Posts Tagged ‘career’
The Best Endevours Can Be Superceded By Decisions Outside The Scope Of Anyone And It May Not Matter How Hard You Work In The End
While I had been working at Dorking I managed to get the bug that gave me the desire to Work From Home when I was ill for a few days and had taken home what was a primitive laptop, and while I was bored I started to write a story that I had had the idea for for ages. I really enjoyed it and as it turned out I now really do Work From Home having done a number of Online Jobs having had my own Internet Business and then another one. It was a stroke of luck but quite far removed from the second major project I’d been on which was a turning point.
It wasn’t possible at that time (it was 1995) to work for an Internet Business or have any kind of Online Jobs as those that did exist were mostly based in and around Palo Alto in California, and Dudley in the Black Country is very far removed from there, for that is where I found myself.
The second project was my first as an independent contractor. It was being managed of a local electricity utility. The aimof the endeavour was to supply new domestic customer service systems to the electricity utility which had a necessity to replace existing systems which had been in place for many years.
The project had already been running for about a year when I arrived, and was almost exclusively staffed by freelancers on the development side whereas the designers and analysts mostly were employed by either IBM or the client company. It worked well, the atmosphere was enthusiastic, dynamic and professional but with a fun undercurrent.
It was also fairly multi cultural as freelancers from Australia and the United States were with us as well as staff from an IBM partner company from Poona in India. For the Brits, we came from all over Britain and it made for lively talk as people mocked each other depending on regional or national stereotyping. If an emergency vehicle went by with its sirens sounding, someone would reassure any Australians who’s convict DNA might have been rattled.
Socially it was very active. As freelancers we were very well paid and as such we had many opportunities for entertaining ourselves, though a normal rule was that on Thursday nights we would go out in a big group to an area called The Waterfront which was the entertainment area of the Merry Hill development, a picturesque area of bars and restaurants situated along the canal-side.
I began for the first 15 months or so stopping at a hotel next door to the office building, but after that I moved into a house that was leased by a group of fellow colleagues which in a bizarre twist of fate, in later years I was to buy. We had great fun there as a group having a large Scalextric track in the lounge and video games, but we also all had computers and were spending more and more time on the internet, which by this point was starting to grow into a useful tool as opposed to a fun toy.
The project ended when the Labour government was elected and Gordon Brown imposed windfall taxes on the electricity boards. Ours was punished so harshly that the money had to come out of the investment budget which resulted in our project becoming too expensive and was therefore shut down.
So the internet was growing and eventually an Internet Business was starting to appear although it hadn’t so far been worked out how to make money from it, for instance there were very few shopping sites around, but the evolution was well underway and the stock market was starting to bubble as speculators looked to get into the Internet Business. It wouldn’t be long before it became widely open to more people to get on and build it as a business tool.