My Work Life Has Taken Many Forks

I have domiciled in the Black Country now for sixteen years. It’s strange as that is longer than I spent at school and yet it remains so fresh and new. In fact, I was at a school reunion last weekend and it was odd seeing them all as adults as I have not seen any of them from the day I ended school. I’m very good about being awful at dropping contact with colleagues and not keeping in touch. I tend to find that I think ‘I wonder how so and so is’ and suddenly grasp that you haven’t heard from them in 5 years and feel too guilty to pick up the phone. Thank heavens for social networking!

I moved up here originally when I began freelancing when I was employed by IBM on a project for the Midlands Electricity Board which was enormous fun. Since then my work has taken a lot of changes in both job and geography, but these days I am operating a firm that offers SEO and IT support services to small companies in the Black Country area and the wider West Midlands. It means that I am able to work at home which is really the single place I’ve ever wanted to work. I have been lucky enough that business has let me to go to other places and I’ve been to Brentwood, Coventry, Newcastle upon Tyne and, most exotically, Canberra before an all too short return to the North East.

But I love being in the Black Country and being out and discovering it. It really is extraordinarily beautiful, not unlike my beloved Surrey, but different naturally in that we are smack in the centre of the Industrial Revolution. We need not have to go far to be surrounded by the evidence of history. This bit of the Black Country was regarded for chain and glass construction. The chains and anchors for the Titanic were created here and the transport of them to the railway was recently re-enacted for a Channel 4 programming. There are also canals everywhere you go linking the coal, iron and steel production areas to the wider world.

Most of it has now disappeared of course, although bespoke metal bashing and steel product firms still work. The modern Black Country now revolves around small industrial firms, hi-tech services and some need on the motor industry which is still prominent in the West Midlands with Jaguar Land Rover, and Rover also making a low level return.

For myself, I am more than satisfied now working for myself, using the knowledge that I’ve learnt in my working life and using them on my own terms. I gathered how to do IT support many years ago when I was at British Gas and had a break from programming to look at something new, and that has stayed with me through the period where I have been able to repair problems for people I was working with quickly and without the need to call out the support teams. SEO I have learnt in later years and have discovered that it is entirely matched the way I love to work and have always had an aim to do as I have always adored creative writing.

So for the time being, I will continue to concentrate on SEO with a smidgen IT support as and when needed.

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