You know that friend, the one who always promises to help you move flat, or help you fix your mower, but then doesn’t turn up? Yes. Or the guy who goes on a date and pays for the meal and somehow that comes with access to your body? Or the airline that makes you think you have to pay for a seat upgrade in order to take any baggage on board when actually you don’t?
The first two are obvious red flags. We all know people like this, and once we’re done excusing their behaviour we tend to move on. They’re often charming people at first. They have to be. They keep needing new friends and new partners, so they get really good at the introductory gab. But as I always say, the only perfect people in this world are people you don’t know very well yet.
This blog post has now been re-arranged with the manifesto at the top, and the reasoning that led up to it beneath. Because, after all, placing the important content six or seven hundred words in is hardly being pure, is it?
Web Dogma 24. By me.
Content First. All articles, images, and graphics must be there to serve a purpose. Superficial or filler material is forbidden.
I hope you haven’t missed the big AI revolution going on right now? No? Yes? YES? You have no idea about it? Where do you live? On Mars? Ah OK, you were kidding. AI is being talked about everywhere, new devices like the Humane AI Pin or the Rabbit R1 are very much about it, and everyone involved is scrabbling around like mad for venture capital to fund their incredible ideas.
Having access to these language models is immense, right? We can sit down, whip out our AI, and enjoy a better than life experience. We can ask it questions and often it can come up with remarkably lucid explains. It seems intelligent. Here’s a conversation I’ve just had with ChatGPT’s latest model, after I asked it to settle into a British conversational style:
In the world of transgender rights, the battle for the bathroom has reached fever pitch, especially in the USA. Now, I’m not here to referee in this brawl – because on one side of the debate you have the ‘TERFs”, and on the other, the trans rights activists sometimes labelled “handmaidens”. Both are terms about as socially acceptable as weeing all over the toilet seat, and on the extreme fringes of both you find calls for violence. It seems every modern campaign group needs its villains and its sycophantic followers.
In the past, this website was sort of my place to keep family and friends in touch. I first set it up in 2005, just before going away to Peru on travels. It was a great. Facebook had been invented but wasn’t generally available or popular yet, other platforms weren’t well thought through or scattered, Twitter didn’t exist. But installing WordPress on my cheap Yahoo web hosting turned out to be one of the easiest ways to publish content and share it with the world.
Being very old (or at least, that’s how I feel being in tech!) means that after coming up to nearly forty years in technology, I’ve seen some changes.
My first computer at home, that I owned, that I could truly call my own, was a Dragon 32. It was a small, 32KB computer using the rather lovely little 6809 processor. This CPU ran at 2MHz and the system as a whole allowed me to learn a heck of a lot about computer science as a geeky teenager who was busy ignoring sports.
I came across this chart recently and it gave me pause for thought as someone whose life work is designed to improve productivity. It shows that from 2008, although we know technologies have been growing in power, productivity growth suddenly dropped away from the trendline following the global financial crisis. Why?
This is where I fall back on an old story as a developer trying to make things more efficient. I worked with my colleagues to bring a client company the equivalent of about ten hours a day of labour saving due to using a well structured database for better data integrity over their previous ‘loose’ system. As they expanded, each branch would save at least an hour of time, and they were no longer capacity bound at each branch where more customers would linearly increase administrative work in a difficult recruiting environment. This would provide a return on investment (ROI) of less than a year.
It worked exceptionally well and the person we’d worked with said their staff were even worried redundancies might be on the way! This was never going to be the case in a growing company, because there’s an infinite amount of work to do.
All was good.
Then for some reason, our contact’s role was diminished and they eventually left the company. And the knowledge of the improvement left as well. The board’s innate distrust of anyone and their perception of us as no more than a cost base resulted in a great difficulty for us to help them without dramatically increasing costs by gold-plating every spec and decision.
This left the client unable to gain for advantage by exploiting our skills. It was difficult for us to see, and we could do little for them other to look for cost savings when, in reality, they needed to implement cost savings by using us more. Instead they opted for a recruitment based strategy to feed their growth and we parted ways as they shifted the system to a maintenance partner.
