I was one of those people that had to leave school at 16 - don't ask me why, but it was time to move on in life and away from formal education. So, after trying out jobs such as a Trainee Manager for two supermarkets (yep, it took me two goes to work out that retailing wasn't the business for me), and a few months on a job training scheme as a summer entertainer for children, I decided to work with disabled people at the local Cheshire Home - especialy as I got free board and lodging too.
I spent a year or two learning most of what there is to know about caring for severely disabled people except, of course, what it feels like to have your communications ability severely restricted. That bothered me and I would spend a long time with the residents listening to them as they slowly spat out through speech impediments what they had to say.
One day a Belgian girl came to the Home for a summer holiday and to learn English. She had been paralysed from the neck down in a trapeze accident. When I discovered she had nobody to look after her for her first year when she returned to attend university that autumn, I offered my services - wouldn't it be wonderful to spend a year or so in a foreign country?
Well it was. I learned to speak French pretty well, but more to the point, the TRS-80 was released while I was there. I spent all my wages on buying one and lugged it home from the center of Brussels by Tram and Train. It took all day but it was worth it. I took to computing like a duck to water. And some of the first programs I wrote were for the disabled girl.
On my return to England I went to a different Cheshire Home to resume my career as a Care Assistant. But now that I had a computer, and had learned how to program, I began to find all sorts of things I could do for the residents. A few coincidences and a few like-minded people led to us creating the first Cheshire Home Computer Room, and I moved from being a Care Assistant to working full time for Compaid (a term I coined for the project).
Here you see just a glimpse of the kinds of things I was involved with on a daily basis.
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