Just about 20 years ago I headed into the BBC Worldwide offices at Woodlands, the dirty brown office blocks on the wrong side of the A40 for the very last time.

I went to my desk in C Block, put down my bag, headed to the loos, locked myself in a cubicle and burst into tears.

It had been a funny few months. The weekend after I had handed in my notice my first marriage imploded. That’s a different story, but the emotional load I was under wasn’t just of leaving at job.

And the BBC wasn’t just a job for me. My parents had met at the Beeb in the 1960s. I wasn’t just employed. I was about to leave the organisation that had played a pivotal role in my very existence.

It was also where I grew up. I started work at Woodlands at the age of 25, my third job from university and not entirely sure what I was doing working in technology. By age 34, when I left, I had been responsible for coordinating technology strategy for the £500 million commercial business for a couple of years. I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing working in technology.

The 20-year milestone has been at the back of my mind as we come to the end of 2024, a year so distant into the future in my 1970s socialised mind that it’s barely believable that we don’t yet have time travel and teleportation. Apparently, it’s only the naff stuff from SciFi that comes true.

As this year comes to a close, it seems we are on a number of pivotal moments: the uncertainty of what the new presidency in the USA will mean for the rest of the world; the uncertainty of the UK economy and what might happen next; the uncertainty of how a few years of massive speculative investment into generative technologies might pan out; the uncertainty of what the pandemic means in the long term for patterns of work locally and globally; the uncertainty of living in a house with two teenage boys and their teenage moods.

Tomorrow, though, will be much like today. And the day after that the same as the one that came before. The media loves catastrophising. It makes for good copy. Telling people that tomorrow will be pretty much like today doesn’t make good copy, so we run risk of neglecting that reality.

Twenty years on from my happy days at the BBC, I’ve had all sorts of experiences that I couldn’t have imagined (or had the opportunity to do if I’d simply stuck around). I’ve worked in many sectors, both as an employee and as a consultant. I’ve met hundreds of fascinating, charming, intelligent, fun people. I’ve met a few arseholes too, but the batting average is fine.

I’ve seen technology being used to make a difference. I’ve seen technology stopping differences being made. I’m not sure which is more prevalent, but I have a hunch. I’ve seen again and again that technology is not, as Timandra Harkness’s book puts it, the problem. Find a technology problem and underpinning it you’ll find human issues. People, ways of working, preconceptions, misconceptions. Issues of trust. Issues of economics.

I think I know now why I work in the technology sphere. It’s because it’s about people. Sometimes technologists can lose sight of that, but mostly they know it too. And I probably understand people slightly better than I do technology (although I’m not sure I understand too much about either some times).

2024 was a challenging year at times. Clients with challenges. People with challenges. An economy with challenges. A home with challenges (teenagers, eh?).

But it’s also been a year of some interesting new things –

I still can see how I can make a difference. And I hope to still be able to make a difference in the year ahead, my 33rd calendar year of work since I graduated.

Thanks to all my colleagues at Equal Experts, my fantastic network of amazing people and all of the clients who have been there in 2024. Happy Christmas, and here’s to 2025 a year so impossibly in the future that I refused to look up how many albums will be 30 in the next 12 months…

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