In all my thirty years of development experience I’ve seen this again and again. Instead of sticking with a solid set of developers who have learned your business details, chop and change to save money. Treat developers as a cost base and you lose so much knowledge that you’ll fail to gain productivity nearly as quickly as you could treating it as a partnership.
I don’t feel this is unique. I see lots of projects following an arc of big development then a cost reduction period which ends up losing the momentum of ongoing improvement.
Solving the productivity paradox
A strategy I now suggest when selling is to spend 60% of what you thought of on your project in year 1, then 40% in year two, 30% in year three, and then 20% a year throughout the product lifecycle. Software isn’t like building a bridge where things stabilise then stay them same for thirty years, sadly.
Fundamentally, I think corporate culture around custom software became both cautious and speculative following the global financial crash of 2008 and only invested in technology if it felt like it would create some impressive unicorn of an offering. We saw lots of developers tied up with venture capital chasing big things like blockchain and AI whilst ignoring the importance of daily incremental improvement that adds up to a huge return over time.
The answer then, is that if you have access to capital, you should stop chasing unicorns and start thinking about continuous pragmatic development aimed at dealing with all the little productivity blocks in your firm. Look to Kaizen style methodologies to help with structuring your processes around this.
The Heroku platform is an absolutely fantastic way to have to not bother with devops within a small development company. We’ve been using it at interconnect for years now, and whilst it’s not entirely perfect, it takes away one set of headaches and does so at a reasonable cost.
All the services offer backups, and the VMs are built from scripts and are essentially read only. So if something catastrophic happened to one of our databases, we can roll back a day and be OK. Except… let me explain my fears around data.
Trust issues with providers
In our very earliest years we used a VPS provider that used Plesk. Everything was solid and stable until one day, we got a report that a site had been hacked. Then another. It turned out that a vulnerability had exposed our sites to being hacked. And they were. This resulted in a big old clean up operation and restoration from backups. Except the daily backups we’d been paying for turned out to be weekly. So the backups we had were three days old. Ever since then, I’ve preferred to have a way of pulling backups separately to a server under my own control, unless the provider is Kumina, because I know the people so well that I’m 100% certain they’re as paranoid as I am and they’ve never ever let me down. But in the era of hustle culture bros who move fast and break things, you need a safety net.
Creeping corruption
My next fear is corruption you don’t notice immediately. I can well imagine that if all the meta data for the posts on a site before a certain date got wiped out, most people wouldn’t notice for ages. Imagine you’ve got a site with 200,000 posts, and various elements of the first 100,00 were damaged – the long tail matters to these sites and suddenly it’s all gone. Well, thank heavens for backups!
Except, of course, most cloud providers don’t provider substantial generational backups. Instead, they keep a few days or a week or so. And that’s your lot. If you need to go back months you’d better hope a developer in the company left a dump on their laptop somewhere – except of course that very very few developers keep dumps of production systems on their laptops – it’s bad practice and only tends to happen in exceptional circumstances and should be deleted soon after use.
How we fix it today
In the end, I asked one of my Linux oriented colleagues, Gianluigi, to create a service that would connect to Heroku’s API and then download every database, and sync every S3 bucket. It worked, with some limitations. More recently, because he’d left but remains a good friend, he helped me with a crash course in Linux sysadmin basics and I was able to extend and improve some bits. The system is a service written in PHP that does all the work. I then asked another colleague internally, Jack, to extend things to cover the PostgreSQL databases we also now used and to create a dashboard so that I could monitor the backups easily without resorting to logging into the backups servers.
The dashboard also doesn’t run on the backups servers. I needed to keep the backups as safe as possible – they’d be a great honeypot for a hacker, so they’re onioned away, and the backups service isn’t reachable from outside. Instead, it messages the dashboard with information about the backups taken. The dashboard also provides details on application and framework versions, for security monitoring and making sure updates have been applied appropriately, and it also sends me a daily summary email showing me storage space available and what was backed up in the previous 24 hours.
Here are a few screenshots of the system, with some censoring, but I hope you catch how it works from what you see.
To commercialise, or not?
