It was 07:15 when he emerged from the greenhouse. Looking over the tennis-courts, Martin surveyed the scene that was the remnants of the great party the night before.The great marquee pulsed in tune to the autumn winds - like a white giant, sleeping off the effects of the beer-fumes that still eddied within it ! He had been unfortunate.. had he not been watching Alan B going for 'that last Jackpot' on the fruit-machine, he may have heard the announcement that his taxi had arrived. As it was, he had spent the night in his greenhouse, next to the piles of empty plant-pots and seed-trays. Even the radio wasn't working as the meter had been read and the supply terminated only the day before.
He looked up at the sky. The overcast, greyness suggested it was going to rain. No matter... there was still work to do. Shrugging off the ache of sleeping in the damp greenhouse and the carbon monxide poisoning from the heater, he set off down the bank towards the, now quiet, Social Club. There was no need for the braces now, after all, who was going to complain ! The echoes of the previous years thundered through his head as he approached the corner of the building. Images of Dudley and Andy sprang to mind quoting phrases that he had made famous. "One down would have been nice !"... Martin quivered at the thought. He *had* been a bit over-zealous with the malt whisky the night before and these taunts from the past were a reminder that had he played the right machine at the right time, Dudley would have been forced to think of some zany excuse as to where his beer-money had gone. He peered through the window of the clubhouse and was startled to see that there was movement. Roger must be early again, he thought ! The faint beat of music echoed out at him and in the corner, the manic lightshow generated by the pinball-machine cast eerie shadows on the ceiling. With a certain amount of hesitation, he crossed to the door and was surprised when it opened !
The heat slapped him across the face and brought back the nauseating feelings that the heater had inflicted on him in the greenhouse. He suddenly felt like he had the night before, the re-birth of the whisky flooding back into his veins. The room was packed. In the corner, the CR Roadshow was blasting out yet another re-mix of some '80s disco-classic. Martin was not sure what, but the throng of drunkards on the dance-floor, beer-bottles in-hand, certainly seemed to be in harmony with it - in some sort of way !! "Hold, Hold, Numbers, Numbers !!", somebody shouted. Martin winced, and glanced over to where the 'Make a Million' fruit machine stood against the wall. Andy and Dudley were clearly trying to finish off what Alan B had started the night before.
"It's going to Pay !!", Andy laughed over the rim of his glass, followed by one of his legendary "YYYyyyUUUPPP" burps. Dudley laughed and cadged a quick drag of Andy's cigarette, looking over his shoulder in the process should Nicki be passing. "Do you mind if I join in for a quid??", asked Martin, holding up his sole-surviving piece of coinage from the night before. "Wait 'till we've finished this last 75p Mart.!", Andy said, as Dudley got yet another go on the feature. With a flourish, he pressed the buttons while Andy scanned the reels. This was tense....it was going to be close. The bells were nestling on and near the winline...all that was needed was ..."YEEEAHHH!!", Dudley exclaimed suddenly, pressing the 'Take Feature' button. Martin could only watch the two lunatics dancing round the machine as the four reels gradually began to step round to reveal an ever increasing number of bells.... the room was full, the atmosphere was electric, the dance-music filled Martin's head and with a suddenness that defied belief, he was left standing inside the empty Social Club, the only company being the lingering beer and cigarette smells from the night before........
It was October 1987 and the endless series of accidents and incidents that I suffered on the milk-round were beginning to make me consider, maybe, looking for alternative employment. For a start, there was the incident when the milk-float had refused to start somewhere up Derehams Lane, in Loudwater, leaving me with 400 pints still to deliver at midday !! However, I think the incident that clinched my departure from the dairy was the injury of being brained by half a tree during the hurricane that Michael Fish and his cohorts on BBC Weather had not quite forseen. So, via a quick interview at Ace Appointments, I ended up being sent to Equity & Law. I had never approached the place before, and only knew of it through various adverts in the Wycombe Star.
