size of a medium-sized state in Central America and considers himself as a world class womanizer, even though he is completely unable to read women’s body language and facial expressions. That and spending the day trying to get reluctant students to understand how simple hand tools affect wood is not the best starting point for an exercise in amorous relations with members of the opposite sex, something Bertram’s attempts in just such relations show every sign of.
The fact that Bertram live and breath football does not exactly make him particularly attractive in women’s eyes. Stopping for pizza, chips, and beer and then spend an evening watching TV together with a man who behaves like an idiot every time some sod on the court does either something this man appreciate or quite the opposite are few women’s idea of a successful evening. The fact that Bertram constantly try and convince Laura that she should get hold of a huge big screen so he can see important games on it at Moxie’s has not made him especially popular there either.
But something good can be said of Bertram after all. He is a good teacher, very good indeed. And as with most shop teachers the do-it-yourself philosophy from the forties and fifties is still very much alive in the depths of Bertram’s soul. If one needed something fixed or build he was the man to see.
Retrorambling 
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