And now to one of the reasons why I’ve decided to write about this. In the past, I created the first version of Search Replace DB – a quick script and algorithm I knocked up to parse a database and search and replace items in it. A fast, dangerous tool that I released as free open source code. Other people took it and commercialised it into successful products. We didn’t. And with the code being integrated into wp-cli and most devs would use that in preference (myself included!), except in those tricky situations where command line access wasn’t possible – mostly on cheap hosts. I think we were right to release the code, but where we failed was in realising the commercial possibilities. And that’s left me a little torn.
So now I’m torn – it’s not easy to set up services in Linux, but once you do, these things just run and run. It’s also not going to be the easiest thing to work with, so I anticipate support costs being quite high. It’s proper server level work. And I certainly don’t feel inclined to build a SaaS that acts as a conduit for people’s backups. It’s just too risky to have a central pool of lots and lots of backups, and people find them lurking on S3 buckets all the time. So I want to put this out to the community. Is this something you’d find useful? Let us know in the comments below. If we did release it, the code would be open source, but access to the latest versions would be restricted.
Having a coronary artery bypass isn’t much fun and comes with challenges. Four years later I thought I’d describe some more of my experiences.
In my previous blog post, I described the adventure of having a heart attack and the five coronary artery bypass grafts that resulted. That procedure saved my life and actually restored my quality of life and fitness, within six months, to about the level of five years before. Today I’m as fit as I’ve ever been as an adult. So everything’s fine, right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated.
Let’s not mess about here, having a heart attack is a traumatic and terrifying experience. So is having a major operation with a risk factor measured in percentages. My risk of death was given as a bit under 2%. Which doesn’t sound too bad, but if you were told one in fifty planes crashed fatally, you’d perhaps be rather scared about flying, right?
With an event like this you come face to face with your mortality. The evening before the operation, Romana brought our chidren to see me. I hugged them hard before they left, but I also wanted them to know I was OK. No tears. But in a way I felt oddly calm. I knew my chances were better with the operation than without. But without the operation I was almost certain to be alive at the end of the next day. You have a fear horizon.
That’s… hard. For me I went into a different mental state. I always imagine it’s that mindset that a meditating Buddhist monk might go into. I was calm and collected. I thoroughly expected, when I was told about the need for a bypass, that I’d be a gibbering mess on the day. Yet most people I met facing this situation seemed to be the same. We know our choices are limited and this is our best chance. So off we go. But let’s not pretend that it also doesn’t scare and scar you. We may seem brave. We may be brave. But what choice do we have?
The ascendance from survival
You can read about my waking up on that previous post, if you like. I’m mentioning it here because it marks the start of the new life. A life which is separated into the before, the after, and the now. The initial week you focus on moving, and managing the pain. There’s a lot of support available, the nurses are wonderful, people visit you. The odd one might nearly faint when they see nearly a metre of stitches.
You go home. My in-laws were staying and helped keep the house bustling during the day, which was honestly a help. We can’t communicate well as they don’t speak a lot of English, but they were always there with cups of tea and help with cooking – stuff that’s still difficult in the first few weeks home.
The operation then changes you. Different people react differently to these events, so I can only really talk about how I felt, and how I still feel at times. Please indulge me, or feel free to ignore me! I do this sort of writing because it’s good therapy for me. It gets those feelings out. Other people have other ways. I’ll try and break up the feelings into types, and describe how they pan out over the four years from the event. I’ve not sought out a diagnosis for any of the following, or treatment, so bear that in mind.
Anxiety
Let’s start with the big one and most common for survivors that I’ve dealt with. The fear. The feeling that every twinge is the start of the end, every bit of shortness of breath is the start of new heart trouble because maybe a graft is failing or new plaques are being deposited. Thing is, having had your sternum pulled apart hard, your pericardium sliced open, your arteries and veins harvested… well, it’s pretty natural you’re going to have all sorts of aches and pains and periods of struggle. You notice everything new. Can’t help it.
