To anybody actually reading these, I apologize for not having continued the series since 2021. I am ridiculous.

I met Raf in August 2009, and he made an immediate impression.
We had been introduced after a chance meeting with his housemate, a lady named Cat. Cat worked on the same site I did, but for a different employer. The place was seven square miles in size, with over 7000 personnel, so meeting people you’d never seen before was common.

When I returned from Korea, I mentioned to a colleague that I was looking for local accommodation – after seeing one place I wasn’t enamored by – and he suggested that I come with him on a job to repair a recalcitrant scanner.
The custodian of that scanner was Cat, who told me her landlord was looking for someone to take the room next to hers.
A meeting was duly set up. Cat was super friendly and had told me enough about the place that it seemed worth a look; for a start, it was very close to work.

I drove to his place one evening after work – before my 90-mile drive back to South Wales – and was immediately taken in. The house was a super-modern townhouse on a new development, with white walls, sharp creases, and wood floors inside. The room I’d be renting was a good size and, with access to a reasonable galley kitchen and large living/dining room, was plenty of living space.
Raf was a big guy. His voice was loud, his opinions were strong, and he was physically a big dude. It’s okay to say that now because he later lost a ton of weight and got properly fit.
It turned out that Raf worked in the IT department too, but we were in different sections. He worked for the site owners, and I worked for a sub-contractor; we were in two parts of the same building but had never seen each other before.
Being IT guys, Raf and I got along famously from the beginning, and agreeing to the lease was just a matter of paperwork. By the start of September, I was moving in and beginning the next chapter of my life.

I lived with Raf for over four years and learned much during this time. Thanks to my new life, untethered by any form of parental oversight, I spent my considerable earnings as a contractor with abandon; Raf introduced me to the finer things in life – nice clothes, good food, and Apple tech. In my first year at the house, I spent all my money on a new MacBook Pro (thus beginning an ongoing love affair with Apple) and lots of clothing. Unfortunately, I also rapidly outgrew the clothes due to the food he’d introduced me to. Housemates came and went over the years, but I was the constant. My relationship with Raf went from landlord to friend, which was good because my professional life was going through what can only be described as a bumpy phase.

A few months after moving 20 minutes away from work, I left. I don’t recall the decision-making behind the process, possibly something involving the length of my contract. Still, in the new year of 2010, I moved to the Defence Geographic Agency on the outskirts of London, near Heathrow. This was ostensibly a more technical role, but between the commute and the lack of variety in the job, I found myself looking around again. My previous employer expressed interest in bringing me on in a permanent role. After several years of contracting, I thought that a more stable permanent job might be a good change of pace; professional development, training, all of those things that contractors never get because we’re ‘just hired help.’
This didn’t really pan out. I was back where I’d been six months before, doing the same job for less money, with no sign of any of the shiny benefits that had been promised. It took a year and five months, but in 2011 I was on my way again.
I’d had a terrible interview with Logica in a shiny office near King’s Cross in London and subsequently been offered the job. In hindsight, I should have taken the oddity of this as a sign, but instead, I took the job as a consultant.
This was a poor career move. The way Logica worked – maybe most consultancies do, I don’t know – had the consultants bidding their services for open vacancies in projects around the company. My problem is that all the project managers I applied to saw me as having too little experience, so I kept getting rejected.
I may have been used on two projects, but the only one I remember was a short stint at London Gatwick Airport. By March 2012, I was bored, miserable, and convinced that the contracting market would welcome me back with open arms.

It didn’t.

A word to the wise; be mindful of market conditions if you’re looking to jump ship.
I was unemployed until May when I snagged a contract at London Gatwick Airport – the same crew that had looked to Logica for workers a few months prior was on the hunt again, and I got recommended. It was a 3pm-11pm job swapping out computers in some far-flung areas of the airfield. Not glamorous, but it paid the bills – briefly at least.
Following that I took a job in central London, for a company called ERM; Environmental Resource Management. I was helping them manage Microsoft System Center, but it was a pretty dry and boring position that gave me some more familiarity with System Center but otherwise just served to sap all of my cash in commuting costs.
By the time this contract had ended I was down to my last few pennies. Raf had already agreed to take my month’s security deposit as an actual month of rent, but I was running out of cash and facing the very real prospect of moving back home again, after just two and a half years of independence.

I took a trip back to Wales and started making peace with the situation. I had always wanted to live in Cardiff and had several friends in the area, so was treating the scenario as a blessing in disguise. Suddenly, as I was about to make the decision to give Raf my notice and plan a move back home, I got a call.
A small airline repair broker nearby was looking for a junior IT guy. It was less money than I’d been on during my last permanent gig and so considerably less than the contracting money I’d been used to earning. But it was a job that meant I didn’t have to move, so I took it.

Airinmar was fifteen months of incredible opportunities. It’s true that I was being paid a pittance, but the rest of it was all upside. The company had a tiny and ageing IT team. The most promising of the bunch had moved sideways to head up their development team, freeing up a seat which I duly took. Despite being ‘the baby’ of the team, it was clear that my more current experience put me several steps ahead, so I set about modernising the infrastructure.
I had the opportunity to take what I’d learned over my career so far and implement it. I could go and learn new things, design and implement solutions, and see the immediate benefits. Work became a playground, and served to strengthen the belief I had in myself. After months of false starts and bitty jobs that made me question my own abilities, this was vindication.

During this time, Raf was also going through a transformation. He shed the weight and hit the gym, transforming himself in a matter of months. He left a toxic job and started at Demandware, a disrupting influence in the eCommerce space, running their IT operation in Europe.
Midway through 2013, I was ironing shirts ready for another week at my job when Raf came home after a week away and told me all about the company retreat he’d just been on. Cape Cod, bars on the beach, it all sounded incredible.

“Dude, you’ve got to get me a job there, this sounds amazing.”

A few months later, that’s exactly what he did.

The money was good, but not mind blowing. The job was in central London, a place I’d sworn off after the contracting job with ERM. However, the opportunities were huge, and my self belief was at an all time high after rocking it with Airinmar.
This marked the next major life shift. Not only was I starting the job that would seismically shift my life, but I was also moving.

Demandware’s HR team took an understandably dim view of somebody employing their own tenant, so I had to move out. I had been seeing someone for about a year – things had been rocky but were going quite well at the time, so we decided to move in together. We found a three bed house in Woking, teed up a move date of between Christmas and New Year, and that was that.
On December 2nd 2013, I boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight to Boston, United States of America, and started my first day on the job that would change my life.