luddite

One of my first jobs was in the grandly named Audit and Technical Section in Swansea Council's City Treasurer's Department.

It was a fantastic job, and being in the Technical part of that section we had access to the most cutting edge personal computers that 1985 had to offer.  We even had an early portable one that was somewhere between a desktop and a laptop.

The machine was used to produce nice looking reports from the mass of confusing raw data we'd extracted from the Council's massive main-frame computer, and present these to management and councillors at monthly meetings.

should have bought an Apple...

One of my main tasks was performing the weekly back ups.  Every Friday afternoon I'd get a locked box from a locked cupboard, in which lay a carousel of floppy disks (remember those).  I'd then perform a meticulous back up regime to ensure we had a rolling five-week back up of all our data and reports.

Anyway, one Friday afternoon while working alone my routine was interrupted by a telephone call from the absolutely terrifying assistant City Treasurer, Mr Matthews.

He was a daunting, old-school council boss and if you were summoned to his room it was because you'd done something wrong or been caught misbehaving, so when he ordered me to see him immediately I was wracking my brain to try to remember what rule I might have transgressed.

When i got into his room I was met by Mr Matthews and his small, I would say four or five year-old, son.

Instead of a rollocking though, all he wanted me to do was turn his computer on so his boy could play with it!

That's right, the multi-thousand pound machine sitting on his desk for the past year or so had never even been turned on.  Well, not by its owner at any rate.

So, I duly turned it on and as I turned to leave the room Mr Matthews thanked me for turning the thing on, and for my guaranteed discretion surrounding that afternoon's goings on!

You know, I never, ever had a row off him following that day!

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Photography isn't about shooting with expensive equipment.  Sometimes, well quite often in fact, it can be much more fun taking photographs using really inexpensive equipment.  In the latest video, I share my experiences of shooting with such gear: