The Job

I suppose I was lucky: the office information revolution had arrived, and I was ahead of the curve in 1989.
When I arrived the only computers were on the secretaries desks, and there actually were secretaries.

I was given quite literally carte blanche to move the 1980s IT systems in to the future.
Working for the IT Director, an old school MRP expert, I brought the existing CP/M Xionics RS-422 green screen secretarial word processing system up to speed, writing printer drivers for the new laser printers that were replacing the enormous A3 daisywheel printers, so loud they had acoustic covers, ensuring the tape backups actually worked, added new terminals and cabling, resolved huge issues with the surprisingly advanced Stock Exchange Regulatory News Service interface that used a hard-wired 300 baud modem, resolved issues with the telex interface and started the process of migration to a PC-based system via an embedded Xionics card in my office PC.
By default I became the Telecomms Manager so had to learn to drive the 10 year old phone system via its teleprinter interface. I actually became pretty good at moves and changes, via the hardwired phone extensions and trunk lines. 

It was all good training and my office sometimes smelt of solder as I wired up printer and modem leads and exerimented with the first MS Mail internal e-mail system, using modems to send e-mail from my computer to my Director's computer.

My first big break came when the Treasurer asked if it would be possible to take control of all the company's bank accounts via modem and move the Capital on to the overnight "Bed and Breakfast" market. Once established with a computer and modem, as interest rates spiked he proceded to make so much money in Interest an extraordinary Board Meeting was called where he had to explain himself.
After that the management attitude changed from "you're a whizzkid who never tells anyone what you're doing" to "what can you do for my department?"

I then computerised the Pensions department by replacing the handwritten pension fund summary "spreadsheets" with checksums calculated using a pocket calculator, meaning the Pension Fund Manager now spent 1 day of each month acquirinbg the figures and the rest of the month analysing them instead of the other way round and the company had to restate its pensions statements for the last 10 years as they all turned out be wrong.
The pension fund promptly went in to surplus and clamours for help from department heads became louder.

Much use was made of Lotus 1-2-3 (and for several years the entire FTSE 100 company was run on a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet) but as PCs became more capable and MS Windows arrived, we were asked for MS Excel and MS Word, so took the bold decision (at the time) to re-cable the building, remove the CP/M system and add networked PCs, file servers and a dial-up Internet connection bank. Hours spent troubleshooting SCSI server drive connections, Microsoft's Windows NT Server and tape backups resulted in a reliable and fast TCP/IP network.
As we added more stations the Ethernet hubs overloaded and had to be replaced by switches, we replaced the troublesome dial-up rack with a leased line and added e-mail, application and database servers and a new, digital Ericsson telephone system.

Ericsson were at pains to prevent us from making changes to the system: their revenue stream was based upon engineers visiting and charging high prices for small changes. They deliberately made the supplied manuals obscure but working through them I was able to assemble a proper users guide to moves and changes I printed out and stuck on the wall by the interface console. One Ericsson engineer liked what he saw and asked for a copy, which I was happy to provide.
It clearly became a standard document for them as a subsequent engineer tore my copy off the wall, saying "you shouldn't have that, it's an internal Ericsson document". I didn't bother to tell him I had written it......

Younger members of staff were more computer-literate and simply expected PCs and powerful software on joining, so by the Millennium all the desks had computers, secretary numbers had dwindled to just PA's for the Main Board members and internal politics in the company led me to fall foul of a couple of influential newcomers, so I took a sideways step to a Group IT management position.

Two years of international travel, fun projects and interesting characters resulted in a post 9/11 management shake-up and I took voluntary redundancy on surprisingly good terms, to start my own company. A big leap, but I concluded in the end that I could manage peoples' IT better than most, so advertised as an independent IT Manager.
Two years of reasonable projects and contracts later I met up with a like-minded soul and we merged our experience to form a proper company in a proper office with a nice young lady who answered the phones for us. I remember sitting around that phone on the first day wondering if it would ever ring.
The short story is that it did ring, and in 6 years we expanded to 13 people turning over £1m a year. That speed of expansion brings its own stresses and in the end we fell out over attitudes to customers and our target market, we agreed to go our own separate ways and despite a ghastly bout of entirely unnecessary legal threats both companies emerged stronger.
I took the attitude that paying office rent was a complete waste of the company's profits so built a home office and what became a team of 4 worked from there. For 14 years Paddock IT Solutions went from strength to strength and in 2021 we retired.
IT was no longer The Job, and I could actually start enjoying playing with computers again.