The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Seven

If you read The Kwiksave Chronicles of Slobberchops , then I can tell you this is going to be in a similar vein to that series. Yeah, it's going to go on and on and maybe never end. Ready?

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The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops will go into some detail over the next few weeks.. er article's about part of my life when I was young, misguided and brash.

Like many, I was once a Software Pirate. That's not unusual in itself but I have a few stories to tell about what happened, and I'll try and not bore you all to tears.

Other article's in this series:


The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part One
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Two
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Three
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Four
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Five
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Six

June 1987

During the summer of 1986, Henry Boot unceremoniously dispatched me using the clause 'Redundancy'.

This technical term worked well for them, but it was really a case of a management shift and the new breed taking a dislike to this smart-ass kid who sometimes was guilty of being a little mouthy.

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Speaking of the 'new breed', these guys were ex-builders and had only had a fleeting vision of what a computer was in their lifetimes as 'brickies'.

I suspect Henry Boot would have lost their lucrative government contract with the Manpower Services Commission in short order after I left as they now had no computer instructor and this was a mandatory position.

I found myself an unemployed layabout for the best part of a year and decided to go back to college and gained a couple of GCSE’s. I then gained employment in the summer of ’87 by virtue of another Atari co-pirate I had met named ‘Mad John’.

‘Mad’ happened to be the Engineering manager of a local PC distributor and managed to get me a position in the Technical Support department despite me never having used a PC or MS-DOS.

To say that I was like a duck to water was an understatement; this was what I was made for.

Command line prompts, Edlin, Ventura Publisher, Laser, Dot-Matrix, Daisywheel printers, this was awesome!

I had a lot to learn but soaked it all up like a dry sponge that never seemed to dampen.

(Yes, this is a scan of my REAL 32 year old business card, I used them.. er never...)

The early days of Micro Peripherals were fantastic, the management were unconventional, my co-workers respectful (which was a new thing for me) and I ended up staying late at nights just to learn more of this fascinating new world.

‘Mad’ was indeed quite mad and frequently drove his Renault Fuego like a deranged person, shifting the steering wheel erratically from side to side driving down the road at 60MPH while screaming the words in a feigned Scottish accent, ‘I canna hold it captain, the dilithium crystals’.

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The IBM PC and compatibles was hardly a gaming platform and it was not going to move my interest from the Amiga. What it did was raise my awareness of what it could potentially be. This was a platform that was scalable, something I had not yet encountered.

After maybe a year of working at Micro Peripherals, my co-worker who didn’t look anything at all like Alexei Sayle but had a similar real surname to his counter-part in The Young Ones, ‘Jerzei Balowski’ left the company for a local rival one.

‘Jerzei’ and I would meet again later at a different company but his leaving left a big gap.

‘Tecchies’ were starting to become ‘meat’ for the head-hunters and whoever paid the most got our services, until someone else was prepared to pay more.

I was a little pissed off that my mentor was leaving but was tasked by the boss, ‘Sedge’ to find a replacement.

I mentioned the local cracker and past game author, @steddyman to 'Sedge' and so was tasked to drive to his house that very evening and convince him to leave his current shit job of working for a catalogue company as a toilet cleaner to work in the budding upcoming computer industry.

Easy you might think? Maybe I didn’t sell it correctly, but a massive pay rise and working in IT seem to raise his suspicion levels that I may be getting him into the male prostitution industry instead. To say the lad had a hard head sometimes can be an understatement.

After hours of convincing him that he was not going to lose his anal virginity to a big dildo strapping 300-pound mama with a fetish for breaking in young lads, @steddyman agreed to talk to Sedge and Micro Peripherals.

Less than a week later @steddyman was working alongside me and took to it in a remarkably similar way to what I did.

To be continued...

All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse'

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