This is my work record over the years. Whether I should at an early stage have dispensed with all this and become an pure artist and thinker, I still seriously wonder about. I probably should have.
Looking at some of my career activities, I think, cor, did I achieve all that in such a short space of time? But achievement in that sense is entirely false sentiment. My reason for doing what I do was simple hedonism, being among people and expressing myself, to show them how to live for art.
But anyway it’s all transient. The work that I did has gone by, it has been superseded, whereas my travels and writing and drawings, they still have value. Actions die but the memory lingers on.
I want to try and get down on record all the jobs that I did, for I find that as time goes by I am tending to forget their sequence and detail, and that would be a pity.
This CV starts from oldest first, as I’m not planning to apply for any jobs.
1996 – 1996
Programmer
Oracle Poland
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Monitoring system for sales management. A nice system that I wrote in Excel VBA. Bally recommended its production to Oracle and they paid for it in Swiss francs, I did it all from home and din’t go to Poland, worse luck. Wonder what’s happened to it. Probably it has disappeared into the mists of history. Pity.
August 1996 – June 2000
Contract Programmer
United Utilities
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I wrote a number of GUI systems at UU, in VB, Excel, Access, Win API, MAPI, OLE, COM and all that:
1. Pumping Optimisation. A model of optimum times to operate large pumps when electricity costs are variable by the half hour and there are constraints on pumped volumes.
2. Life Cycle Costing for Plant and Equipment. Estimates the cost of investment in plant and machinery over the life of asset. Interacting windows show context-sensitive what-ifs.
3. Asset Criticality Assessment. Calculates risk of equipment failure. Data collected from field engineers assessing equipment safety, environmental sensitivity, criticality to a process, maintainability, fitness for purpose, etc. Results analysed against trends of Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF), Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), and Average Downtime (ADT), and a score is produced showing risk matched against cost of replacement.
4. Reliability Centred Maintenance. System to analyse engineers’ worksheets by equipment type or process type to show MTBF, MTTR and ADT by criteria including failure type, fault identification, cost of materials, etc.
5. COSHH. Used by COSHH assessors at multiple locations, produces an assessment sheet for every substance on site that could be hazardous to health. Electronic exchange of data with central repository. On-screen forms and reports deal with the exceptionally stretchy nature of COSHH data.
6. Staff Training Programmes. Used by training co-ordinators in North West Water and Norweb to record planned training programmes for employees. A heavily-used system in multiple locations. Incorporates security checks on buggy Microsoft Jet databases. A sub-system prints photo-cards for employees who have access to restricted areas. 7. Project Analysis. A system to record and analyse projects undertaken by design engineers. Performance is analysed against targets and against customer satisfaction returns. Includes a timesheet data entry module that feeds project costs.
2000 – 2001
Systems Designer
Ampsol
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My leaving of United Utilities (see 1996-2000) coincided with the retirement and redundancy of some long-standing UU engineering staff, and we set up a company to develop further as a web-based application, those engineering analysis techniques that we had been honing. I did the programming: HTML, DHTML, Javascript, Java Applets, mySQL, CGI/PERL for active server pages. My friend and critical relative Mick James says he thought we’d make a shitload of money out of that application, so impressive was it for its time.
But we made the mistake of not having anyone in overall charge – no chief exec, and it all fell apart somewhat messily, though they were all lovely people and I’m in contact with some of them still.
Mar 2003 – Mar 2005
Developer of Educational Publications and Training on Drug Education Project
Home Office
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We did the educational publications and teacher-training elements of the UK Government Home Office drug education project called Blueprint. This was a pilot project to develop procedures for informing the future of drug education in schools in England. There has been some criticism of this project, resulting in its appearance in Private Eye and in Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column in The Guardian newspaper. Through all of this, we have come up smelling of roses. The project was evaluated by a team of researchers from a number of UK universities and in all of this evaluation, the work that we contributed was reported as being well-received and produced to a high standard. Especially considering the bad press, we feel very proud of the way that we maintained our professional integrity throughout the saga.
September 2005 – October 2005
Programmer
Wright Associates UK
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A system for Routes to Market.
Routes to Market was I think developed by Ogivie of New York in conjunction with IBM. Wright Associates were doing a joint bid with another company, whose name has gone from my memory, to BT in the UK on a RTM system; they were in the process of preparing a presentation. Ray Wright asked me if I could develop an interactive presentation on RTM, in Excel embedded in PowerPoint. Yes of course I can, except that RTM is horrendously complicated once you start digging into it, and every stone turned led to another four still to turn.
These big American companies maybe don’t know the old rule of Keep it Simple, Stupid, though for me to be saying that must be quite something.
I don’t know whether this presentation ever took place, I think it might not have. The system certainly tested my skills with Microsoft’s flaky software. Ray is even older than I am and he like me has seen management theories come and go. We’ve seen places and been things. No worries.
2002 – Present
Director
Me-and-Us
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Me-and-Us is a specialist publishing company, producing practical materials for teachers and health professionals on Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE). It is one of the very few companies to specialise in PSHE materials for teachers of people with learning disabilities.
1 comments:
Most entertaining Dave, love it! One job a year mostly. Have to read the details. There's some jobs here that I never even knew you had. You've inspired me to do something similar. Roj
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