Symon

Managing Director

1. What do you spend most of your time doing at Symcar?

My day starts looking at tickets. Working out what needs an immediate response, what only I can deal with coz it’s either a second-line issue, or its something that Louie’s already looked at and needs some assistance with, or it’s just that we’ve got that much work on and we need to just divvy out between us the tasks.

2. What do you spend most of your time doing outside of work?

I enjoy reading. Love watching films, very into my films. When I actually am doing it, I cycle. Other than that, it’s running around after the family and keeping the dog in line.

I spend a lot of my time looking at technical stuff that might not be directly related to work but it might be things that I want to explore—like I do production at a church. I am a geek, so I spend a lot of time looking at geeky stuff.

3. Favourite thing a customer could say to you?

Probably ‘I didn’t know that was possible’.

Y’know when you know something, when you see something in science, when somebody shows you something and all the pieces click into place, and you go ‘ah that’s awesome’.

IT is like that, but for a lot of people, IT is just something that gets in the way of them doing their job so when you can then deliver something and go ‘look, this will make your life easier in this specific way’ and they go ‘oh, I didn’t know that this was possible, I didn’t know we could do this, I didn’t know this existed’ and then they run with it, that’s probably the most satisfying thing because you’ve just made somebody’s life better in a tiny little way.

I did this last year. I was talking to somebody, and I had my Surface, and I was writing notes and they looked over and they were like ‘what are you doing?’. And I said, ‘oh I’m writing in OneNote’. ‘Oh okay, what’s that?’

So, then I gave them a quick five-minute tour and they were ‘my husband would kill for that’. And they were just blown away at, not just this app OneNote but all of the things it could do; the fact that I had a tablet that had a pen that the piece of software that you could get to by clicking a button on the end of the pen, that then you could write in and you could convert your handwriting to actual text, that it would help you improve the boxes you were drawing, that you could do all of this on a single page then you could take a photo and then you can mark up on top of that photo. And you could do all of that on an infinite page, that then just saved into a thing automatically and you never had to say Ctrl+S.

Then again, I’ve also said to people ‘Ctrl+S’ and they’ve gone ‘oh my god that’s gonna save me so much time’.

4. Favourite part of the job?

Favourite part of the job? Helping people.

5. What’s a quote you live your life by?

Ooh, I don’t know. Probably most things Alan Kay said.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

My anti-quote if ever asked is John Watson, Chairman of IBM in 1948 said, “I predict the future market for the computer will be maybe 6 or 7 worldwide.”

[Bless his cottons. We don’t talk about how many mobile phones are around the world. Little minicomputers]

3 billion.

[Why do you know that?]

[Yeah, why do you know that?]

Go back to my earlier statement: I’m a geek

[laughter]