Following a brief stint at the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham, I started with Havering's Housing Department as a junior programmer working on their housing system, CORA, which originally ran on PDP-11 computers but was later ported to Unix, which was where I got my first training in Unix shell-scripting and system administration. As it was a small section, I was also involved in networking and in PC support as well as, to a lesser extent, Novell server support. I was made redundant in 2001 but briefly returned as a contractor to support the decommissioning of one of the systems I was involved with in 2002.

Over the next few years, I worked in a number of places, including a hardware audit at Sky Television in their bases in Osterley, Livingston and Dunfermline and their installation bases around the country, and later as a PC installer for Britvic, working around East London at first, but later in Chelmsford and, briefly, Norwich.

I have been part of the Chelmsford IT section since the end of 2004. Skills I have picked up in previous jobs have been put to use here though I have also trained in other skills during this time and have managed to pick up a couple of certificates, including ITIL and Microsoft Certified Professional certificates. Apart from a lot of operations involvement including various backup technologies, I have taken the opportunity to refresh my Unix skills and have taken up an active interest in Linux to the extent that I was involved in the implementation of a Nagios based system over the last five years. I finished at Chelmsford at the start of December 2014, again due to redundancy, following which I started with GENEU, a company specialising in cosmetic biotech, then covered a service desk role for a customer of the tech supplier Acuutech.

I have also been involved with the electoral process as a canvasser and as a poll worker during elections. My activities over the years at Arena Essex have mostly been to do with reporting and programme work, though I also do a little photography.