Mel Christie
The Alternative CV
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing - Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Developer with an interest in the various Tai Chi forms including a bit of Taijijian (sword).
Never lived anywhere without a piano by my side.
2022 Next
The kids have left,
so
more
time,
some new writing,
but
less
piano. What next? You can Google it, but what would the tarot reveal?
2011 Virtual, USA
A couple of acquisitions later ended with SAP, roaming the corporate structure before returning to Cloud Ops to deliver products to Sales teams. As Lars said, Everyone works in Sales.
1998 Washington, DC
A choice between the UK and the US. But it was back in DC where Sensory joined Plateau, I got
married,
had
babies.
And
started
the
Operations
unit
for
our
first
Cloud
customer
(installed
while
watching
Liverpool
beat
AC
Milan
in
the
Miracle of Istanbul)... Until Cloud Ops took over two thirds of the customer base.
1995 Hong Kong
A long nascent idea took root as the Pure Goodness Radio Company amidst the swirls of Tropical Storm Helen. Originally intended to stream lounge music on the Internet (Keith Jarrett, etc.), it was possibly the first web design company in Hong Kong... A digital nomad existence that included working for Sensory and others from a beach. Nightly code transfers on a hissing modem courtesy of CompuServe.
1993 Falls Church, VA
I broke my achilles and found it easier to work closer to home. As luck would have it, this translated into joining a startup called Sensory where we dropped apps for hard hat workers from the Nuclear Power industry.
1992 Washington, DC
Looking to leave London I got lost in North Carolina until I was posted to DC to rollout IT networks for air traffic control. Great reason to travel the States. Installed at eighty air traffic control centres, I didn't get to Hawaii or New Orleans but I did get to Oklahoma City and Kansas.
1991 Travels along La Ruta Maya
A circuitous path from Teotihuacan to Tegucigalpa.
1989 Sunny West Drayton
Late nights with Chubs, Shorty and the air traffic controllers, a slightly mad crew, at Heathrow's air traffic control centre. Before working on a new system using a language named after the world's first computer programmer,
Ada Lovelace.
1987-1988 Travels in Egypt and the Far East
Beautiful, heady days through much of SE Asia and China, with some writing on the side.
1985 Down and out in Watford and Paris
First engineering job, developing medical devices used to analyze blood samples (Assembler burnt into circuit chips in large machines that span test tubes around). And being bossed around by elders who thought they knew everything.
1983 University College London, UK
Sat comm research sounded better than it was and resulted in PowerPoints for Ericsson in Gothenburg. The highlight!
1983 CERN, Geneva
At the birthplace of the World Wide Web I worked on more particle-physics matters
before WWW was quite there. Weekends spent with a Swedish contingent (strangely) in adjoining countries.
1980 University College London, UK
Side job as a travel agent selling rich folks Corfu package holidays from a room with a view right above Leicester Square station. Otherwise the degree highlight was controlling microscopes used to detect sub-atomic particles. Developed using a hex keypad to enter the code which was fun in an obsessive compulsive kind of way.
Not missed an FA Cup Final since the age of eight, but as a Tottenham supporter always destined for disappointment! Audere est Facere.
The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused - Shirley MacLaine, Going Within