As a teenager I had a job delivering potatoes to fish and chip shops across the staffordshire plains. The boss had a book called a ready-reckoner to help calculate the bills.

I remember the books of sin/cos/tan tables, normal distribution figures etc. I also remember that they would contain small rounding errors on specific values as a means of checking whether or not a rival publisher had violated the copyright.

My first IT job had me loading 1/4 inch tapes for backup purposes. You had to master a strange TiChi maneuver to get the ultimate efficient loading technique!

Then there was the short straw of having to crawl through the roof space with a crimping tool to wire up a 25 pin plug to connect the mini-computer to dumb terminals. A job made harder by the fact that the boss used to bribe us with whiskey!

Happier times, and as Phil Factor once described, a time when having an interesting personality disorder was a pre-requisite for a career in IT.