Where to start? I've done quite a few things in my life since I left school in 1966 at age 15 to when I retired at 67, and a couple since then, so here goes. Despite the extrordinary length of this tome, this is an abridged version, as the longer one would fill at least one, or possibly more than one book!
1. Spent the first week and a half of my working life at the grand old age of 15 1/2 at a cardboard factory in Bristol that made cigarette packets. My job was stripping the excess cardboard from the sheets that had been through the cookie cutter. It was hard, back-breaking work, and my hands got cut to ribbons on the edges of the card. The pay was poor as well, all of £3, 6shillings after tax and national insurance deductions for a 40 hr week.
2. I left after a week and a half, and became a trainee engine machinist at a company called Hartcliffe Engineering, where I spent the next 5 1/2yrs, learning the trade of engine reconditioning. I did mainly cylinder boring and honing, and also cylinder head reconditioning, but didn't do much in the way of crank grinding. I left there in 1971 at 21, and by then I was what was called an 'improver', as I'd never been apprenticed or I'd have had my City and Guilds certificates to show the skills I'd acquired.
3. General factotum working for various companies for the next three years, doing all sorts from operating a radial drill, cutting the grass for Bristol Corporation, and working as a tele-sales and progress clerk, until I ended up making parts for Concorde at BAC Filton. When Concorde was cancelled in 1974, I left my home town of Bristol and moved across the country to the small city of Canterbury in Kent. While there I spent a year operating a milling machine for a company in Sittingbourne while I applied to become a mature student at the local university.
4. Full time History student at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent. However, while there I also worked in a local Chicago style pizzeria called Sweeney Todd's, doing shifts in waiting, bar and till work, and kitchen work of all kinds.
5. After being at uni for a year, I took a year out and worked as the kitchen manager at the pizza parlour, buying all the fresh fruit and veg each day, then with two people under me, getting all the preparation done each day, such as weighing out and rolling the dough balls, grating the cheese, whipping the cream, making up the tomato sauce, making the sangria mix, and just about anything else you can think of for running a fast food restaurant.
With the preparation done I'd then work as the pizza chef for the daytime shift. However, after a year of this I decided to go back to my studies and stopped managing the pizzeria kitchen, but did continue to do various waiting and cooking shifts till I finally graduated with my history degree in 1979, at age 28.
6. Moved to Maida Vale in central London and worked as a trainee work study officer at Hounslow Borough Council, following road repair gangs around the borough and working out how much bonus they'd earned each week. I soon realised that this was a dead man's shoes job, so I left after six months to do something completely different.
7. Spent the next 10 years, from April 1980 - July 1990, working as a self-employed motorcycle courier in and around the London area. It was a dirty and dangerous job, but quite well rewarded in the early years, and it allowed me and my missus to get a mortgage on our first home, a 2 bed flat in Barnet, North London. I could relate many stories of my time on the bikes, some of them good, but more of them not so good, but it would take up many pages.
So I won't tell you about the time I met the model Marie Helvin when she wore nothing but a towel, or about delivering a pair of false eyeballs from Camden to the Fluck and Law studios in the East End, where they were used in the Margaret Thatcher puppet in Spitting Image. There were many encounters I had with famous people, but most of them weren't very nice, and I was just a flunky as far as they were concerned, so not worth bothering with. As such I won't bother recounting my time with them either.
8. In 1989, after a nasty crash one May afternoon right outside the Madame Tussaud's waxworks on the Marylebone Road, I sustained permanent damage to my right wrist. A courier van decided to change lanes, and move into the lane I was already in. I hit the brakes as soon as I realised I was being queezed, but too late. The back of the van caught the front wheel of my bike and threw me over the handlebars. I landed awkwardly on both hands, but because the van didn't stop I just ignored the pain, got up and ran after it. Luckily for me, there was a set of traffic lights around 50 yards along, and they were red, so the van had to stop.
Grrrrr! The bloody driver wouldn't even give me his name, but I got the registration of his van, and I had several witnesses to the crash, as my bike ended up sideways across two lanes of traffic. Some people even got out of their cars and helped me move my bike to the kerb so that I could try to recover before very slowly and painfully driving on to the offices of the compamy I worked with at the time. I was off work for 2 months thanks to that, and when I went back to work I struggled because on a motorbike the right hand is used for both the throttle and the front brake, so having a painful wrist didn't help one bit.
