Devoted Doug gives firm 32 years' service

Three decades with a company is good going but nothing remarkable - unless we are talking about retiring tetraplegic Doug Sands.
Whangarei firm Gilmore Brown is honouring  Mr Sands at a dinner tonight to mark his retirement from the firm after 32 years' clerical work there.
He is thought to be New Zealand's longest-living tetraplegic. He can certainly claim to have had the longest tetraplegic working career, thanks to his "writing gadget". This enables him to elbow-activate the tiny bit of flexibility he has in his right fore-finger. He also attributes being able to hold down a job to "good genes". "If I had had conditions like, say, asthma or diabetes I would have been dead years ago," he says.
And he's deeply thankful to Gilmore Brown for giving him work and years of support and encouragement.
Doug Sands' active life was destroyed in an instant in a car accident when he was 21. At the time he was a Northland representative rugby player. He had taken a summer off to focus on improving his game.
He loved the outdoors and he loved sport. When the accident happened he had been on his way to  see Peter Snell and other greats of the New Zealand running scene compete in Auckland.
A couple of days after the accident he received a letter to say he had passed all his exams in mechanical engineering. Needless to say, someone else had to open the letter for him.
He admits it was a traumatic time. "Things were archaic compared to the services that are available today," he says.
The full realisation came slowly, because he had believed for about a year he might have a chance of improving. "I was a country person with that sort of optimistic, I-can-do-this sort of attitude, and you rarely saw tetraplegics in those days."
Then he realised that tetraplegia was going to be his lot in life and that he had to figure out a way to spend that life. He found the answer in something he had always been interested in - working with numbers.
He got into selling, then took up accounting and tax work, learning on the job while working for a sign-writer, a clothing manufacturer and then at Gilmore Brown. 
 
Mr Sands has travelled overseas and loves going fishing, using a device similar to his writing gadget. He has many rugby friends and belongs to the Vikings Club for former players and people who have served rugby.