Some great life stories in here chaps, here's mine....
Left school at 15, worked for a jobbing builder mostly did extensions, great grounding for DIY stuff to come.
Aprenticship at GEC Traction, electrical engineer. Broad based Engineering training 50% mechanical 50% electrical 2 years, then spent a few months in each dept for the next couple of years.
Joined the RN, Clearence Diver, Pompy bomb team, various minehunters HMS Wilton, HMS Nurton, HMS Cottesmore, and then on instruction staff at Horsea Island Defense Diver training School. Highlights included rendering safe IEDs in woolworths (animal rights tried to firebomb fur retailers in the 80's) blowing up WWII sea mines (2500kg of TNT is by far the best fishing method
) and looking at an awful lot of FBRs on the seabed around our fair isle. Got as far north as Narvik in Norway, as far south as Gib, went round the UK about 5 times, got my name as finder on 3 wrecks around Dunkirk! Drank lots of beer, fell in love at every port
Left the mob, got a pub in Stockport (now boarded up, a victim of no smoking rules) Hated it so much we stayed there 10 years! Got head hunted to put a R&D team together to prove a new Diver Detection port defense Sonar system, went round the world doing various defense exhibitions, live demos etc. Highlights include breaking columbian special forces in Cartagena Harbour, getting a go on the Victory team offshore powerboat in UAE, meeting Nelson Mandella in S.A. I also ran a small computer business from the pub, PCs were just going mainstream, everyone wanted a cheap PC which were easy to build from off the shelf parts.
We also had a bit of a property portfolio, buying run down terrace houses and me doing them up and renting them out, did a full resto and big extension on a big 1930's semi which was going to be our place to bring up a family, then we found we couldn't have kids.
2000 came around, decided to sell up everything and look for a smallholding to get away from it all, got gazzumped 4 times over the next few yrs. Got head hunted again to cover the Northern half of the country for a telephone recording company, designing and implementing anything from a signle line recorder to a fully integrated call centre solution with 100 T1s with remote desktop agent screen recording; the carrot at the end of the stick never appeared so binned it to do a big property development when we found the current building we're in.
2004 went all in on an industrial building that didn't have residential planning permission, and wouldn't have got it if we'd applied. The access was shared with a narrowboat marina which came up for sale, so we bought that while we were waiting for the planning issue to timelapse. Developed the marina, then sold it last year so we can concentrate on finally doing the building renovation.
2006 Mrs started a dog boarding business, I thought it was a hobby thing, but within a few yrs it looked a better business than the marina. We had so many dogs with issues that I decided to find a way to work with problem dogs, we got a bit of a reputation for dog behavoir work, just from word of mouth people started phoning me up out of the blue to help them with their dogs, I felt a bit out of my depth on some calls, so decided to get propper qualified, I've just finished the final part of my professional Graduate course, I am now a fully qualified canine communication specialist.
Currently: waiting for the architect to finish plans so we can finally get the panning issues sorted, half the building will be for dog boarding/training with the new part being our living space (with heating and everything!). Hope to get building work started this year, bit of a logistic nightmare atm, trying to work out if we can keep the business open while we do some construction, I have no idea where all the dogs can go while we have underfloor heating installed, not sure we'll all fit in the caravan!
re-reading that lot I missed out loads, mostly failed business ideas
I hated school not least because it kept from work where i was always welcome in a scrapyard or on farms and at some point i was sent by the school on a weeks work experience scaffolding . The best part of a year later our head tutor found me still on the scaffold with a fag in my gob and said "Shayne i haven't seen you but just so you know exams start next week and if you don't sit them you may be forced to do another year at school , and niether of us want that!"
