Adam Belson, Software Engineer
As a young boy Adam was given a computer. He is very old and it was along time ago so you can imagine just how useless it was. After loading the operating system from a cassette he then spent hours typing in programs published in magazines - these rarely worked properly so he fixed them. Later he refused to join his schools computer club because he knew most of what they were talking about already and the teacher who ran it was smelly.
Some time later he went to university in order to play with computers some more. Despite being some time later and despite the fact that the computer there was the size of a modest family car he found it able to do very little that interested him - in fact the only thing it did seem to be able to do was take 20 minutes to compile ten lines of Pascal code. He left to study drama instead.
For the next ten years he went a bit theatrical - this is an excellent job if you aren't actually acting every day as it mostly involves drinking and mostly doesn't involve computers. However, the most important thing that it mostly doesn't involve is large pay packets. So Adam took another day job at the BBC.
The BBC was at that time in the process of weeing our licence fee up the wall with pointless non-programme producing departments all of whom seemed to need databases. Adam ended up doing a bit of data inputting into spreadsheets (which had been invented by then) for a database that hadn't been written yet. This was deeply tedious and the fools left the software manual for the database system lying about - so he wrote it without telling to help him get through the days. Once it was confirmed that elves don't do databases in the night - only shoes - a high level inquiry was instigated and Adam was caught. He was sentenced to be made to take permanent employment with the Beeb writing software. As an additional cruel and unusual punishment they paid him enough to leave the theatre which meant he couldn't go to the pub quite as much (although the local wine bar wasn't bad).
He has been trapped in computers ever since like the blokes from Tron but without quite such fluorescent suits (told you he was old). He has now been enslaved to the Masters of Information Technology for twelve years or so.
In that time he has done the evil bidding of; several BBC departments; a number of dot coms that exploded with a satisfying pop in the 90's; truckload of consultancies. He was for 12 years Head of Technology for an Energy Trading Company writing everything from trading web sites to an application to decide whose turn it is to make the tea. He was also sometimes in charge a bit. Until recently he has worked as a consultant writing calculators for a clean electricity company.
He was one of the original triumvirate of B's in 3B - being a very old friend of the brothers Bremer - but sat back for a few years doing different things in the hope that they would build up a great big business doing fun stuff and then ask him to be involved again out of pity. This they appear to have done as he is now helping out when the tip top team need some additional hands on the pump.
He likes to find out how to do things with computers that he doesn't already know how to do - because that's when computers are fun. He has written hundreds of applications to do hundreds of things for hundreds of people and can still remember how to do nearly all of them again and will do if asked (and occasionally paid). He likes music and sport - but not football.
He isn't on Facebook.
