15 years ago whilst working as a sales manager for a major company in the City I had a secretary. One day I went into my office to find an oik beneath the desk laying a lot of cabling. The following day a PC appeared on the desk. It sat there for 6 months doing nothing until my secretary showed me how to turn it on. It sat for a further 6 months turned on but doing nothing. Then she went on maternity leave, the temps were no bloody good and after some months of increased frustration I got a call telling me that my sec had resigned to spend time raising her new baby (having taken the company for all the maternity leave with pay that she could get). I contacted HR to be told that the decision had been taken NOT to replace her. I went to the MD and discovered that all secs had been given redundancy notices (except his of course) and that we had all had PCs for over a year now and could manage our own typing etc. So I had to learn to use the bloody thing. I also bought one for home use, reasoning that I need not go into the office to type letters but would bring home some headed paper and do a lot of work from there. I then fell ill and was eventually "retired". We are now 10 years ago. I became interested in family history and took out a subscription with Freeserve for dial up internet access. Taught myself to use the internet from there. At first my only interest was in using it to look things up, when I didn't have a book that covered the topic, and in looking for details to help in my family tree researches. Then I discovered that one could look up phone numbers and other such stuff ~ which was handy. When we moved to North Wales I decided to start a Community Magazine (many reasons, not relevant here) and started to use the PC more and more but still mainly as a word processor.
One day, reading Private Eye, I spotted a piece (can't remember if it was an ad or an article) about GOM and joined that forum. Got well into the exchanges on there and then got slung out for joining BM in setting up this enterprise. Now I spend up to 10 hours a day at the keyboard, split 70/30 between the internet (here and elsewhere) and word processing articles for my own and other magazines, periodicals etc. This is the only "Chat" forum I use although I do look in at GOM, as a "visitor",from time to time. Tried one or two others but they didn't suit me for one reason or another so if I am not here or logged on but not posting I am researching other stuff for my writing/ family tree/ kids homework etc.
I don't do gaming, music downloads or movies on line. I do use the internet to listen to the cricket commentaries as Long Wave reception in this area is poor.
