Edinburgh - April to June 2006

I had a telephone call from an agent in London, about a contract in Edinburgh. The contract was at Standard Life Assurance to help with the demutualisation of the company. The job involved re-designing their actuarial reporting to fit the new de-mutualised organisation.

Here I met another SAS contractor called Phil, who had learnt his SAS in the RAF. What he knows about mainframes beats what I know about accounting.

Also while I was in Edinburgh, a lovely city, I met up with a guy I had worked with at Lombard North Central between 1987 and 1994. Andy was the same old cynical individual, always denigrating himself, but still able to make spreadsheets do some pretty interesting things.

Yorkshire Bank - summary

Finally, after nine months, YB have at last worked out how to resolve the problem of relocating the server. Leave it in Leeds, because they cannot afford to buy a new server to copy everything to and make the old (new) one redundant. They will send someone down from Glasgow to Leeds once a month (or so) to make sure that the server is doing everything it should.

First Contract

Having spent almost three months, calling agencies on a daily basis, my first contract for over two years fell into my lap. The downside was that it was in West Yorkshire, in Leeds actually, nearly 90 miles away.

The good part was that I would be working again, doing something that I could at last enjoy doing, and not be frustrated by office politics, dictating what I could do, how I did it, and when I had to do it.

The new role was to stand in for an employee of Yorkshire Bank who had been made redundant, while the job was relocated to the Glasgow office. The work involved a server that was then in Leeds being upgraded and relocated to Glasgow.

Moving to Chester

March 2003-March 2005:

Spent most of this time, working too many hours a day, only seeing our new house in the dark. At the end of March 2005, I was offered early retirement, which I took, almost gleefully. The downside, as the following posts will clearly demonstrate, is that I spend most of my working days living away from home, usually in bed and breakfast accomodation, only seeing my home at the weekend.