I work in IT, got into it by accident. A guy walked into my office one day and said that we should start a degree at a correspondence university in South Africa. I looked at the subjects and Information Systems looked interesting. The long and the short of it is within a year I had changed my job to a computer one and that's what I have been doing since 1984. The IBM PC had just been launched and I got a job at a Nashua copier agent to sell IBM PCs for them. I had never seen one before and when I walked in they showed me the PC and a MSDOS manual, version 2, as well as a rack of accounting system manuals for IUS, later to become Accpac, I think. Those were the good old days of comprehensive manuals. I liked installing and supporting the stuff more than selling and a year or so later moved into support. PCs and accounting systems were synonymous to me because of my first exposure, there was a funny thing called Lotus 123 around too but I never took it seriously!

One day a guy walked in and said he had an accounting system that ran on Unix. I didn't know what Unix was but the idea of a multi-user accounting system appealed to me and there started my love affair with Unix, initially Sco Xenix. This was 1985. In 1990 I started doing freelance/contracting work, hourly paid and ran into a client that wanted to build an Oracle database and write an application to track the mine workers they recruited for the South African mines. I did not really know what Oracle was but it intrigued me so I got involved supplying hardware and doing the Unix stuff for them. The application was using Oracle 6 and Forms 2:-) The original developers left and I inherited the application and DBA work and here started my love affair with Oracle. At the same time there were four sites in neighboring Mozambique we were working on and to get between them I got a private pilots licence (PPL), me being scared of heights and all, I still am terrified of turbulence! I clocked up about 190 hours training and flying in Cessnas, Piper Arrows and Beachcraft V Tails between branches doing work for the client that was called TEBA - The Employment Bureau Africa, one of the worlds largest employment agencies. At that stage there were about 50,000 Mozambique mine workers working on South African mines. I have tons of fond memories of those days, flying and looking after Sco Unix and Oracle on 486 PC servers on dumb terminals. When Windows 95 came along I converted all the terminals to PCs and Ethernet running the QVT telnet emulator on TCP/IP.

At the same time I started giving freelance Unix System 5 Release 4 and Solaris training for ICL in Johannesburg. I had a disastrous foray into a web company and after a year or so gave it up and got a contract for a year as a DBA t a large South African corporate. They were implementing Retek and a hard-*rse colleague dumped me on the Retek team that had been nagging them for a DBA. So started my love affair with Retek! I spent two years there and then got tempted to move to Cape Town, arguably one of the most scenic port cities in the world, to give Oracle and Solaris training. I did this for a year and then returned to working on Retek projects.

These three ladies, Unix, Oracle and Retek (now Oracle Retail) have served me well and opened up opportunities all over the world. At this stage I have had the privilege of working in Africa, the UK and Belgium briefly, South Korea twice and Indonesia.