A Blast from the Past!
"There's a man on the phone called David Windsor, says you know him, do you think it's just another Sales call?"
It was a bit of a surprise but little did our Administrator know that David Windsor was in fact the Managing Director of Masterbill from its inception in 1981 through to his retirement in 1998. It was just a few minutes later that I found myself talking to a voice from the past as David asked whether he and Jill Gillam, a former Sales Director, could visit for a bit of a ‘catch up’ and an amble down memory lane.
So it was that Simon Jones and I agreed to meet up with David and Jill for lunch during March to ponder such questions as
“Whatever happened to Graham Nightingale?”
“Do you remember when someone travelled all the way to Dublin to install a system only to find the disks they had were blank?”
“Did you know we once delivered a number of empty boxes to local authority so that they could spend their budget by the end of the financial year?”
We also discovered that both David and Jill are in good health and enjoying retirement, it seems Jill is busier than ever looking after her grandchildren and jetting off to Europe for a bit of skiing. David seems to be taking his retirement at a bit more leisurely pace, writing up and publishing his journals including his most recent publication entitled “Skye’s the Limit” in which, in between recounting his epic tour of Skye on a commuters bicycle, he reveals some of his memories of his Masterbill years as follows:
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"We soon went through Motherwell and saw the Council Offices where a few weeks ago I had given a demonstration of our Construction Industry Computer software system, “Masterbill”. I think now is the time to get riveting information on this out of the way. The system dealt with the estimating, tendering and cost control of Building and Civil Engineering projects and, modestly, I have to say, was very successful, particularly in Scotland, where all the Regional Councils plus Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen City Councils and virtually all district councils with a technical services department were kind enough to send me money. We travelled to Scotland by car and plane, now and again by train, on average twice a month for several years. It also took me to Malta, Cyprus, Bahrain, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, to name a few, plus all over England, Ireland and Wales." |
If you would like to obtain your own copy of the book please contact us and we will put you in touch with the author.
I am sure like us those of you who remember David and Jill will be pleased to hear that they are doing well and see that they are growing old gracefully.
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