Not sure where I'm going with this one, don't really want to bore you with my life story.......but!

Educated to 'O' level back in the 80's, ......weren't the 80's great? I come from a working class background (and proud of it you hear) I left school at 16 and went into further education on a YTS scheme (remember those, dubbed 'Young Tosseres Scheme', tee hee) for computer programing, aaaggghhh. Didn't like that, didn't like working in the office with a shirt and tie on evry day, blaerf.....

So I kinda drifted after this went into working at J.Sainsbury, short stint at a motorcycle shop and ended up starting a 3 year appenticeship at year 2 in sheet metal work! What sheet metal work, I sure the heck didn't know? Anyway serverd my time (just) and got made redundant from the small company and ended up getting a job in a papermill.....not for long I thought!

Nine years on, I had worked a multitude of shit patterns, oops sorry shift patterns. Night 10pm to 6am (lovely) then days 8am to 4:30pm (bit more normal) then finally weekly alternating shifts of 6am to 2pm and 2pm to 10pm, not the best but doable. I realised here that working hard was not the answer and working smarter was the way to go.

I tried a few diffent things here, I managed to get my cartoons published, I have always had a wry sense of humour but it was very different putting humour into pictures, but I was chuffed that I achieved a goal, but it was never going to keep me fed, week to week. I tried bulding PC's from home and selling but this was a lot of work post sales...how do I do this, how do I do that, phuur.

Then my mother (believe it or not) had heard about a crash course in computers (nothing specific then) and I asked her to get more info. The upshot was I quit my job and re-mortgaged my house to foot the bill for a six week intense training course (after do rather well in the entrance exam). I completed the course with flying colours and after a lot of tooing and froing landed a job with a compant called Centerprise International.

I really cut my IT teeth with Centerprise and excelled in the, shall we say; dynamic nature the company operated. I progressed from field engineer to being re-located from Manchester to Basingstoke and becoming thier IT & Network Support Manager, along the way doing pre-sales, events and instalations. phew. I stuck with CI (as its affectionatly known by its employeees) for some 5 years at which point I was not enjoying the managerial flack without the ability to change the issues (micro management...don't ask).

So left CI to work for Fujitsu, totally different kettle of fish, far slower pace of activity but with an enormous scale. I have again moved around within FJ and held both technical and lower management roles. I am currently a 'Customer Solution Architect' which is a posh way to say solution designer. I must admit I am thouroughly enjoying the technical role and being able to have an impact on project decisions ticks all the boxes for me. Unfortunatly I am by accident falling into a lower management role again, but hopefully I can stop this before I get in too deep.

So thats basically it. Along the way I have had two lovelly children, my wife still manages to surprise me, now and then, my best friend is my pet Lab and everything is tickety boo. I miss being local to my parents as the 200+ mile trip to visit means it doesn't happen often enough.

I have repeated the links to www social network sites below which will give you some more insight into 'who the heck is dbaxendale'.

You can contact me through the social websites above or via email below. Be safe and have fun, bon voyage.

u2me@dbaxendale.co.uk