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For my 17th birthday I was given a course of driving lessons. On my first lesson I was told to put in for my test as there was a waiting list and I would pass as I was a natural. I bought my first car, a Hillman Minx. What did I want to do? Basically, I hadn’t a clue. I’d had no career advice and I thought that as I was good at maths, maybe I’d get a job in a bank. But I didn’t want to go into an English bank, which I thought would be boring, so I tried some foreign ones. At my interview with the Bank of America I had to take an aptitude test and I got turned down because of the result. Believe it or not I scored too high! ‘You’d be bored said the interviewer. I wish I’d taken his advice and looked for something different, but no, I carried on and got offered a job with the Australia and New Zealand Bank at their head office in London. I stayed there three years and guess what. I got bored. The only good bit was being a member of the darts team who won the league and cup double that year. After that I tried a job as a Sales Rep for a greeting card firm and hated it, and then I managed to get into an advertising agency as a Trainee Media Executive. The idea was to get in and then somehow get a transfer into a more creative and artistic job within the company. Then I started getting migraines caused, I now know, by sick building syndrome. Something in the air conditioning was bringing them on. I suffered with severe migraines for many years afterwards, virtually always on Sundays, which at the time seemed very odd to me, although I now know the reason. I started applying for various jobs and got offered two on the same day. One was as a Cartographer with the Land Registry and the other as a Trainee Computer Programmer with Twinlocks (my high IQ had finally been of some use). It was 1966 and Computing was in it’s infancy so that’s the job I took. Whether it was the right choice was a different matter.