After the Air Force

From Vandenberg AFB in the rear view mirror to Twin Falls through the windshield was about three thousand miles and I drove the powder blue 1980 Pinto station I bought in Lompoc into Twin Falls. I had had a 1972 Pinto long ago and when I saw a low miles 1980 wagon on a used car lot I decided to buy it. It was a slick little machine, Ford put square headlights in that year and improved the front end quite a bit. It had the four-banger, one of the best engines ever made. Just be sure to change the timing belt every fifty thousand miles. That was my only gripe, I popped a belt on a Pinto once because it overheated. Timing chains give you warning quite a while before you have serious problems. I owned several Ford Rangers and all had the 'Pinto motor' until the last ones. I bought a 2009 and it had the Mazda engine that used a chain. About six months later I bought another one - an extended cab - because I foresaw the automobile business going to pot. Which it has done. Still got both of them, one a little knackered and I'm gonna dump about three to four thousand into it for a mechanical recondition, more like eight to nine if I decide to replace the engine. Probably will.

My little blue Pinto was my favorite daily driver for years. I hadn't gotten around to buying a truck yet, seeing as how I borrowed one of Dad's old farm trucks when I needed one. But not many women wanted to ride in a Pinto, station wagon or not. You could fold the back seat down to make a nice cargo bay or place for something else and I often did. But a Pinto wasn't going to get it. I drove by the local Chrysler dealer one day and saw a 1978 LeBaron on the lot, this was 1983 or so and I had gone back to work at the bank I worked for earlier, more on that in a minute.

I had a ton of money for a twenty-four year old, and more money piled up while I was in the Air Force. Military personnel don't have any living expenses so the pay is all disposable. Most younger ones disposed of it quite quickly but I never could seem to drink and gamble and whore that much. I didn't do any of the latter two, paying for sex not only wasn't necessary but I always figured it would feel kind of weird. So most of my pay went in the bank and stayed there. The Lebaron was a beautiful dove gray two-door with all the buttons. Including a power sunroof. It was used and they put the price on the windshield with some kind of white paint that washed off easily. This one had 3800 painted on it and I drove it and asked the salesman if he'd take thirty-five. He goes in the office and stays a long time. Comes out with a sheepish grin and tells me he can't do it, the kid that washed the cars put the wrong price back on and he wasn't going make but a hundred bucks at 3800. He may have been lying - he was a car salesman - or may have been on the level. I was good with thirty-eight or even four so maybe there was something to it. I was just doing the standard negotiating.

That was one fine car and another one I wish I'd never let go. Cast aluminum wheels, smooth dish with no spokes or anything, just a small fancy hubcap in the middle. It had a 318 and would get out and move out just fine, the speedos on cars in those days were still the wide all the way across the instrument panel that went to 120. I never pushed a car like that past 120 because I didn't want to break the speedo. I don't know if it would. Later I mounted an aftermarket tach and speedo from JC Whitney and the speedo went to 140. I miss JC Whitney. You could get about anything you wanted there, all kinds of VW Beetle stuff, stereo equipment (8-tracks and speakers, later cassettes) and stuff you had to look long and hard for before the Internet would find anything you wanted in a few seconds. Anyhow I put the new tach and speedo on when the 318 went south, Chrysler engines then would get sticky lifters if you weren't careful with oil changes and eventually chew up the camshaft. I opted for a freshly rebuilt 360 a friend who was Mopar enthusiast had just finished. He had one in his Dodge Magnum and that baby would get with it.

You could get an exhaust header for a Chevy straight six, and an intake manifold that would take a 390 4-barrel for same. One time I had a '62 BelAir 2-door post with a 235 and Powerglide. It would do most of the 120, and all of it I stuck in a 250 with the JC Whitney parts. I was only doing about a hundred the night that state trooper lit me up but that's another story for another time. The only aftermarket parts on the LeBaron was a stereo. I had a high-dollar hi-fi setup with a Pioneer CT-F1250 I used to copy pristine vinyl onto five-dollar Maxell cassettes. Pioneer Supertuner cranking Judas Priest through the Jensens was the way many a drive started out.

But before I bought the Lebaron I had gone to work at the bank where I worked before. Right after I got back to town and was running into people I knew I met Bill, the guy with all the problems who was banging his not-really-all-that-hot secretary. He was in charge of operations, primarily the tellers and bookkeepers. The bank had just committed to buying their first computer system. Little banks had always had their work done by larger banks or service centers that had the big mainframes and check sorters. Millions of dollars to set up and more to keep running. There were small software developers getting into the act about then, late '70s and early '80s. It would get real interesting in the late eighties but the time was not yet. The bank would be buying a fair-sized NCR 9020 system, the computer itself about the size of a refrigerator and some really big printers to go with it. And the proof machines had to be upgraded to feed the data to the computer, complicated stuff.

