My Job Talks
All club members are invited to give a "My Job" talk to the club. These talks always provide insights into the individuals and sometimes a few surprises. Here are some samples from the last few years.8th July 2002 - David Campbell Burns
David Campbell Burns (left) with Susan Jackson
David Campbell Burns, accompanied by his wife Barbara, told us about his career in ophthalmology. After qualifying at the City University, David went into a group practice of three where he worked for fifteen years. He decided to specialise in contact lenses and joined the UK arm of Wohlk, biggest contact lens company in Europe. He met Barbara about the same time. David was MD at Wohlk for twelve years and is now a contact lens industry consultant. He then showed slides from a presentation he gave at the Tehran Ophthalmologic Conference in November 2000.
David told us bio-compatibles are materials that are highly compatible with the human body, there is no rejection, because the body says “hey that’s me”. In the beginning Perspex was used for lenses; it is very compatible with the human body. This was spotted when pieces of shattered Spitfire screens got into pilots’ eyes and did not cause an adverse reaction, so they were left in situ. Perspex has high transparency; it is inert, durable, hard, easy to manufacture, easy to maintain, scratch and deposit resistant but doesn’t allow Oxygen through.
Rigid gas permeable lenses allow more Oxygen through than soft lenses do, but soft lenses have other advantages, extreme comfort. Then Bausch and Lomb managed to spin soft lenses very accurately and a ‘dry eye’ study showed that if you could make the lens wet, comfort would be good. The new soft lenses bind water and do not dry out in use, so they are much more comfortable to wear.
Many people suffer astigmatism, unevenness of the lens, which makes fitting contact lenses more difficult. In the past getting the right fit was achieved by estimating from a fitting guide or trial lenses or empirical fitting. But as it is theoretically possible to transmit new variant CJD via tears (no cases reported), the use of trial lenses has stopped, creating an urgent need to make fitting prescription lenses as easy as it is for stock lenses.
David carried out a study to measure the effective diameter and curvature of the eye, plotting relationships between steepness, flatness, longness and smallness. He worked on the principle of taking something that is easy to measure, the curvature of the eye, and extrapolating for something that is hard to measure.
David came up with a calculation that worked, which was launched in the USA five years ago. A small under-correction was discovered, which was tracked to an error in the printed instructions, which did not follow David’s words. Ed.
10th December 2001 - David Fear
December 10th, David Fear gave his ‘My Job' talk. He started by saying he is one of Yvette's marketing successes - he contacted us as a result of reading the Xmas 2000 leaflet.
David has had 12 jobs in 42 years, so the talk should be entitled ‘My Jobs', or even better ‘Life at the leading edge of technology.' He said that his father had one employer all his life and regarded David - with an average residency of 3.5 years and a maximum of 7 years - as a maverick. But the job changes were often forced by technology changes. Ten of the twelve employers no longer exist due to mergers or going broke. After college David started work at AEI, a company that made a huge range of products (too many) they were taken over by GEC. After a move into process computing, he was heard criticising the sales group and was moved into sales. A 27 year old selling to 50 year olds who'd been in business since before World War II.The 1960s and 70s were the era of the mini computer; he went to work for Honeywell selling machines at £10,000 each. For 5-6 years he had ‘a total and complete ball'; people had fresh ideas and were risk takers; every project was different, the range of activity was incredible. The minis were the size of washing machines, but they were good enough to do useful work.
David's sales area was Cheshire, Liverpool, Derbyshire and Ireland. Every project was a risk into the brave new world of real-time computing. People wrote software that took five to ten times the price and effort estimated! They linked computers to mass spectrometers, installed them at a nuclear power station to do data logging and adapted a note counting machine to read football pool coupons.
Life progressed and David moved to a start-up, Pr1me Computers, he was number 88 in the company. Pr1me experienced astounding growth going from $3m in 1973 to $100m in 1980. In the UK the team went from 4 people to 100 and the biggest issues were recruitment and office space.
David said that much of what they achieved is now commonplace, but then 1MB of memory was large (his home PC has 64MB), a 300 MB disc was the size of a ‘fridge and cost £40,000, but sold like hot cakes.