Ruth Gregory and David Sawyer were the first people that I met. Ruth, because she made me sign the visitor's book, followed ten minutes later by David, who was the supervisor in charge of an area in Sales Admin. I had never set foot into a company's head office before and the trek through the grounds was quite an experience. At the somewhat revolutionary age of 20 and having come from a background of McDonalds and the milk-rounds, this was very very different. David seemed okay and led me up the stairs to the first floor to begin my first day at, what I regarded, as *proper* work. I was introduced to the rest of the department. To begin with, there was the 'Official', a silver-haired guy called Peter Birbeck, who had his own room. Following down from him was a lady called Jeanette Hopkin, who sat in the corner behind an ever-present cloud generated by the Picadilly cigarettes that were stacked up in the ashtray. Jeanette was a complete character who was very humerous and approachable but had been known to launch the occasional bottle of ink at unsuspecting members of staff.... especially if their name was Paul ! The first day also had a hilarious afternoon as one of the girls in the department (Sharon Brown ??) was leaving so everyone disappeared for 2-3 hours at lunchtime and she turned up slightly devoid of marbles with a glass in her hand from the Social Club ! The day following Sharon's departure, I learnt a bit more about the people that made up this very friendly department. To the left of Jeanette sat Sue, who sat next to Pete. These guys were the main heirarchy of the department. Then, there was Shaun Smith , who was in charge of the Agency section, Kev Youngman, who collected commission refunds and Paul Muscroft, who was the captain of Quality Control. Others, that I can remember, were Alyson East, Rich Mabey, Nick Tilley, Rich Cooper, Laurel Roberts, Cynthia Dean (who always drank lemon tea !) and Liam Burridge, who spent his lunchtimes concocting revolting combinations of food for me to eat...more about this later !!
In the late 80's, we were allowed to smoke at our desks and working with a leader who smoked numerous amounts of Picadillies per day, it certainly removed the inhibition of sparking up when things got a bit hectic ! Given the tedium of my first job at Equity & Law, I think I was entitled to smoke...... There were thousands of files held for the agencies that provided business to the company. My job was to sort these files from alphabetical order into an order based on their unique company ID-code. Not only that, but I had to input onto the computer those which had registered with an organisation called FIMBRA. This was relatively new thing to the life-assurance industry. Thanks to the Financial Services Act 1986, a lot of work was generated in classifying the brokers who were now authorised to sell business from those who weren't. Without worrying too much about the details, I carried on digging out the files, entering details onto the Unisys computer and then re-filing under the new agency-code idea. The Unisys was good fun. It required a username and password in order to access the data on its disks. I found this entriguing, even if David always used Tottenham players as his passwords. The software we used was something caled 'Multiplan' which I later found was the Micro$oft forerunner to Excel. After entering the details for around 2,500 agencies into this package, I learnt of a vacancy for a full-time staff member. Within a week, I was given a flexi-clock and was enrolled on a new-entrants; course, scheduled for December 1988.
I was enrolled onto QCC under the leadership of Paul. Apart from the continuation of file-sorting, I was given the new task of re-creating Paul's favourite fruit machine on the Unisys. This was a machine, called 'The Ritz' that was in the on-site Social Club. It was a bit of an ordeal to do at work under the watchful gaze of Jeanette but things were simplified by the sale of old Unisys equipment from the branches. I learnt that Equity & Law had been bought by the 'Compangnie du Midi', a big french insurance giant. As a result of this, several of the E&L offices were to close, (eg. Cheltenham, Farnham, Ipswich...... the list goes on but the memory doesn't). I managed to buy a Unisys B21 from Ipswich which was great apart from the fact that I had to lug the thing from Ipswich myself. I didn' t have a car at this stage so I carted it via train, taxi, train......laugh-a-minute- NOT!!...still, it made the program-writing a bit easier ! The B21 was a great hit at home !... it made a noise not dissimilar to a jet aircraft starting up and the keyboard sounded like Gene Kelly on taps everytime it was touched ! The key to all this though was that the floppy-disks that came with the B21 also included the master volume password (thanks Tony D !!) that was on every single system at Equity & Law.... after a couple of days' pondering about this, I confided this to Paul...... and it worked !!! Whether it was due to this security breach, or whether it was due my natural pain-in-the-ass inquisitiveness, I spent the rest of my days in Sales Admin writing BASIC on the Unisys....quite often causing the cluster to crash resulting in endless visits from a department called 'Micro Support'. Some of the code was serious but a lot of it was devoted to finding out what the Unisys could do..... games such as 'Nightmare Park' were developed. NPark was a favourite, having been ported over from memory from the Commodore PeT. It involved manouvering through a maze, avoiding the random hazards that waited on each square ! The saddest thing about it was that I lost the source-code - it could have been re-written but I couldn't be bothered at the time, it had taken too long to do in the first place. A few other areas were hassled by me constantly during my afronts on the Unisys and the ins-and-out of the BTOS operating system. I must apologise for the endless suffering experienced by Gill Hart's and Nigel Smith's areas (particularly Rob) with my interruptions for 'just that one more look' at a manual or the scrounge for a bit of extra software !!