Not all that complicated really, the hard work was the software maintenance and that was what they were paying for. The NCR mini (like a little mainframe) and a couple of high-speed printers went for about a half million and was supposed to be adequate for ten years. Annual maintenance was about ten percent of that, so fifty thousand. Hardware maintenance was another ten percent. Quite lucrative for a while. Intimidating though to folks with no experience. Bill asked me what my plans were and I said I hadn't decided and he asked me if I wanted to come back and be their computer operator. That was a pretty good job in those days, twenty-five a year at entry level and up into the thirties with some experience. I said OK, remembering that it had been a pretty good deal before, except for the pay.

Mine was a little better but not much but I had no major expenses. I lived in a small rent house that Mom and Dad owned, they were fed up with renters and having me there to take care of it worked for them. Money was no big deal to us, we had plenty and didn't care about being super rich. There were several younger unattached women there and we had pretty good times. I worked from about noon to whenever I got finished at night, usually around midnight but I was spending a lot of that time fooling around with the computer. I got the company to install the COBOL compiler and BASIC interpreter and polished my programming skills. I quickly got a system down for getting things done efficiently and generally made myself pretty useful.

It was boredom more than money that had me looking around for something else to to. Partying with the young folks (and sometimes the older women at the bank) was fun but the work environment got kind of unpleasant after a while. Small-town banks in those days were mostly owned by a handful of local bigwigs (occasionally by just one) who inherited their stake from their forevears. Last Nasty was owned mostly by a dozen or so major shareholders, with about five or six holding enough stock to run the show. Two of them were brothers who had made their money in selling farm equipment and owned - among other things - the big Interntational Harvester dealership. Each had three four kids about the same age as me and my siblings. Two of them (cousins) being my age were in my H-section class. One of them was unable to maintain the grades and his parents put him in a private school. Nice kid. His cousin was the other honor student, this country bumpkin being the other. She studied fanatically and I probably should have sandbagged and saved myself some grief but...

Anyway she had a brother a couple of years older. He went to college at a small school of which his family was a major financial benefactor. Remember that motorcycle gang I told you about? Or have I told you yet? Anyway he was dealing pot, this was fifteen bucks a lid times. He hardly needed to with his family being rich but dealers got laid easy and often. And they got robbed in a big city. One night a couple of locals ripped him off, took all his dope and money. His supplier was the biker dudes.

He lived in the dorms on campus and after he told his suppliers what happened a day or two later a bunch of them came rolling onto the campus for a visit. His roomie was dealing too and they were together when the robbery went down. The bikers went to their room and interrogated them for a good while to get the details and descriptions of the robbers. Caused a bit of a stir, being the kind of place it was.

After graduating he went to work for the congressman representing the district Twin Falls was located in. That went on for a few years and then a Republican president came in and DC wasn't as much fun, maybe because the Congress did or threatened to do some cracking down on drugs and other bad behavior. He came back to Twin Falls and before long was working at Daddy-and-Uncle's bank. He didn't know anything about banking so they made some kind of position for him, something like an efficiency expert I suppose. He went around and watched people work and asked them questions and sat in his office and did who knows what before eventually coming around and telling us we needed to change something or other. He was interested in my work, and I showed him around and explained everything.

A couple of things happened around that time. The Federal Reserve started putting computers in all the banks they served (about 99% of them) for an early form of electronic funds transfers. They installed an IBM PC-XT with a modem and installed about twenty-something floppy disks of the fantastic system they had developed. That was 360K floppies. Getting through an install or update without one of them failing and breaking the whole thing was something to celebrate.

The computer was cool. I had a TI-99/4A at home but the IBM was cool because there was already a lot of shareware available - buy floppies full of all kinds of cool software for a buck apiece. I fooled with it a lot and so did Wells. That was his first name, I believe it was the name of some ancestor, first or last I don't know. He was always asking me all kinds of stuff about computers and they I would hear him talking to other employees (like 95% of the population they knew practically zilch) and showing how much he knew. Harmless enough, some people are like that. There's probably a name for the disorder but I never thought much about what it might be.

