Andrew Hill
I overheard someone describe me with that phrase many years
ago and it seems to have stuck.
design[at]ahi2000.com
Respectable.rebel
I had a good education and a successful career
found me running my own consultancy firm in the early 1980s,
primarily advising senior management on the intricacies of
pension funds. Suits, smart offices, secretaries and a fondness
for Switzerland may have had something to do with the respectable
bit. Or maybe it was because I had, and still have, a tendency
to open doors for ladies, get annoyed at people who throw
litter in the street and paid more attention than most to
grammar and spelling - what now seem terribly old-fashioned
things.
civil.service
My work brought me into close contact with
many civil servants, and officials in large institutions where
I was quite incapable of hiding my views on the amazing amount
of unecessary form-filling, procedures created almost for
the sake of creating procedures and the quite extraordinary
effort that had to be made to get someone to do something
that was slightly different to the way that they had been
doing it for years before. It took a while, but eventually
I began to realise that the people who drafted the regulations
and documents that I was concerned with were not that much
different to you and me in that they made mistakes from time
to time. What was different was that no-one ever seemed to
admit to it or do anything about it. That's when I got the
rebel bit. I fought hard for what was fair and just for my
clients and only filled in the bits on forms which I knew
organisations didn't have already. I joined the Plain English
campaign and actually made a pretty respectable living from
translating jargon into something we can all understand without
losing any of a document's specific legal intentions.
first.computer
Computers first entered my life in 1980 in
the form of a Dictaphone Dual Display system which used massive
8" floppy, very floppy, disks. I recall that the printer
was so noisy we bought a clear perspex hood affair to put
over it! Just one unit cost £11000. It was absolutely
brilliant and in the early days I spent far more time working
with it than any of the staff I had bought it for.An Amstrad
PCW helped me produce some short stories and novels in the
early 1990s until I began lecturing on the wonders of Windows
in 1995.
still.here
Now, in the 21st Century, I have been lecturing
in IT and Business & Management, and am a member of the
Academic Board of Dunstable College where I am also their
ILT Co-ordinator. Remarkably, I have also survived nearly
five years part-time secondment to LSDA and now the Learning
& Skills network (LSN) as an E-learning Co-ordinator trying
to make sense of government initiatives too. I'm surrounded
by PCs these days and probably addicted to my laptop! I work
ridiculously long hours but I do thoroughly enjoy it. That's
me. If you really want more then my CV is available at the
link opposite. |
Respectable Rebel
Designer
Writer
Lecturer
Collector
Lazybones
More.info
CV life story on a
page minus the juicy bits.
Images Photos and
design work |
