What's Your Job in Real Life?

[Peckris 2]

2 hours ago, Paddy said:

PL/1  with DB2 and IMS/Db to start with, then another another little known application development suite called Sapiens (RAD). Then much more into the Business Analyst side for Insurance companies - a lot in support of the sales process. Eventually all got too stressful and cost me my marriage so I got out of the rat race.

EASYTRIEVE rings a bell somewhere but I cannot remember what it did or where I met it!

Interesting - I designed a small Excel application for a friend's company's users which we called Sapiens! No connection with yours of course.

EASYTRIEVE was essentially a stripped down version of COBOL. Its main advantage was the utter simplicity of File Definitions for input / output operations, but the syntax was also very easy too. There were no complex functions like you had with PL/1 but its use was in any case basic commercial stuff.

[Peter]

Another Quantity Surveyor / Commercial manager here. Freelance since 2006 but taken my foot off the loud peddle.

[blakeyboy]

I restore old Recording Studio consoles ( mixers), but only one make, Neve,

and only between 1968 to 1980.  There's only me doing it full time, with all the spare parts, in Europe now,

and I'm old enough to have once been taught Fortran using punched cards........

 

 

I knew at the time it would come in handy!!

 

Not.

[Paddy]

Ah yes - I did Fortran IV at university on punch cards. I hereby formally apologise to Ian Pickles for shuffling his deck when he wasn't looking.

 

[Coppers]

ALC with DB2 -- and hopefully Ian Pickles had taken the precaution of numbering his punch cards before you shuffled them.

[declanwmagee]

I've pretty much done every job there is over the last 35 years, but I had two "careers" during that time:  Lab technician testing construction materials during my twenties, spent my thirties in I.T., ran away to join the hippies at my mid-life crisis at 37, then ten years as a freelance gardener/tree surgeon.  Gradually realised I was making more money from buying and selling coins than I was from the sweat of my brow, so laid my chainsaw down for the last time at the end of 2015.  Now a full time coin dealer

[Fubar]

When I started in computers this was the norm. Size of a foolscap sheet of paper. Can't remember how many bytes that was. something like 256 bits per patch and double sided. Didn't really have a programming language. Hex machine code did my head in.
From that to PCs in a little over 10 years. From change a chip to chuck it away. 1980s mostly.

[Unwilling Numismatist]

On 7/31/2018 at 9:05 AM, Madness said:

I aspire to delivering junk mail.

Me too, but until then I have to continue doing what I'm doing now.

'Er indoors said so.

[bagerap]

An Ex described me as a serial entrepreneur, and it wasn't meant as a compliment. It's just that I'm better at working for myself, or as an employer, than being an employee.
In the late 60s before Uni I was a Coin Dealer's runner, buying and selling at Seabys 3-4 times a week for my father.

After university, freshly minted and full of enthusiasm I had absolutely no idea what to do. I'd worked at Pinewood in the sound dept but the British film industry was going through one of its periodic slow deaths and there was little work. All of my mother's family were publicans and I took to that like a duck to water for 15 years or so but at the cost of a couple of marriages.

I'm a language and linguistics grad and started using that for the first time, ending up at DHL learning about freight and courier trade. For a while I was the International Trouble Shooter/Hatchet Man. 82 countries in 3 years.

Since then I've owned and operated Freight Forwarding companies, restaurants,hotels,  shop fitting companies and at one time the only Asian outside catering company certified by the KLBD (Kosher London Beth Din). And I'm neither Asian nor Jewish.

And now I sell a few medals and tokens. I kid myself I'm retired but there is always something on the boil. It's not the money, it's the involvement.

[Peckris 2]

11 hours ago, Fubar said:

When I started in computers this was the norm. Size of a foolscap sheet of paper. Can't remember how many bytes that was. something like 256 bits per patch and double sided. Didn't really have a programming language. Hex machine code did my head in.
From that to PCs in a little over 10 years. From change a chip to chuck it away. 1980s mostly.

A bit scary, the number of ex computer pros on here!

[jaggy]

Retired (at 55) IT auditor.

[Unwilling Numismatist]

So I guess coin collecting must be subconsciously theraputic to the IT crowd

[davidrj]

1 minute ago, Unwilling Numismatist said:

So I guess coin collecting must be subconsciously theraputic to the IT crowd

Or collectors who are not digitally savvy, have never found this forum. 