9. A year after that crash I was still suffering from a painful right arm when I realised I couldn't sit down due to pain in my lower abdomen. It turned out that I had Acute Prostatitis. My prostate had managed to become infected and had swollen from the size of a walnut to that of a large grapefruit.
It stayed like that for the next year, while doctors tried various antibiotics to find one that would be effective against the infection. Eventually they found an effective antibiotic and my prostate shrank back to a more normal size, but I still have some BPH swelling, although it doesn't cause me any pain or discomfort.
10. So with me unable to ever sit on a bike again, in 1991 I was sent to a local centre for evaluation as to what I could do once my prostate had returned to something like normal size. While there I got to play with computers and discovered that I liked programming them.
11. As a result I spent the next 6 months learning how to program using Cobol, but then found no-one wanted a 41yr old man who had just learned how to use Cobol. So spent the next 4 years unemployed, but doing free work for various companies around the area, just to get some industry experience. During this time my mortgage interest backed up considerably and the building society we had our mortgage with were considering whether to evict us and sell the house we were now living in, in the town of Borehamwood, which is close to Barnet where we'd previously had our flat.
12. In desperation I went to a training company in Watford and asked to be retrained to program using Visual Basic instead of Cobol, and spent the next 6 months learning VB and Crystal Reports on a Windows system.
13. At the end of the course I talked my way into an unpaid 3 month internship at the BBC World Service, and while there I met a bloke who suggested that I should bypass rejections from those companies I'd already applied to for permanent work (over 200 at that time), and instead I should go contracting as a self-employed programmer.
14. So I followed his advice, put a slightly amended CV (I changed all the 'work experience' entries into 'contracts') into one particular agency that specialised in contracting, and waited to see what would happen. After only a few weeks I was called for an interview at Christie's the Auctioneers in Mayfair, and then spent the next 7 months working on a complete Windows based reporting system that I built using VB, Access and Crystal Reports. It was a complicated system and by the end it worked just how they needed it to, and when I left it was being implemented in the New York office.
15. For the next 7 years, from 1996, to the end of 2003, I worked as an IT contractor for various companies, and earned a lot of money in the process, but then the bottom fell out of the market and at the same time the gov't brought in a thing called 'IR35' which effectively killed the contracting industry.
16. So at the end of 2003 I was headhunted into a permanent job as an IT consultant working for a company called Comino that had their own proprietary database and front end for local authority and housing benefit customers, but which used Crystal Reports as it's reporting system. By this time I was quite an expert with Crystal Reports, and I spent the next 5yrs going all over the UK both creating custom reports for customers, and training their staff on how to use Crystal with the company database.
17. After 5yrs Comino was bought out by Civica, our department was shut down and I was made redundant. So I went back to contracting for a few months until I got another permanent role working for an insurance company called Jardine Lloyd Tompson in the City of London. I did all sorts there for the next 2yrs, but then they made me redundant in June of 2011, when I was 60yrs old.
18. At that time things were ramping up for the London Olympics, so I applied for a year long role as a reports developer. I got the job, and from June 2011 until September 2012, I worked for the IOC, and was based on the 37th floor of the CITI building in Canary Wharf. From there I had a fantastic view of the river and the O2 centre just on the other side of it.
This had been the Millenium Dome originally, but after the year 2000 celebrations were over, it was bought by O2 to use as an indoor sports and entertainment arena. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I enjoyed my time working on the Olympics and got to see places in London that I never would have if I hadn't been working for them. When the Olympics were over I was kept on after the other report developers were let go, so that I could do all the statistical reports for the IOC.
19. I was then unemployed for 8 months, then worked for a small company in Stevenage that specialised in cashmere clothes, so I now have some really comfy cashmere sweaters, and so does my wife. However, after 18 months there I was made redundant so I applied for a role as a database programmer at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, South West London.
20. I spent the next 4 years at St Mary's, and retired from there in 2018, at the grand old age of 67.
21. With nothing to do after retirement I bought myself a boring bar, and some honing equipment and set up a business as an engine reborer and honer. This worked well until 2020, when the world went mad, due to the Covid pandemic, and although I continued to work throughout 2020, in October 2021 I caught Covid and since then have never been quite the same. I lost a lot of strength and stamina, and found it very difficult to lift the heavy boring bar, so I gave up my boring business and now just sit around twiddling my thumbs as I wait for the Grim Reaper to come calling.
So that's my working life in a very large nut shell. I wish it was not so complicated or diverse in some ways, as you can't say I ever had a career, but it's been interesting (sometimes!) and I've a lot of memories look back on and keep me amused in my dotage.