So we live in this state of increasingly intermittent rather than constant anxiety. It does get better too. I hold on to that. After a year the panicky moments are every couple of weeks. After four years, they’re every month or two. Still there though. I’d been doing some new exercises with weights. The next day my chest was aching and I had a moment where I thought it was a heart attack before I remembered I’d been working out my chest muscles.
Other things come in to play with anxiety also. I suffered a frozen shoulder following the operation, and that is painful and annoying. It eased off six months later, but you find yourself worrying that you’ll never have a pain free day again. And no, you can’t take ibuprofen if you’re on blood thinners despite it being the usual go-to drug for pain relief for things like this. Ah well.
And sometimes I’ll be puffed out because I have asthma, but I’m never sure… worsening asthma marked the decline of my heart health. Is this asthma or is it my heart? Take the inhalers and see if it improves and when it does you do feel this mental relief kicking in!
Depression
This is a very normal reaction to these events. Sometimes you can work through it, sometimes you can’t. I’m pretty certain I had a period of mild depression as a consequence. I still relapse and seem to have a bout of a week or two every now and again in this weird, empty space – I’m either too sensitive, or struggling to enjoy anything or do anything that is outside of routine. Then I’ll have a period where I’m super focussed and really get stuff done. When I’m in it I kind of resent hearing “let’s meet this week” or “there’s a birthday party for one of the boys’ friends this week and they’ve asked us to go along.” I always say yes. But I don’t want to. I want to be left alone. Half my current life I don’t want to talk to people, listen to them or do anything with them. But I do it, because it’s better for me than being alone, even if I prefer being alone. Mad eh?
I still sometimes like and need to be alone though. Last night it was relatively warm, Romana was studying a presentation she had to give, I’d done my chores, kids were in bed, and I curled up on the bench in the garden, with the cushions, and headphones on listening to some good music for an hour and not even glancing at my phone (which was now in do not disturb mode), and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in a while.
Anger & self pity
I’ve put these two together here. There’s that “woe is me!” feeling which feels like the other side of the coin which is “you’re so f*cking happy and healthy and yet you drink and smoke and don’t exercise and do everything wrong! Feck off!”
These aren’t helpful emotions. But they exist and they’re real. And need acknowledging. And this tendency to anger means that when people get under your skin you have to decide whether they’re actually a positive impact on your life or not. I had a friend who was perfectly lovely and supportive in many ways, but the 2019 general election was coming up. She was very Momentum in politics even if it doesn’t quite chime with her middle class lifestyle, but that’s fine. The problem, the big moment, came when I’d posted something on Facebook about the Lib Dems who I support. She described Jo Swinson as “that vile woman.” And I flipped out. Had a go at her, blocked her, and that was that. She wasn’t the only person I did that to either.
I don’t miss these people I cut out, really. They had toxic personalities to me at that moment in time, and you know what you don’t need when you’re recovering from a major life event? People who are toxic. To you. They might be perfectly lovely people overall. People don’t get into Momentum or the Lib Dems or even the Conservatives, generally, in order to make the world worse. Sometimes they do, but that’s not usually the intention for most people. But those people can be terribly toxic to you. And I’m still recovering, so I don’t have the capacity to cope with that substantial difference of opinion.
I’ve got this! syndrome
Here’s an interesting one, and there’s probably a proper psychological term for it. But I just describe it as “I’ve got this! syndrome.”
A belief that I can deal with all of this. That all I have to do is eat perfectly, exercise perfectly, behave perfectly, care for myself perfectly, take the medication perfectly, be a perfect husband, be a perfect boss, be a perfect dad, a perfect patient, and everything will be fine.
Which is, quite frankly, delusional. There are no perfect people. Myself included.
This knowledge, sadly, doesn’t seem to stop me. I go through phases where I decide I’m going to run faster and further than ever before. Then I realise that in doing that, I’m skipping quality time with the kids, not doing laundry or jobs around the house… or I go camping with the kids and feel that I ate badly and didn’t do my run for the weekend… or I switch to alcohol free beer and then realise that actually it’s still full of simple carbs… or I think sod it, have the chocolate, but now I have to run extra hard, only to find that the extra hard running leaves me sore and exhausted the next day.