March 1988, and after a week's paternity leave when Laura first made an appearance, I was stitched up into doing a Social Club competition called 'Endurance'. Loosely based on the Japanese television series of the same name, my practice at lunch under the tutorship of Liam B, must have paid off as I came 2nd-failing only to my lack of knowledge on Geography !
Anyway, I digress.....The department didn't just exist on Unisys. We had a collection of dumb terminals for talking to Tandem as well as one Honeywell terminal that was used for all the agency enquiries that had not yet been transferred over. This terminal was a laugh....it had big lit buttons on it (BUSY and TDS spring to mind) that lit for long periods of time as the hamsters in the basement ground their little wheels in order to process the requests ! Each terminal was connected by its own length of spaghetti and it was a daily occurrence for Dave Greenwell to appear to check the cabling when a machine went down. For those that remember Dave in those days, he had a moustache that made Sanchez and Rodriguez look European !
I was moved onto a new section called 'Statistics' in the Summer of 1988 under the watchful eye of Anne Friswell. I don't know where she came from but she was a good laugh. A couple of other faces appeared, noteably Kev Ward, Danny Pusey and Nick Allcock. Anne disappeared for a couple of weeks to get married and then returned.... but not for long.... leaving me an Opal Fruit as a leaving present, she disappeared up to Leeds with her husband, Julian. Incidentally, I still have that selfsame Opal-Fruit. It is a bit dented and crystallised but it is still a great momento from the department that started me off within Equity & Law !
February 1989 - After having passed the legendary ISD test in London, I was sent to Marketing, presumably on the grounds that Nigel Smith's area was on the lookout for additional nutters to join his team - either that or Gill Hart had put a veto on a move to Micro Support on the grounds of a comment that I had made months earlier regarding a character that starred in a well-known satirical television series ! The section that I joined was responsible for developing and supporting POS quotes systems both on PC and the Unisys - IQS and SOQS respectively (Intermediary and Sales Office....get it ???).
My new boss down in Marketing was a guy called Ralph Dadswell, who had the very annoying habit of ordering three drinks at once ("Three Mint-Chocolates please Andy" he would say, with his feet up on the desk). The first job that he gave me was to get the Unisys to calculate a formula on the Unisys that would display as many 'perfect numbers' that the machine could manage. I ran the program overnight and found that it had managed 15 of the things ! - remarkable !! To brighten the days up, Nigel would give a rendition of sound samples on his Apple Macintosh at regular intervals. I was informed that this was a frequent occurrence whever somebody new joined the section. Whether I did anything wrong or not, I don't know and was moved pretty quickly off the Unisys onto a Tandon 286 to learn IQS and the wonderful language of C !! At least it got me away from the mathematical conundrums that Ralph seemed to adore flinging at me. At the same time, Rob, the supplier of the functions that many of my BTOS games survived on, left. My new boss was now a guy called Steve Perkins. Working alongside, Brian Webber and Julie Quelch on the IQS system was a totally new experience. I had never seen MSDOS before, let alone told it what to do ! I had become very used to the comfortable BTOS 'Executive' interface on the Unisys. The first week on the PC was a 'play-around' week..... no work scheduled, just play !! Needlesstosay, the Norton Utilities, as Steve had predicted in his crib-notes, was heavily investigated on day 1 ! I should give a mention here to the others on the section that were there but I hadn't got to know too well. They were Duncan White, Nigel's right-hand man, Neil Gibson, a guru of Clipper and the SOQS system and Marcelle Thomas, a bright and bubbly young lady who spent her time grinning at people and generally being nice !
