• 23 years with BCTel originally as outside plant construction. (this is their terminology for ‘Cable Splicing’) before moving inside into network monitoring.
• Patchwork Services began as a consultant vehicle for home and small office computer services. Training, trouble shooting and website development.
• Originally all webwork was html coding with Dreamweaver. With the growth of mobile accessibility to the internet, WordPress quickly became the logical solution.

Having just retired… in the winter of 2003, my wife and I were travelling in Southeast Asia . This was the other half of our life, the flip side of Victoria, Canada… been doin’ it every winter for the past 30’ish years. Snow birds of a different plumage if you will.

While in Cambodia we were trying to find a situation that would allow us to volunteer for a couple of months. Both of us had worked in the telecommunications industry so we thought we might have some skills to offer. We ran into road-block after road-block.

The situation was… in the past there have been so many problems with the wrong people having access to the young Cambodians, that all the NGOs have become very nervous about the motives of some expats. The vetting time is quite lengthy with lots of red tape and the openings are usually for 6 month minimum. All of this presented roadblocks to us.

We thought that building free websites for struggling entrepreneurs would be a big help. Now, every winter we are finding new situations. It’s a way we can give back / pay it forward. Small businesses all over Asia can benefit from internet visibility. Tourism is such a huge part of the economy and the modern travelers are using the internet more and more to make choices for travel. A website conveys legitimacy. We try to help!

And here we are.