All good things come to an end; in the 1980s and 1990s microcomputers took centre stage and the move to non-proprietary software was under way. It was also another step in economics, a hard disc computer for £5000, which was unbelievable at the time.
In 1983 it was the dawn of the IBM PC, for the first time IBM was looking to buy-in software rather than writing it. There were two software companies Digital Research (Op Systems) and Microsoft (Languages). Gary Kildall of DR did not believe IBM would buy his software and played a game of golf instead of attending a meeting with them. They went to Bill Gates at Microsoft and the rest is history! The IBM PC led to growth of software packages. There were many office and commercial transaction systems - insurance quotes, kitchen cash and carry invoices, government automation of processes and the birth of on-line databases. Packaged telecommunications and networks eventually led to the Internet.
In 1992 David fancied a change and went to work in the NHS as a business manager, during the time of NHS Reforms.
He found that no data was available- no measures of cost, how many patients, cost to treat, average time to treat and so on. There were no departmental budgets, relying on consultants' ‘seat of pants' feel. Information systems were needed everywhere; the secretaries were still using typewriters! It was a busy time.
In 1996, with retirement coming up, David decided to work half-time as a technical author for Metrodata - Telecomms in Egham. He is in Liz's half-way house between working and not working. He concluded that it has been a professional life full of innovation and interest.
26 Nov 2001 - Liz Shard
Liz Shard (left) with Yvette Asscher
Liz explained that she works as an Internet Executive for a ‘flexi-hour placement company. She said that she was not a technical person although she was fluent in Java, Perl and Html. Her company specialised in flexible hour staff. To ascertain the level of awareness in the Club Liz set a quiz. Richard Walsh won a flexible pen for the highest score.
Liz explained that the focus was on recruitment marketing, finance and Human resource workers. Her company dealt with interim, part time and jobshare opportunities. They use psychological profiling to secure a good match between workers and jobs. President Yvette had submitted to one of these tests and the following ‘conclusions' were announced.
Yvette had no psychological problems, was competitive and didn't like losing. She likes fluid rather than structured situations and ensured conflict free environments by not criticizing others (!) She is content to have some repetition, likes to challenge established ways of doing things and adapts her style to suit situation. These profiles are charged at £5.
Liz explained job share partners often have different styles. She puts job share people together. Teachers bank managers etc virtually any job. Her company started in 1997 and has 20 people, only one man
In question time Anne asked what were the on-costs to employers and Liz explained that six days costs can be incurred rather than five to give handover time although part timers work harder and better
Part time is alternative to redundancy. The main takers are women with young children and over 50s who didn't want to stop work completely.
Richard Walsh pointed out that traffic delays in rush hour were good reasons for flexitime.
Stan gave an excellent vote of thanks summing up by pointing out what a good job talk it had been and how it had woken the club up as well as giving a most enjoyable quiz.
18th March 2002 - Ulla Baagoe
Ulla was born in Denmark and speaks several languages. She worked for the Danish Diplomatic Service before branching out on her own.
Before coming to Shepperton, Ulla was based in Manila using the skills she developed in the Danish Diplomatic Service in a consultancy capacity for non-governmental projects. She has worked on a wide variety of projects ranging geographically from Africa to Russia and the Philippines. Her last project was in Serbia, her next is in Macedonia. Her focus is now on European environmental and public sector reform.
For the Serbian project Ulla prepared terms of reference for a complete restructuring of the Public Service Broadcasting services, which were to be used by the European Agency for Reconstruction as the basis of their work. Ulla explained the enormous pressure of change involved in moving from a fully staffed system working to cultural norms that were no longer in place using equipment and techniques that, of necessity had to parallel international commercial standards of use.
Ulla has set up her own Consultancy Company in the UK with six consultants working in an international and multilingual context.
Gray O'Hanlon
Gray joined BEA (Back Every Afternoon) after a spell with The Ford Motor Company, clearly he was destined for greater heights. BEA and BOAC (Better On A Camel) joined forces to become British Airways, which is where he now works. He was trained on Boeing 757s and now flies Boeing 777s.
View of the 777 cockpit
He showed us the manuals he has to learn off by heart and all the charts, maps and flight plans that help him find his way over Shepperton and across the Atlantic and back again.