It’s probably PTSD
I guess this is that post-traumatic stress problem that people talk of.
So why don’t I get help?
Because I’m functioning, frankly. I’m not so depressed that I can’t get by. I’m not so anxious that nothing happens in my life. My kids are happy. I think my wife is happy. I think my colleagues are mostly happy. But each little setback, even if nothing to do with my health, sets me on a path of questioning and trying to work out how to be better, stronger, smarter, more organised, more caring, more focussed, better at caring for myself, better… better… better. Because that’s how I get over this and make the most of the 5-30 years I probably have left.
About that 5-30 years
All things being well, there’s no real reason why someone who’s had a bypass like me, following a heart attack (myocardial infarction) with relatively little damage to the heart shouldn’t live another 30 years. Maybe more. An active and full life. I’ve come across people in amazing shape, aged nearly eighty, thirty years on. They look amazing.
But I also see some people pass away. Some of my grafts were from veins and they’re just not so tough and have a high chance of failing after ten years. I could get really unlucky and they could block and cause trouble in a bad way. Which could kill me.
Who knows, eh? I certainly don’t. Nobody does. I just keep taking the pills and hope for the best. Speaking of which:
Now the good stuff: The weird disappearance of my xanthelasma
So, xanthelasma are interesting. I had a couple of these. Here’s a before and after shot:
Excuse the ropey shots used – I never set out to document the disappearance of these things, but there you go. I had them, now I don’t.
Xanthelasma are made of cholesterol, and are, in fact, an indicator of risk of cardiovascular problems. The fact they’ve gone is actually reassuring. I can see that my cholesterol levels in my blood, from blood tests, are about half what they used to be. This is potentially great news. I’m hoping it keeps me safe.
With blood pressure, we all know that high blood pressure is bad for the arteries. It damages them, and is linked to stiffening as well.
In this case you can see that I’d started logging my blood pressure in the top part of this chart in early 2019, half a year before my heart attack. Then I kind of lost interest. It was a bit high-ish but not so high as to be of any real concern. I didn’t worry too much.
But the heart attack came! I started logging everything as soon as I came home, and you can see how I did it very regularly by the density of data points. Sometimes I was measuring two or three times a day.
You can track it along until March 2020, when I came off beta-blockers. You can see that the blood pressure readings became a little more varied, with more readings above 120/80 – my target is to keep below that. The trend didn’t really change, but over 2021 I’ve noticed that if I’m over 120/80 it’s by a very small amount. Most typically I see readings around 110/70 which is exactly where I want it to be. Ever since then it’s been much the same, but I’ve zoomed in to show how my desire to measure my blood pressure quite suddenly tailed off. Because I felt a lot better. You get the odd spike, but they often go with a bit of relaxation.
Ten key things I do to try and help recover from the bypass
So now for a little list of the things I try to do to help myself. They don’t always work:
Exercise. I’m told this is the single best thing I can do. So I try and do at least three solid bouts of exercise which substantially raise my heartbeat each week. I also now try and incorporate some more strength exercise – sit ups, press ups, pull ups, etc. So long as my shoulders don’t hurt too much.
Cut out toxic people and walk away from disputes. I always stood my ground in a dispute in order to ensure a negotiated settlement was the end, or the other person would give up. Now, sometimes, I just think “nah, sod it. I don’t need the argument, and I don’t need these people. Step away.” I still need to be better at this, but watch out for it.
Eat reasonably well. Still like some treats though. I’m largely vegan, so I avoid dairy. I really enjoy a peanut bar with a bit of chocolate as a bit of a treat. But the rest of the time it’s wholegrains, plenty of protein, not too many simple carbs, no sugar in coffee, no sugary fizzy pop, no alcohol, no deep fried food, no cheesy food.
On the point of no alcohol, I still allow myself the odd glass. On very very rare occasions I’ve been known to have two glasses of wine. Needs to be a good reason though. Because alcohol is bad for you. Yes, even red wine. I could link to studies, but if you don’t believe me you’ll find the outdated studies that say it’s good for you, and if you do believe me… well, you don’t need further evidence do you?