The other event was the half-million dollar computer that was supposed to last for ten years was not going to be adequate. Either an upgrade or replacement would be needed before long. NCR would be happy to fix them up for a few dollars more. A few hundred thousand. The software developers had another idea they assured us would be great. The golden age of the Motorola 68000 was underway, a proliferation of startups out in Silicon Valley building Unix boxes as we called them. Essentially the power of an old IBM, DEC, NCR or such that would cost hundreds of thousands for less than a hundred. They had aleady ported their software - trivial using COBOL - and had sold a few units.

Wells got in the middle of it, being the 'tech expert', and I regularly supplied him with whatever information he needed. The management, already unhappy about having to spend more money, was uneasy with spending it with a new that wasn't IBM or NCR or Burroughs. I explained to Wells that you buy whatever your software runs on and the NCR gear had a limited future. I didn't mind at all letting him do the talking. So we got the Unix box. New printers too, 1200 LPM. The old ones were 600. Nice since they were constantly wanting new reports and I was putting a couple or three big boxes of greenbar through them every night.

Unix made it about ten times as easy to automate too, and once I had things set up all I had to do was replenish paper or change forms. And then play. Being located pretty close to the developer's home base they visited us a lot to test new software. I schmoozed with the a couple of the programmers (what they call developers these days) and before long I was getting asked occasionally about going to work for them.

Before I was ready to do that Wells began to be rather unpleasant. There was some friction when people would realize what he told them about things computer were coming from me and they bypassed him. I had unwisely shared a little program I wrote for managing a video rental (VHS tapes) store while I didn't plan to try to make money with it it showed up on a BBS where shareware was distributed, under his name. Whatever, I thought, it was pretty apparent what sort of person he was. And there were two or three young people - unattached female variety - that were giving me too much attention. Hell, they weren't even asking about computer stuff, which may have made it worse. It might have been because he really began to resent me being a lot smarter than him, or the fact that I was a country bumpkin that was a lot smarter than him. And some of the girls liked me a bit outside of work so there was that.

A few months of that and I decided to go. But I just up and turned in my notice one day without any definite plans. Gave them almost thirty days, it was the first week of the month and I gave them to the end. Wells and I had just had another unpleasantness session and when the boss showed him the letter he went into a closed-door meeting and the boss came out and told me that I was paid through the end of the month and just go home how.

Probably Wells told them I would to something bad to the computer. Maybe he thought I would. Anyway that was the end there. I found out later three people quit in the next couple of days, and they took two people to replace me. I didn't sabotage anything but I left them the instructions on how to do things but not the tools I had made to get it done faster. A couple of days later the software company called me and asked if I wanted to work for them. I said not right away but I'd get back with them. The bank of Red Springs that had moved its office to Twin Falls and wanted help with their new computer system.

They were evaluating proposals and I helped them out. They selected one (I figured it wasn't the best) and I helped with the conversion and got everything lined out. After a few months of that I was got another call from the B&H folks and decided to go talk. The money was seriously better and I didn't have to put up with the office politics. The company was owned by three partners who ran everything hands-on and tight. So I made the move.

The three partners were a thirty-something programmer, a fifty-something woman who was experienced in bank operations and a salesman. When you're selling stuff you need a salesman, even if your product pretty much sells itself, which theirs did. They had a couple of other programmers and one or two people that did the installations and training. A new customer would supply a set of data from their current service on 9-track tapes and supposedly a set of file specifications. Companies like that hated losing customers so they provided only what they were contractually required to and that was about it. The programmers would load the data and build conversion programs to put it in the desired format, run test after test for weeks and when everything was perfect they would send a couple of people to the bank to make the switch and train the personnel on the new product. Sometimes the bank was buying new hardware and that made it easier but not a lot. If they were going to use the old hardware the conversion consisted of wiping the data from the old system (storage was expensive and generally the two systems couldn't cohabit) and load the new software and the converted data.

This would happen on Friday night if the bank was closed on Saturday otherwise it would be Saturday evening if the bank closed at noon which most did. Then some key personnel were given a quickie course on the new system so they would be going reasonably smoothly on Monday morning. If there was new hardware it was generally just the computer itself - the old mini or the new Unix box - and the terminals had to be disconnected from the old box and hooked to the new one. Everything was RS-232 in those days and it usually involved modifying the connectors on the computer end. They had a fellow who could do some of that but most was done by the hardware service.