C was, and still very much is in its more recent versions, a brilliant language to use. Once the early steps of declaration, definition and execution of functions was put in the right order, then it was merely a matter of not of not going over-bounds on your strings ! - at least that was my main fault. There was no such thing as 'Bounds-Checker' in those days !! My first project within the IQS development team was to work on the Term Assurance program. This was purely a bit of 'maintenance programming' to reset limits as dictated by the product managers and the actuaries. The first 'real' design was a complete re-hash of the Utils program to brighten up the install and update routines. This took three months and a complete brain-implant on how to use the ELVIS screen-handling libraries of 'Panel-Plus'. I must apologise at this stage for some of the variable names that I used. During a fit of madness one day (or month!), several spurious names crept into the code, amongst these were the names of sweets and some of the Mr Men. As far as I know, unless it has been found, the name jelly_tot still survives ! The only problem was, you would have to do your changes to the code, set the compiler going and then go to lunch ! (maybe I exaggerate, but it was a lengthy process to build in those days of the 286 !). My first appraisal from Steve, and I quote, contained the order to 'Write code that doesn't produce warnings !!'
At the end of 1990, IQS started to become known as ELVIS and Steve and the team were moved over to a new Novell network. This was a leap for all of us as we no longer now had to pass floppies (of the 5.25") variety amongst ourselves. We still had floppies of all varieties to copy anyway. With a major update probably 3 or 4 times a year, for 2000 systems, the copying of the disks was a 2 week mission. There was one noteable weekend when Brian and I spent the day walking in circles round Techlab, changing disks as each of the terminals finished copying them. With ten terminals we could copy 600 disks an hour ! With a major update taking 30,000 to 40,000 disks, you could imagine the effort that went into them.... especially when a bug was discovered just a couple of days prior to release !!
We moved out of Marketing department in the Spring of 1991, into a big old room adjacent to the quad (where Joyce Marriott's area was at the Finale). I only had one criticism about this room and that was that my screen had a reflection of fountains dancing in it for two years ! We were now part of Sales department and the WM logons changed back to WN.
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A lot changed in a vary short time. We had amalgamated with the existing Sales IT support team and became a dual-purpose department of development and support. New responsibilities arrived in the shape of 'Making people aware of what was on offer'. We did roadshows where we would travel round the country with other life-offices and publicise ELVIS and also systems available via 'BTIS' and 'Inview'. These were done in pairs and I still hold Laura Bentham responsible to this day for me starting to smoke again due to her manouevres between the road-cones on the M6 !!!
The presentations that we did in Techlab were also a feature of the job. With the new technology of the Commodore Amiga, we ran them based on 'Police Squad' with some corny animations that would pale next to today's computer-generated output !! Noteable content includes, Dropping a 16-ton weight on Chris Brocksom, Calling Chris Brocksom a Smeghead, Pumping Duncan White full of Bullet-Holes, Stabbing Steve Perkins, animating Mark Kletta's teeth in time to the Red Dwarf theme-tune and making Nigel Smith spin round on the spot. I don't know how many Sales-office staff we bored stupid by our techie presentations over the couple of years that we were doing them, but they were damn good fun to put together !! For those who can still read DPaint4 .anim files, these can be supplied ! <g>
Back to ELVIS support. We had killed off SOQS and were now concentrating solely on the PC side and limited it to those with hard-disks. We still received requests from people who had the Amstrad PCW wordprocessors and those with the Amstrad 1512s and 1640s who we politely had to phone up and give them the bad news. We had a new member of the team, as Brian had left to join the BVCT on a full-time basis. His name was Jamie Taylor and he proved a hit within a week with his crash-and-burn attempt at trying to chat up one of the ladies from marketing department..... without success ! See the Jamie Taylor profile for more details on this maniac !
MICHAEL was another feature that entered the department on an official basis in May 1992. It sat in the corner of the room and became bigger and bigger. I won't elaborate too much on this system as it is covered in 'The Story of MICHAEL'
Anyway, back to ELVIS.....it still chugged on and now had the complete product-set within its quotationable capabilities. I don't know whether Joolze (Julie Q) had had enough of it or not but I got the job of looking after Multiplan alongside MICHAEL. Multiplan was (and still is at the current time) an okay product. There was one broker that we had though that dictated my work for two years, re-hashing various facilities, such as 'self-funding'. For business reasons, I cannot mention names but it was a daily conversation over the phone with one of the foursome of Meena, Mona, Veena and Janda.
The time was now November 1993, and the bombshell was dropped that seperated Sales Computing Services into its constituent bits. The hardcore development side of Steve, Joolze and Neil went along to ISD. Nigel. Laura, Amanda and Richard remained in Sales to maintain the business IT presence. I went along to Micro Support to worship the High Priestess and Jamie, after a good deal of wrangling joined in with Steve Foster's area on the proviso that he still maintained a certain degree of support for ELVIS. To be perfectly honest, this was not a move that I wanted at the time, but due to the involvement with MICHAEL and the Apple Macintosh network, I had to move otherwise both would have gone the proverbial 'T's Up' route !!
