I started work with John Lewis in 1984. If my maths is correct I would have been 17. I became a Waitrose 'weekender', working 5.30pm until 8pm on Friday nights, and something like 8.30am to 6pm on a Saturday. At that point the only other gainful employment I'd had was a paper round. Not the 'get up at the crack of dawn and deliver 50 papers' sort of thing. The free paper sort of thing. I would come to dread the unmistakable sound of 550 copies of the local paper hitting my parents doorstep on a Thursday afternoon, knowing that I had to get them all delivered by Saturday morning. I got £8.50 for those 550 papers (extra if there were leaflets) and as I'd just started driving lessons, which cost me £7.50 a week, I was left with one whole pound to see me through the week. Rockefeller I was not.
So it was that I ended up being interviewed by Mr Donovan of Waitrose one Friday afternoon. It could just as easily been WH Smith - I applied to them, but they never wrote back.
I enjoyed my time at Waitrose, but after about three years I spotted an opportunity to work in the Partnership's IT department in central London. Another interview and suddenly I'm commuting to work rather than walking.
And that was 33 years ago. In that time I became a dyed-in-the-wool Partnership advocate and when the first decade had rolled by, I assumed that I'd be there for life. Life, however, had other ideas...
A couple of years ago, our newly appointed Director of all things IT gathered the 1000 or so Partners that made up the IT function and told us that he was going to find a cheaper way of doing our jobs. Fast forward to last week, and I find myself having been outsourced to an IT 3rd party who are in the process of making me redundant as my job is now being carried out somewhere in India. I'm too young to consider retirement, so what to do?
Well I decided that if ever I was going to stop 'doing IT' and start writing for a living, then there wasn't a better time than now. Thus was The Uncommon Scribe created. Theoretically, come next Saturday, I'm unemployed. I prefer to think of it as the first day of self-employment.
Now I just need someone to employ me. Is that going to happen?
Stay tuned!
DSP
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