I used to work for a company called EDS in Telford. I didn’t stay long and, if I’m honest, it was one of the weirdest places I’ve ever worked at. For 6 months nobody could really tell me what my job title was or what I was meant to do with the day. There really didn’t seem to be a whole lot to do – I had Tivoli and HP Network Node Manager and three PC’s with huge screens, however it only seemed to take me an hour to do what they thought was 8 hours worth of work. I wrote a Unix script after about 3 months which chopped this down to about 10 minutes. They gave me a payrise for it too, which I found hilarious.
After 6 months I decided that I and several hundred others had probably been employed simply to validate the millions that the government were / are feeding EDS to do Inland Revenue and Employment Service contracts. We even used to have meetings which lasted several weeks to decide when to change a backup tape or something. Nightmare. I nearly fell asleep in one meeting too.
It was bad, although I did manage to spend about 7 hours a day reading books and learning Unix stuff. :) I also went on a few courses and drank the bar dry at the hotel. Excellent stuff.
However, I did meet a few cool people whilst working there. Marc was one of them and I’m glad to see he’s still doing his rather excellent music stuff. He’s now in a band called “Prospect Lane” and they sound pretty decent indeed. He’s even managed to get out of EDS too.. nice one mate! :)
Link – Prospect Lane