After the heady days of running a bar and a night club, being at the apex of the Darmstadt social scene, and generally having a ball, I have to admit that going back into IT was a bit of a let down at first.

The job was with a small start up company involved in documentation for the Medical Equipment and Pharmaceutical industry. I began as a part-timer, translating from German into English and generally tidying-up existing documents. However, as the company grew my role expanded and I went from translator to writer, then to editor and, finally as we moved into the electronic media age, I became responsible for developing the companies production and communication systems and ended up as the Director of Advanced Media for the company.

From 1992 through 1999 I learned the basic skill set for modern information presentation. As a writer and editor I learned how to design and produce good documentation. With the development of hypertext, I learned how to develop online help systems, basic multimedia presentations and acrobat documents. And to top it all, I was in at the birth of the World Wide Web, building our companies first websites and even helping to organize the Third World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt.

During these years I got to work with some cutting-edge hardware and software teams in the fields of industrial robotics, molecular science, information retrieval and presentation, and virtual reality. On reflection, this was probably the most interesting and educational period of my career to date.

The success of course, filtered through to my personal life. The increased salary meant I was able to see my children more often and, in fact enabled me to have my two youngest sons in Germany for the whole of their summer holidays. My woman was happy as well, it lifted a lot of the financial pressure from us and gave our relationship a second lease of life.

But, as all good things, it came to an end when the company was bought by a larger one and they wanted me to be just another cog in their great machine. So it was back freelancing for me.

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