Break work into chunks. I sometimes use a visual countdown timer, just to get things started. I allocate myself twenty minutes to at least start a task, and see what I can achieve in that time.
Self-care. If I can, I take time to myself. If it’s been gloomy I’ll allow myself six minutes on a sunbed (with sunblock on the scars) to give me a little boost. Not very often, but seems to lift me. Other things can include getting a haircut, going for a walk, or treating myself to something enjoyable.
The pills. Oh the pills. I take them carefully and religiously! Very occasionally I forget one, but it’s rare. They keep me alive. I also supplement with magnesium (it’s a mild calcium channel blocker and can help with relaxing) and some other multivitamins as feels appropriate.
Appreciate the people around me. They matter. They give me the support and grounding that I need.
Try not to think too much about work. You’re either working, or not working. It’s OK to not be busy when working and to be thinking. Don’t work eight hours, then think about work for another five hours, never quite present with other people.
Have things to actively look forward to. Your things, not the things you’re supposed to do. A mild bit of selfishness is OK – in fact it’s healthy. Just don’t make it pathological. If you’re spending more time playing golf than with you’re family you should probably tweak things or deal with why you prefer that to family. But enjoy yourself. Give yourself space for pleasure.
So that’s it. I just saw my word count and 2800+ words is far too many, really. If you’ve made it this far without merely scanning, then well done you! Take care 💖
Have you had a bypass operation? How did you recover? What tips do you have?
At 18 I was skint and got made homeless. It took a lot of graft, patience and mistakes to get out of that and into a moderate middle class lifestyle. Here’s how.
When I was 18 I found myself in a weird situation. October 1987. I’d just started my first job, straight from 6th form, and was happy with that. My favourite song the year before had been The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades. I was optimistic and hopefull. I’d done my A levels finally surrounded by people who actually cared about education. I was no star pupil at 6th form, except at computers, but computers were the big thing so I had confidence.
All good then. I mean it wasn’t perfect, but I just had a fresh optimism. I’d lived with my grandmother since I was about 12 (my childhood memories are imperfect and I have few witnesses to refer to. I’d been casually fostered for a number of years prior, was fed up, and had been dumped with her. She was one of the few consistent things in my life and could see I was breaking in front of her. So I in effect ‘divorced’ my father and she took custody of me. She lived in a mobile home type caravan at the time. She was poor, but stability mattered more to me. I got my education. The future felt very bright.
I got through the various stages of ICI (then one of the largest chemical firms around) to get a job in their computer centre as a trainee printer operator, with the idea being to climb into a programming job. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, my grandmother had been in a lot of pain and, within a day of being admitted to hospital (this is another story to tell) where we discovered she had terminal cancer. Very terminal. She had less than a week left.
I was so very alone. My father turned up, signed over to me to handle everything, then disappeared to South America, never to be seen again. In 1986, my mother who I had some mild relationship with, had taken her family to Spain and, for some reason, me being told and having a goodbye seemed to be forgotten… so I’d accepted they weren’t a factor in my life. That was it. Me, alone, in the world.
Things got quite bad, quite quickly. Here’s what I learned, what I did wrong, and what I think I did right.
The world is not your friend
When you grow up, generally there are adults who look after your interests and needs, until you’re old enough to do it for yourself. But often you feel this interconnectedness with everything being generally good. Often in adulthood we discover things can be quite different – especially if we have some failures. I think learning that the world isn’t your friend is important. I discovered, for example, that if you have no cash, you can’t just take over a substantial asset (a house, in this case) and expect to not pay off debts that your grandmother had. The answer should be simple – I could have borrowed from another bank or building society to buy the house off my grandmother’s estate. Except her bank refused unless my grandmother’s estate was up to date on the mortgage payments. And because my grandmother’s estate had debts and no income, it couldn’t make the mortgage payments, and I was advised that if I paid the mortgage it would potentially make me liable for everything. When you’re an eighteen year old that leaves you in a bind.
The bank took the house, and I was made homeless, briefly (I kept a spare key and let myself in at night to sleep on the floor!), and I quickly organised myself and bought a tiny flat. Good job, because the council wouldn’t help me, the bank wouldn’t help, renting privately was almost impossible for me. Thank heavens I was organised and found the right combination of people.
