My (alternative) CV

Experience
2001- *****-**** Ltd
As a Director of this high-technology startup company, I get to work from home and make the coffee, decorate and babysit. I also have to talk to a small number of customers and astronomical numbers of doltish sceptics who aren’t. We do anything which requires a creative approach to making things work -and which can help fund my caffeine addiction.

2001-2001 Stringvestment East Ltd
Despite having my lips stapled together, I lasted a month at this tax-funded quango. They were supposed to be attracting inward investment, but actually the Women’s Institute do a more effective job. Low pay, political correctness and panto-politics by people who wouldn’t know an investment opportunity if it leapt up and bit their ass. I left my suit behind and I’m told it’s now in charge of an entire department.

2000-2001 Fishshit Merchandising Plc
Before realising that it was all funded by inherited, untaxed cash, I worked like hell to ensure that these guys didn’t lose all the clients to their cocaine habit. Eating fried egg sandwiches whilst hungover in meetings was considered an essential part of the board’s rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. I won’t dwell on the prostitutes and the drug money laundering. Then they sacked me and the industrial tribunal scared them into a payout. Truly an example of the best in modern management.

1994-2000 Demonfart University
This crowd had just been handed a big cheque by the government to keep the local ineducate youf under control. I was hired after about 9 interviews by a status-obsessed, drunken vice chancellor. Thankfully, this period allowed me to do my own thing almost entirely and that included a great deal of house restoration and babysitting. Eventually they twigged and suggested that I could teach some courses, if I liked.

1990-94 SHAMBLES Ltd
I tried to run a professional software marketing operation, despite the best effort of the lunatic MD, a retired academic nazi who used to slap the Chinese development staff members. After being sacked (by fax) I set up a new division of the company and we competed with the UK parent, despite legal threats. The VP of sales, an ex US Marine, went completely Iwo Jima and pulled the plug.

1987-90 XYZ Technology Portfolio Consulting Group International Ltd
Great fun spending the budgets of international clients on making whizzy technology to daftly tight timescales. Forced to work for a boss who was the ultimate twitching conformist, I left after developing several interesting bilge pumps….and doubled my salary.

1986-1987 4 Lowlife St
Unemployed house decorator, daytime tv critic and babysitter

1986-1987 Museum of Abstract Theoryfying, University of Cambridge
Worked as a post-doc for a vampiric mathematician who regarded all of science and everyone below professor as his personal property. I walked out when my patronisation detector melted.

1985-86 Dodgy Engineering Ltd
Worked for a weasely Glaswegian with a seriously limited sense of humour and a schoolboyish approach to amateur lechery. After only a few months chainsawing in the snow I quickly realised that my vocation lay elsewhere.

Ejucation
1997- 99 St Barclay’s College, Cambridge University (MSc)
Working on a real PhD, my supervisor died and the department shut me out “that strange Irish fellow (was) having ideas incompatible with his status”. I got to see some real Science, though, despite the best efforts of the university administration to destroy its own brand by a combination of toadying and laziness..

1982-85 Hairyoldtwitt University (PhD)
Three years of fun in the festival city. I was paid to have all-day coffee breaks and played a mean game of indoor football. I supervised ‘workshop practice’ and almost no students were hospitalised during my lathework classes. Completed a thesis centring on steam engine technology which had been perfected in 1829.

1979-82 Imperial College, London, B.Sc. (Eng.)
As an engineering undergraduate, I just managed to avoid failing by adopting toxic caffeine dosage and perpetual stewing over problem sheets about redesigning 30-year old powerstations. It was a collection of soulless grey towerblocks each with a queue to commit suicide. Fun was outlawed; creativity would see you expelled. There were no women and the staff were almost uniformly unhelpful pencil-neck Cambridge rejects. I’ve tried to hand back my degree but they wouldn’t reimburse the fees. Don’t go there.

1972-79 Regiment House School, N. Ireland
Wasted much too much time playing rugby and mooning around after girls who later married some real mrpotatoheads. I managed to survive a martinet father, unlimited television and a terrorist war in the background.

Personal
My interests include:

reform of higher education
celebrating absurdity
curiosity-driven Science
parenthood
avoiding employment and starvation, simultaneously
toxic caffeine