[Paddy]

I have long had a theory than both IT and collecting (along with certain brain focused games such as Chess and Bridge) are particularly attractive to people with a low level (often undiagnosed) autism. The need for high focus of concentration, attention to detail and retention of large amounts of data seem to work together.

 

[Madness]

40 minutes ago, Paddy said:

I have long had a theory than both IT and collecting (along with certain brain focused games such as Chess and Bridge) are particularly attractive to people with a low level (often undiagnosed) autism. The need for high focus of concentration, attention to detail and retention of large amounts of data seem to work together.

 

*Madness raises his hand and then quietly whispers that he suspected something similar*  I wasn't diagnosed until I was 41.  

Edited August 2, 2018 by Madness

[Paddy]

34 minutes ago, Madness said:

*Madness raises his hand and then quietly whispers that he suspected something similar*  I wasn't diagnosed until I was 41.  

I have never been diagnosed as such but have come to same conclusion  for myself over a number of years. I thinks some indicators:

- get on better with things than with people, even get emotionally attached to inanimate objects more than people.

- able to focus intently on mental games for hours, but get bored quickly making idle chatter with people

- Love "ticking the boxes" collecting and filling gaps in a collection. Love sequences, similarities and differences in a collection

- can remember facts about things - periodic table, history, coins etc - with no difficulty but forget people's names in an instant.

- find "unfinished business" intensely bothersome.

- have to focus to be understanding and tolerant of other people's faults, but can't see the problem with my own!

Anyone else tick a few of those boxes? 😁

[Peckris 2]

May I dip a tentative toe into the controversial autism waters? I think - and this is only a theory based on autistic characteristics - that 'completists', i.e. collectors of date runs and every known variety, are possibly more 'on the spectrum' than type collectors?

Of course, the other connection between coins and IT is that if you get bored, you can always switch off, then switch back on again in the future. 

 

 

[Flash]

can't be bothered

Edited August 2, 2018 by Flash

[Flash]

I deleted my original post as it was obvious I was over reacting.

[Peckris 2]

1 hour ago, DrLarry said:

None of us has the exact definition or fully understand the full extent of the problem the point to bother about is that you have at least given an alternative contribution and that in itself is important .  One can only learn by trial and error what is right and what is wrong.   

Yes, we probably throw the term 'autistic' around too loosely. Mild Aspergers is probably nearer the mark.

[will1976]

2 hours ago, DrLarry said:

I dont think it was an over-reaction I think if you are in the middle of something then you become more keenly aware of the impact it has on the child's life and the parents and family.  There is an incredible new resource I heard of recently available from the autistic society it is a 3D download you add to your phone and you have to wear those funny techno glasses that allow the phone to sit in and it gives a 3D visual and sound perspective of how an autistic child experiences a shopping centre.  I think the more resources like that around that give us insight the greater our ability to see the world from more than one single position

We use a similar 3D visual for our dementia training, while I'm sure it is nothing like what a person with dementia suffers it gives us a look, all be it very briefly, into how their world is. You have to remember though that everyone is unique and the dementia (or autism) affects the person in an equally unique way with no two suffers experiencing the same thing

[Madness]

There are good things about autism, but not a day goes past where I wish I didn't have it.  Attention to detail and the ability to focus do not compensate for the melt downs and hypersensitivity to noise.  

[Mr T]

Computer programmer.

[DaveG38]

I worked for BT plc pretty much all my working life after I left College. Retired at 56 and never looked back. For 25 years of my time with BT I was their Emergency Planning Manager, covering both internal and external disasters. Think exchange fires, floods, explosions, cable damage etc plus civil emergencies like Lockerbie, Dunblane, Deal Bombing, Zeebrugge Ferry, 9/11, 7/7 and these are where my expertise lies (apart from 20th Century Bronze and Silver varieties!!). Coins were an interest from the age of about 16, but my serious collecting re-started in 1995, and has continued ever since.

The mention of Fortan and punch cards reminded me of my early programming as part of my of my research work at College. Stacks of punch cards, weighted down and fed through a scanner, leading to activity somewhere in a huge mainframe computer behind glass, looked after my lab technicians in white coats tending to its every need. All this to show that FeCl3 is a flat triangular molecule. Nowadays I expect the PC I'm typing this on has more power than that huge mainframe. Happy days though.  

[davidrj]

Back in the early eighties we spent £1000 on a state of the art Tandon AT, and a further £1000 on a 100 MByte hard disc. The rest of the lab gathered round in awe, and suggested we had bought far too high a spec disc drive, as we would never fill It!

Edited August 4, 2018 by davidrj