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This is where you can find out about some has-beens of Central Rates

Let's start from the heights of the thirteen "man" team of mid 2000.

The first to earn the Rat tag was Greg, who chose to "walk" in November.

We parted company with Mark in December 2000

Sometime around the end of 2000, Robin & Dave changed teams.  By the time they got to Phoenix, we had hoped to have thought of an end to this sentence.

Jon got restless in early 2001, and ended up at Oxford University.  Well I think it was Oxford Brookes University, which always used to be the Poly in the old days.  He's now perfecting the art of "looking busy" in their offices.

Jenny had been preparing for retirement for several years.  I suspect that all that nonsense about Accounting Funds probably convinced her that she had to get out.  And so she drifted away in an alcoholic haze.  

In March 2001, Davey escaped via a "secondment" to Accenture [stupid made-up name?].

With the outsourcing to "FI" imminent, we then lost two more prominent members.  Our stylish fashion expert and our standing-joke.  I'll leave Russell and Nick to argue about who was who, or what. 

Russell couldn't cope with work that was either insultingly simple, or was that impossibly complex, or was there not enough of it, or was the volume just unmanageable.   I never worked it out.

And Nick finally spotted that his daily 100 mile round trip was something on the pointless side of unnecessary, particularly as it involved spending his days in High flaming Wycombe.  So this, combined with a few misgivings about what was going on in the office around him, caused him to skip off to the secure environment of being a Contractor doing IT work for the Open University (which, as far as I know, has never been a Poly, or a Tech).  He has yet to admit to "feeling really stupid about leaving AXA".

This process of rapid elimination left me, Ralph the webmaster, as the only person left who could hold his own (!) in a discussion about Accounting Funds, and so inherited the wig of leadership.

And so things stabilised for almost a year, with four of us.  But things got a trifle wobbly (most of them are) in early 2002.   As work levels have decreased, the remaining youngsters are looking elsewhere.

Robert departed Central Rates in March 2002 to soon start at another Xansa location, doing Cobol programming (heh! heh!).

And Andy is also looking for much the same sort of work.