Finance is risky and can be expensive
Because I was young with little credit history, all finance was risky. I figured that with my job and my flat I could now live a little and went stupid, bought myself a small engined sports car – a Scimitar SS1 1300 if you’re a car geek – a tumble dryer and washing machine all on credit, and thought everything was great. But I had nobody around to advise me I was being dumb, remember? No parents, and even most of my friends had gone off to university.
What happened was that when something went wrong with the car, it really stretched my finances to fix it. Then it got stolen and damaged, and I either repaired it myself or my insurance would get really expensive. Every little bad thing that came up, made life harder. But I discovered that I couldn’t just sell the car and forget about the finance – the interest and the way they did it meant that I’d need the value of the car plus another £1k to pay it off. I was trapped.
Toxic parents usually remain toxic parents
My father was still in touch with me, but for some reason thought I had plenty of money. So when he got into financial trouble in South America, he started giving me hard luck stories about how dangerous things were, that he was going blind (or a bit long sighted as we call it now), and he needed £1.5k. Or £3.5k in today’s money. I was 19, skint, and instead he banged on about how I must have had money from my grandmother’s death and my good job. “Yeah, Dad, but you’re not here and you have no idea.”
However, guilt led me to do my best. I sent him all my spare cash for a couple of months, before finally arranging a loan. I used some of it to consolidate my credit card debts, and two thirds went to him. I sent him, if I remember correctly, about £800 in total. He wrote to say he was struggling and needed more and he was in a dangerous situation I didn’t understand.
So I did what I felt was the right thing – I spoke to the Foreign Office, and eventually secured a facility for him to be able to catch a flight home, where he’d at least get benefits.
I called him, told him the good news, he was furious. And that was the last time I spoke to him. Ultimately, narcissistic, self-centred and selfish people rarely understand that other people have struggles. They just don’t get it. And they stay that way.
Stability matters
One thing I did right was to stay at ICI for many years. I kept that job. My head wasn’t in the best place, so I wasn’t the best employee, but I was useful and smart enough to keep it as well, and had some reasonable progression. For a while I’d been renting rooms after financially over-extending when I lived in my flat, and that job gave me the much needed anchor to my life. Eventually I bought a house with my then girlfriend. That stability then allowed me to think about taking a risk again… But it also established a nice final salary pension plan that will still be useful even 40 years after leaving!
I went contracting
Sometimes, income really matters. I don’t think contracting is for everyone. I hated some aspects of it, and it ruined my relationship at the time because I was away from home so much. But it really helped bring in money, which then really helps you to just establish a buffer of more than a month or two of money. Suddenly I felt like I had an actual surplus and proper savings. I got rid of the rust wreck of a Peugeot and bought a three year old Rover. I started to dress more smartly. I had nearly ten years of this solid and high income and it probably made the biggest difference of all to me.
At the end of my ten years, inflation and low interest rates made my mortgage look tiny, I had asset wealth in the house, shares, and low outgoings. When you’re in that situation, as many middle classes get born into, you can start to take risks. I decided to set up a proper web development business, now called Interconnect.
I could have lost a lot with Interconnect, and we came close to giving up. It didn’t ever give me more income than contracting – not even close. But it does give me another source of stability. And that, dear readers, is worth more than you might think.
I learned about how money and how the stock market works
There’s one book I read early one which just opened my eyes to the world of money. I’ve bought it several times, lent it to people, forgot who I leant it to and lost it! Doesn’t matter, it’s worth it. Its called How The Stock Market Really Works and it goes way beyond stocks, shares, and bonds, but into planning, risks, retirement and so on. In reading it, several times, I established a baseline of understanding that stopped me falling for scams, stopped me making bad investments, and generally helped me ensure I could make best use of the spare money I had.
