When you became a lawyer…?

OK, two mistakes….

Actually, I’m quite into it at the moment. I might even start putting some effort in….

Stoners reply is like something Humphrey might say in Yes Minister!!!
Nothing too exciting for most folk but when something I’ve designed gets built it’s kinda cool. Gatwick North new multi-storey car park for example.

Beating stubborn unreasonable bloody minded council officials into submission using cunning, guile and logic is quite rewarding too.

I might even start putting some effort in

I have to say, this a horrifyingly keen attitude & not something to be encouraged on STW.

I worked with an Editor to launch a new Homes mag last year in a recession that is selling over 70K copies a month in it’s first year.

Your wives will love it 😉

MM

v666ern – If I come up with something cool like Drac will you design me a house?

Ps, I love the Aero8 logo above ^

*blushes*

I also designed one of the country’s most popular cycling books:

Anyone here bought it?

Anyone?

Last year the ship I was on escorted a World Food Programme through piracy waters into Somalia. To be honest it was pretty dull as the old tug was pretty slow but when the Captain mused that we’d got 2 million meals ashore a pretty big smile spread throughout the ship (hopefully the local war lords didn’t nick too much of it).

sorry guys im not the architect, if you gave me a blank sheet and said draw a house it would look like a 5 year olds!

if however you had the architects faffy design i could actually make it work and stand up! My skills are currently being used on the shitty little housebuilder cubes that blight this land!

Made a lot of brides very happy in a previous job.
And a few bridesmaids 😉

Now I produce the material that people build with and change the landscape as well as getting personal satisfaction from the tasks themselves.

I’ve just discovered one of my houses sold for £1 mill!

Just how many houses do you have?

I was lead engineer (responsible for the permanent way construction) on:

Kettering to Harrowden 3rd Tracking (6.5km of new line)

East Midlands Parkway Station

Remodelling of Whitechapel Station for Crossrail

But no life saving unfortunately

bruneep – not my house unfort! i did the drawings for it

Sunday night my team caught 3 car thieves red handed, then went on to dive in and rescue someone trying to drown themselves in the river (air temp was -4C). Night shifts always the most fun but this was one of the more eventful.

I occasionally save some animals, sadly a lot of owners/farmers think we are money grabbing toerags out to benefit only ourselves. Oh to have and animal NHS..

Featured in a couple of Brazilian trade magazines for my work presenting industry research there. 2 page spread, I think! 🙂

Although to be honest, the police/ fire/ paramedic work on here makes that look quite trivial…

I’ve just persuaded the school management to set up a whole school outdoor education programme which will put kids on the hills at least three times a year. And also spend £120k on refurbishing our outdoor centre. Not bad for a chemistry teacher. Does also mean I’ll spend a lot more time in the hills.

I’ve just learnt the basics of VMWare ESX (i’m hyper-v qualified) and consolodated a massive number of servers saving my company a good bit of wedge/month.

Feeling pretty chuffed but that could just be the vast quantities of coffee.

no lives saved, but i designed this which has entertained a lot of people.

over the last 3 years i’ve made an invisible but successful contribution to the making of this, of which i’m proud:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOFLtsDvbw[/video]

My first proper job after uni probably helped to save hundreds of lives – it was sticking HM Coastguard’s search planning system onto this new fangled thing called an IBM PC so they could enter details about where/when someone was last seen plus tide, wind etc and the number & type of search units, and it’d tell them where to look and how to split up the search units. It even won an award at some swanky do at the Royal Society.

MIne is just in little ways – the worried demented person I have helped to calm down, finding the little things that makes life better for someone and the reward is a smile.

I get to design things that help pump the black gold out of the ground and make a few people very rich.

My longest job almost certainly saved the public purse many millions of quids and will continue to do so.

Owning our house in London but also just bought a small terraced Bungalow in
the Alicante region, which are our bigger purchases

I designed this and a few other speakers for Ruark, the most tangible/identifiable of my achievements.

http://sites.thestar.com.my/audio/story.asp?file=/1997/1/02tyruark

Otherwise, fixed a heap of shed like bikes, gave a heap of legal advice, amongst other un-noteworthy stuff.

No life saving involved but was my first big project and it all went up very quickly and comparatively quickly and pretty much to budget. By all accounts a very successful hotel too now. Few years ago and since then not very much exciting

Laings in Glasgow?

If so, its now closed and derelict

I’m proud (and humbled) that some of my work helps operate this:

And this:

It also helped get this to Mars (before it disappeared):

And also helps keep all these safe:

Good few years ago spent about 18 months chasing / harrasing a gang around the world; arranged to have various lieutenants and gofers potted all over the place, big lumps of gear; +350 kgs class A +300kg class B, tens of thousands in cash, all went to jail – some for not as long as they should’ve (one was a hitman in past employment) but at least they went, to a man they were all horrible people no redeeming characters. It was quite interesting and I made sure my team got the perks;no money but lots of foreign travel which helped a fair few of them in later life. Monumental p*** up at the end as well, which was nice

I had no idea that we’d made 4 satellites each a big as teh planet!

An important medicine was approved in Japan on the basis of an analysis I conducted.

When I was in recruitment I picked up the CV of a bloke in his mid 50s whose life had fallen about him like dust.

He used to be an export salesman – spending time building up agents and contacts in Africa & Middle East. His wife was unhappy that he was away all the time so nagged him to give it up and come back into the UK.

He came back and sank all his money in a crappy franchise scheme.

His wife then realised it wasn’t him being away she disliked, it was him being at home so she kicked him out, his business went flop and he ended up sharing a room in a strange town.

Ended up with no home no money no job. For somebody in his mid 50s, that’s a bit of a bummer.

I looked at his CV and thought with a bit of judicious trimming I could make it look OK. I then set about getting him in front of employers.

Eventually he was given an export assistant role and he phoned me up out of the blue a couple of weeks before Christmas. He loves the job, he’s had a promotion, his firm love him, his customers love him, and apparently it was only my faith in him that re-ignited his own self belief and stopped him taking the big walk to the top of the multi-storey.

Gulp…

These are all really great things to be proud of people. Funny isn’t it how the normal grind gets you down, but when you stop and think, you can say ” I did that” or “I contributed to that”.

Slaps to backs and high fives all round.

Nice work, BigJohn 🙂

Don’t forget the whoops Mugsy_m8 whoops are essential too.

BigJohn can you look at my cv please.

Took a nanotechnology concept I had developed for pure research purposes and applied it to a real world problem I asked to look into and had proof of concept and patent application in 4 months when I was doing a research role at Uni on a contract for a large company. European and US patents now granted 🙂

Engineered some software to self-calibrate the frequency of a microprocessor, after some numpty left the crystal off the board design. Not sexy, but got us out of a huge hole, and I’m proud as everyone said it couldn’t be done!

Proud of a few things over the years; one job that springs to mind was a project I worked on where I delivered bike riding sessions to pretty much all the primary schools in our region. First session was basic skills, then second session was an off road route. Seeing the kids enjoying themselves was very rewarding.

One particular set of kids had behavioural problems, which funnily enough didn’t arise during the sessions, and having them thank me afterwards was very nice.

WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP 😆