Thoughts of a carer

  If you look me up on Linkedin ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/philbutton/ ) you'll know that I worked in IT for 36 years - that's around half of the time that IT has existed, if you think about it. Computing, as it was in the seventies, wasn't something I ever really enjoyed, but, as with anything to which you commit more than half your life, I have a sometimes-useful mine of experience from those days. What I find frustrating is that lessons have clearly not been fully learned from the mistakes my colleagues and I made maybe 20 or 30 years ago. Invoicing cock-up One story from a role I had many years ago relates to invoicing. At the time I was working on a fulfillment system, which interfaced to invoicing - because, of course, once an order is fulfilled you need to invoice the customer.  The invoicing team told me they would be running some tests at the weekend, which didn't really affect me. I was just not to tinker with any data that they had set up specifically to ...

I've just come off the phone after a regular chat with my mum. She's 88, living in a tiny bungalow in what was once a development of sheltered accomodation in South Cambridgeshire. (I say 'what was once' because, some years after she moved in, the council gave up on the 'sheltered' idea, just giving the residents a phone number to phone if they needed anything, and once-a-week visits from a council officer.) My mum was quite mobile in January 2020, but, as our leaders gradually put the fear of God into people, she stayed indoors in her tiny home from March that year. 'Use it or lose it' is the phrase my osteopath uses with regards to muscle strength, and, by February 2021, my mum was hospitalised due to her legs not working. She then spent maybe ten days in Addenbrookes followed by a couple of weeks in a rehab unit, where they were apparently much in demand due to the numbers of old people who'd stopped walking during the lockdown. By March my mum wa...