Search for people
Second "Yearbook" campaign
It occurred to me that I could improve my chances considerably by finding other referees, especially as I knew there were several people who had given glowing references about me in the eighties. I went back to Birmingham public library to work my way through the Computer users' year book again, this time to target all sites, regardless of computer equipment used, of any size situated in areas where I thought former colleagues and managers might be working. I asked about vacancies at the same time. Employer reaction was sometimes hostile because of perceived privacy issues, even though I wasn't actually asking to be put in touch with anybody and I certainly didn't want to cause any problem. Nevertheless, some employers clearly wanted to help. One employer gave me the address of their pension fund, which in turn forwarded my letter to the address they held. That address may have been out of date, but in any event I never heard from the individual concerned.
Telephones and newspapers
I even looked in the Basingstoke telephone directory and wrote to somebody with a surname and initials that matched one of the names I was looking for. Having failed to locate somebody else via our former employer, I attempted to locate them by writing to the local newspaper in Guildford, the town in which I thought the person lived, hoping that the newspaper would publish part of my letter. They never acknowledged it and I never heard from the person I was looking for.
Up north
All those efforts yielded nothing, so when the Manchester branch of Computer People asked for alternative names of references, it was more in hope than expectation that I sent them a list of people who I'd met while working in the north of England. To my surprise, one of them was at the time a contractor registered with the agency. He gave them an impressive reference of me. This was brilliant, but as he'd been a colleague of the man whose name I'd given to Dudley metropolitan borough council (we'd all worked for ICL in Leeds together in the late seventies), I realised that I still needed to look for other people, especially as Computer People ultimately couldn't secure me any work.
Found in Wales
I really needed a name from the eighties. I created a CV page listing over thirty people from this period and where I met them. The list was by no means comprehensive. I did not normally circulate this page but used it to remember names. My luck improved in October 1997 when I mentioned one such name to the Bristol branch of Computer People. I'd worked with this particular person at Somerset county council in 1989, so this was by far the most recent reference that I'd secured. Furthermore, it was my last major contract as the Yellow Pages contract was only for a couple of months, so I couldn't get a more recent reference that mattered.
I didn't surf the internet
I wonder how much difference it would have made if the internet had been around then in its present form. Insofar as it existed, it was in its infancy (especially outside the United States) so it probably wouldn't have been of any help. I saw internet cafés in Birmingham but didn't know anything about how to use them. It would never have occurred to me that the internet might be a powerful search tool, and in those days it probably wasn't. If MySpace, Facebook and Google existed in 1997 (and I don't think they did), they were in their infancy. When I eventually started using the internet, Yahoo was the premier search engine. How things have changed since then.
Now I could
Occasionally, I have looked in recent years to see if I could locate any of the people that I worked with in the old days, more out of curiosity than anything else. I have two names from my job in Narborough so if a potential employer wants a reference, I'll pass on those contact details. At this distance in time, I doubt that any of my colleagues from earlier jobs could help me, but I still occasionally search for them just as a challenge, made difficult because names on the internet are seldom unique. Whether I would actually send them a message if I found one of them, I don't know, but I wouldn't even consider it unless I was reasonably sure that I'd found the right person.
Nobody's found me
So far, nobody from my real-life past has ever contacted me (if you exclude the two referees from my last job who responded to my request) despite my high profile elsewhere on the internet. Of course, they may not realise that my middle name is Durward, since it's not something I ever bothered with for most of my life. Also, except for those who know me from my time in Narborough, my former colleagues wouldn't expect me necessarily to be in Leicester, nor would most of them know about my taste in music. I learned that it was wise to keep quiet about it at the time, because my taste in music isn't usually shared by the people I meet in real life.
It may well be that a lot of former colleagues have come across my contributions elsewhere on the internet without realising that they know the author. Maybe they see my name and then think "Nah! It's not him". Even if they know that it's me, they may prefer to consign me to history, and that's fair enough. Nevertheless, given my high internet profile, I think that somebody that I worked with or for before my last job is, in general, more likely to find me than I am to find them. So far, I've identified four people from my last job on Facebook and I've made contact with one of them. In looking for earlier contacts, I found a Facebook entry that might have been for somebody I know, but he didn't respond to a message that I sent him so he was probably a namesake from the same area. Incidentally, my CV page contains enough information for anybody who has ever met a Peter Harris at school or work to decide whether I am the Peter Harris that they remember.
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