The last four years at AEL were spent working for Gill Hart's area and involved crossing into ISD from the relatively 'do as you like' IT style of the Sales and Marketing areas. the 'inaugural' meeting that I had with Gill and Clark was a bit of a shambles. I had been 'landed' on this area and due to the polarisation that had existed between Micro Support and Sales Computing Services, it was like going to a football match and standing at the wrong end. I think Gill was probably still seething over the time (5 years previosly) I had told her that she sounded like 'The Queen off Spitting Image'. The end result of this meeting was that I was in an area of two with Lee Cash with Dave Morton as our boss. Dave's job was a bit similar to that held by Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks) in the film 'Big'. All the new IT innovations would come onto the market and would be looked at by Dave, Lee and I. The only bad thing was that reams and reams of documentation had to be written to pass onto those paper-hungry managers that would eventually make the decisions on the basis of cost, etc.....
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We *did* get some fun jobs and some downright tedious ones! Because the department was primarily concerned with WOD, we got a job of testing various bits of software under differing RAM and swap-file conditions. Despite the work and the results, management opted for no swapfile and 8Mb RAM (Later changed after a year to 16Mb RAM and a swapfile !! <g>)
We also took on the role of 'WOD-Coordinators, responsible for the coordination of department-by-department installation, training and subsequent support. After doing Audit & Compliance and Personnel, we were faced, one weekend, with the mammoth task of Accounts dept. All the training had been done on the Friday. All that remained was to clear the desks of the old 386s and asynch. cabling and splat in the new WOD terminals. NOT THAT EASY.... !! if you can remember how much paper is scattered around accounts ! We had a major desk-clearing mission on our hands and it was lunchtime before we could even think about putting the new terminals onto the desktops. The meal that day was 'Herbies' delivery pizza ! The best pizza company that I have ever had the delight to order from. (HW 447900). The job was eventually finished around 18:00 with a quick pint in the soc. before hometime.
WOD continued to reach into most areas but I had moved on to work for the 2nd line helpdesk. Having been a sort of 'emergency' troubleshooter in my 'idle time' for the previous months, I had approached Gill and made the request. I was now working for Allan Horn and taking my day to day work from Steve Davies and co. downstairs on the main ISD Helpdesk. This was certainly a job that brings you into contact with a large number of people. I met more people in my first month working for Allan than in the previous 8 years at AEL. Certain names cropped up more often than others and in some circumstances, verbal haggling over who should/should not do the calls took place. A lot of the calls were filtered out by the helpdesk so by the time a call reached us, it was either another dodgy monitor or some software problem that was so unfeasibly complex that we would 'have to go away and think about it'. One of my favourites was a problem that Kev Ward had with some macros that he had written. After combing through his code for a few hours, we realised that it was the physical constraints of his machine that were at fault.... we were learning !!
1997 arrived and with the results of ROBO, we had an ISD meeting in the Official's Dining Room in May. "There will only be one helpdesk" John French had said. I remember the initial feeling of panic but as Allan and the rest of us were moved into room 220 along with Steve Davies and his crew, things began to take shape. Pete Ellingham, Steve and Allan had come up with a plan to rotate the various members of each team around so that 1st Line and 2nd Line work would be learnt by all. I did this for a month and then went away on holiday...coming back only to find that certain opposition to certain tasks had ground the iniatives into the ground..... or it could have been the merger, which was made official whilst I was away..... eitherway, it would have come to nothing whichever way we had gone. The merger polarised a lot of people from all over the country and whatever working environment we had built up was now rapidly disappearing into darkness.........
Martin gazed down at the solitary pound coin that lay in the palm of his hand and then looked up over the chairs and tables. The bar was empty and any traces of Dudley or Andy that were with him only seconds ago were now just a memory. The 'Make a Million' winked at him through it's hundred or so eyes and the bells, still nestling on the win-line were making a distant clamour. "At least I'll have the last go!!" Martin muttered as he reached over and dropped his remaining pound coin into the slot. The hold-lights came on. Martin couldn't believe it ! - nor could he get away quick enough from the demolition ball that suddenly blazed through the wall in front of him!
