I spent a major part of my working life with British Telecom. I was stationed at Churchill Square Brighton until my retirement. I enjoyed work and it never became bored. In fact there was never the opportunity to become bored. It was normal practice to change jobs at roughly three-year intervals. One was usually thrown in at that deep end and rarely spent more than a week with the person who had previously done the job.

The office in Churchill square was a regional office responsible for six area offices. As a result the jobs that you were asked to undertake usually involved either administration or advisory work. It  gave one the opportunity to travel to either area offices or telephone exchanges.

I was therefore not surprised, for instance, to lead a team of auditors, investigating the work of the computer billing staff in the area offices or  to design and plan the building of nuclear fall-out shelters beneath the telephone exchanges. Estate management and transport fleet administration also fell to my lot.

Thus it was a that at the time of my retirement I held the title of computer systems manager. Before being asked to undertake this job I had bought and used Sinclair computers. My earlier experience as regional computer billing liaison officer provided a little knowledge of the very large computers (mainframes) and this job involved working with a smaller one referred to as a mini.