Is this cheating?
When I was a smaller god, my Dad was self-employed. He ran his own Management Consultancy business. Anyway, he ran this psychometric test on his victims (err, subjects) and had to process the results. This took him two weeks with an elderly, mechanical, hand-cranked calculator. I mean, it was the early 80s, but even so...

One weekend, I was bored, so I wrote a program to do the calculations on our ZX Spectrum (no, really). He was rather amazed by this, and checked it out. All well and good, as it saved him two weeks billable time. Experience of work number 1: Customers will pay two weeks of billed time, but it now takes two minutes = customers will pay two weeks, but you can fit more in.

Anyway, as all good things do, we got busted. It seems that people twigged on to this one. So we changed the plan. He wanted to pretend his business had A Computer, and was therefore Cutting Edge. (Did I mention this was 1983?)

So, to the plan. He'd go to the customer, get them to fill the forms in (he'd basically be billing for staring out the window and drinking coffee at this point). Then, he'd do ten minutes work totting up the numbers. Then, he phoned me 'at the office'. I typed the numbers into our Spectrum, and then took a number to call him back on.

Then, I waited five minutes again, then called him back with the results. He'd thank me politely, hang up, and continue doing whatever it was that he did.

When he got home, he bunged me a fiver. That works out at about sixty quid an hour, which I've yet to better even now.

So, pretty good really. I never did the work experience thing, but I did spend my summers working various jobs. Of which more later, maybe.

(Feel free to click 'I like this' if you remember typing on an original Issue 1 ZX Spectrum 'dead flesh' keyboard!)
(purplegod counting down for Christmas!, Fri 11 May 2007, 18:33, Reply)