Back in the UK
I had no job, and no car. I also didn't know it, but there had been a dramatic decline in the mainframe market in the UK since I left. It was very fortunate that I was able to find another job within three months, in October '90. This time I was working for CKS, a small British software company, as distributor manager. Starting salary was £35,000, but then I had to take on Marketing Manager responsibilities, which put my guarantee up to £55,000, and on target around £70,000.
My youngest son, Michael, died very suddenly the February just after we came back to England. He was just fourteen months old. He was the best of us. Michael fell ill on Saturday afternoon; we took him to see our doctor on Sunday morning, who told us to bring him back in two days if he wasn't better. Liz stayed up all night holding him, as he was constantly sick. Just after 6am on Monday, she thought she felt him fall asleep. When we next looked, he was dead. This happened at a time that CKS wasn't faring as well as they hoped, and I was made redundant as they downsized in July '91.
I was unemployed again, with a large loan taken out to buy a car and a new NeXT cube. One good point was that we had taken out unemployment insurance on the loan, or so I thought. This was disputed by the Abbey National who supplied the loan, and I ended up with the loan added on to our house mortgage.
Liz was doing a small amount of PC training (at about £150 per day), and I was looking for mainframe jobs. I managed to get a little PC and Unix training work, when it became obvious that I wasn't going to find a well paid mainframe job.
I had bought a NeXT cube in April '91, as I wanted to get a proper Unix workstation, having become interested in Unix while working in Saudi. One of my options was to build up enough expertise to be able to consult with NeXT customers, so I started to follow the NeXT forum on Compuserve to build up expertise.
In November (or thereabouts), I took a NeXT Programming class. This was good, as I talked with the instructor about running NeXT systems admin and hardware classes; NeXT apparently needed someone extra to do this. After a few weeks, I had a contract with NeXT to provide all their classes in the UK, with a rate of about one class every six weeks.
As it happened, NeXT never scheduled even one of those classes. They had an agreement with me that prevented me from offering NeXT training, but weren't giving me anything in return.
In June I resigned the contract, and the same week picked up a large amount of training for Swiss Bank. A couple of weeks after that, I got a call from a guy I had talked to about doing some NeXT work together, in the UK. He was now working for Phibro in Houston, doing sys admin, and was I doing anything?