I no longer pushed my finances hard
Now I understood money better, I knew that, for example, if you have assets of £100k and a debt you can’t pay of £50k, you’re in a really really bad situation. If you have assets of £10k, a debt of £100k and some short term cash flow issues, then you’re in a strong position to start negotiating. Why? Because if you have no assets and a big debt, the bank can’t recoup anything much if they send in the bailiffs. Once their costs are accounted for, they lose everything. So they’re more willing to negotiate. If you have loads of assets, you’re stuffed. That was, in effect, what the bank did to take my grandmother’s home from me when I was younger. They had no motivation to negotiate with me.
So you either max out your finances, Donald Trump style, or you very carefully segregate them. Because I value stability and security above all else, I segregate them.
I learned to think like an accountant
After ICI, I spent a lot of time working in corporate finance departments on their software.
Here’s a thought experiment. You have £10,000. You go out and buy a car for £9,000. How much are you worth? The naïve answer is £1,000. You see yourself as £9,000 worse off. But if your car helps you earn more money by opening up a job you otherwise couldn’t reach where you’ll earn £5,000 a year more, then you have two things happening:
First, your balance remains at £10k, because you have a £9k car and £1k of cash.
Secondly, you have a future benefit over, say, the five years you expect to have the car, of £25k. So over the five year period, assuming the car becomes worthless, you’ll end with £26k on the balance sheet. Or you use that £26k to put into a mortgage which, again, is generally a good move because it’s a limit liability loan secured on property which, in most economies, is a pretty safe bet.
But all accountants will say that cashflow is of utmost importance. You may have a pile of assets, but if you can’t service your responsibilities then you become insolvent – you can’t always easily sell assets without a big loss. So always think about cashflow – it’s best to be gently increasing your cash position as your wealth grows.
I learned to let go of status plays
When I was young I caused myself trouble by buying that sports car. It wasn’t, in itself, a bad buy on the surface – sports cars depreciate more slowly, the insurance on this one was the same as a similar powered Ford Escort, and it didn’t use any more fuel. And it’s not like a 19 year old needs to carry a family. Two seats was fine. Reliability wasn’t great either. But where it went wrong is that my boss therefore believed he paid me too much! My older superiors didn’t like that I had, on the surface of it, a fancier car than they did.
Of course, I was financed to the hilt, and they weren’t. They didn’t know that. They just assumed I had more money than I let on to.
Had I been in a humbler car, they’d have had no idea of my financial status.
It’s better to let people assume you’re a bit skint, and focus on reliability plays in order to establish your career. Took me into my thirties to work that one out.
Same with clothes. Stick to cheap clothes until buying them is easy. If you do what young me did and buy everything on credit at Top Man and Burton’s (yeah I know) then you’re setting yourself up for bad decisions and bad outcomes.
Adaptable accent and open attitudes
I’m actually quite Scouse yet a lot of people I meet and work with down South just think generic, educated Northerner with a light accent. The reality is I just adapt my accent to suit the situation. This means I don’t terrify upper middle class people, whilst I can still sit and have a chippy lunch with garage mechanics. Non-threatening to everyone, basically. I accept that most people know stuff I don’t, that they believe they’re trying their hardest (they may not be trying optimally, or coping badly, but I accept their belief), and generally try to learn from the people I meet.
Meet lots of people from different backgrounds
The more people you meet, the more lives you get to understand, the more mistakes you can avoid and the more opportunities can come up. Local politics can teach you how councils and Westminster works. Bankers can tell you how finance works. Medics can give you really good reasons why you shouldn’t smoke, drink, or eat too much sugar! Bin men can teach you that you can make a good living even if you’re not well educated (or are – there are some very well educated bin men and women out there). Truckers can tell you how their industry works.
Just avoid the cynical and the put upon – there’s little useful information there.
One good thing with the internet today is that there’s so much sharing online that you can virtually meet almost anybody, from African villagers to corporate board members. Just be kind and open and remember that they’re all humans, every one of them.
What about you?
None of the above is unique to me, or in any way makes me special. I just think they’re what helped me. Feel free to comment on what you’ve experienced. Everyone lives different lives and found different ways out of poverty traps. And of course, some people find themselves ground down by a system that can be unfriendly and downright hostile at times which means they can never escape, no matter how hard they work.
