Thoughts of a carer

  When I’m asked about my occupation these days, I reply ‘carer’. It is often written that caring has a big impact on an individual’s life, and, indeed, their freedom; I can only go by my experience. Caring has completely changed my life. In this essay I shall try to explain how.  I’ve actually had three phases of caring: pre-critical illness, during critical illness, and post-critical illness. Viv’s ‘during’ phase lasted fifteen months, after which she began a slow recovery; the effects on me of what happened in that time will last much longer. In an attempt to relate the effect of caring to that of another challenge I’ve experienced, I’d like to go back fifty years. Daily life and freedoms as a Bluecoat boy, 1971 In 1970 I was admitted to Christ’s Hospital , the Bluecoat school. I’ve seldom claimed to have enjoyed the six years I spent there; it should have been seven but I persuaded my parents to agree to me leaving at seventeen, rather than study further to attempt to get ...

  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 ...