They were good and never had a major snafu the whole time I was there. Other companies, bigger ones with more expensive products often did and sometimes there were days of pain while they got everything ironed out. They mainly wanted me to be the technical resource, especially with everything eventually going to be on Unix systems. So I went out and did the hardware setup before the conversion and hung around for a couple of days to make sure it was all tight. Then it was back to the office to prepare for upcoming jobs and field phone calls from people having problems. It was a pretty good time, a lot of traveling around the country and staying in nice hotels and eating at nice restaurants, all on the expense account.

Once in a while there would be some big problem like a disaster befalling a system and having to be fixed quick. RS-232 equipment was notoriously vulnerable to electrical anomalies, like a building taking a lightning strike and the cables getting electrified. It would blow the ports on the terminals or the computer, sometimes both. I'd have to go out and assess the damage and help them get replacements in and installed. Disk drives crashed occasionally and that could get ugly if they couldn't get it fixed quick. Connections to ATM network were beginning to show up in the small bank market and I had to go work out the communications, usually interfacing to IBM or Burroughs mainframes. It was challenging to the point of being scary sometimes since I was given a problem and told to fix it and rarely was there anyone to ask how. Had to figure it out and do it.

It was fun and the money was good but all good things must come to an end. At least all the good things I ever knew about did. The programmer and the semi-tech person were pretty bright, you sorta have to be to even get by in about any business. The sales guy was a solidly credentialled doofus. The fact that the product sold itself - or rather the customers who already had it did, it was that good - and the revenue stream was steady profit was good. But the salesman thought he could do better if he could make all the decisions and the other two weren't crazy about him so when he offered to buy them out at a ridiculous price they took it.

Now B&H was in a small city rather than a small town, say sixty thousand instead of six, and had two or three fair-sized banks. Fred (the doofus salesman) laid out his business plan and a young loan officer who wasn't much if any smarter than Fred sold the idea to the board of directors. The bank gave him three million dollars and he was to pay his partners a million each up front and a two hundred thousand each for five years. So the deal was done and one day the final papers were signed and Fred took the staff to dinner at a fancy restaurant and talked about how great it was going to be. Salesman joke here, can't resist (and it's not about the 'standard' RS-232 interface):

A young recently divorced woman married again and on their wedding night the new husband discovered that his new wife was a virgin. "How are you a virgin?" he asked. "You were married for three years." "My first husband was a computer salesman," she replied. "He never got past sitting on the bed and telling me how good it was going to be."

Fred and his wife Clara and their two children were present. One was a girl of about eighteen, burly and not attractive like her father. The boy was a couple of years older and resembled his mother, slim with black hair and a touch of feminine appearance. Clara was still semi-attractive at around forty, fifteen year or so younger than Fred. She seemed ditzy, thought her husband was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Oddly the affection seemed to be genuine as she stuck with him as he wrecked the business and left them broke. As near as I could tell the kids weren't any smarter than their parents.

The evening of the celebration Clara arrived in a brand new Lincoln Town Car and Fred was driving a new top-of-the-line Ford Ranger. Doug (the lead programmer) and I rode with her when we went to dinner. One of us commented on the car and Clara replied airily "We just went three million dollars in debt, might as well enjoy it." Doug and I exchanged 'oh shit' looks and didn't comment further. Monday morning there were several new employees - the kids of course and a niece. All were just out of high school and were not in continuing education. That was just the beginning.

Two more new vehicles arrived, a white Chevy cargo van and an Olds minivan. The cargo van made sense as Fred had mentioned hiring a dedicated hardware tech and the Olds was to be used by the installation people instead of their personal cars. Fair enough. Then the construction company came in to survey the place in preparation for remodeling. The building was fine as it was but Fred and Clara would get new offices, fancy desks and cabinets. A local high-end office furniture business did very well. We working people got new offices too, not that we needed them. We were out of the office almost as much as we were in it.

Chris - one of the kids - had knocked up a girl and married her without bothering to inform his parents. Her kid sister got a job, receptionist or secretary or something. The daughter of the contractor doing the remodeling got a job. Some actual workers were hired, a programmer and the hardware tech. A couple of salesmen, none of whom ever sold anything. Fred never made another sale either. So it went, we were working on two or three conversions that had been scheduled before the sale. We did those and that was it, then were in the office all the time.

After about six months if we hadn't already have a bad feeling about it we were beginning to. No new sales was bad enough but Fred and Clara were showing signs of pressure. We would see them in his or her office with bank statements out looking at checks. Lots of checks, more than are needed to run a business. The building renovation was supposedly finished but we found out the contractor had stopped work due to non-payment of bills. The companies we ordered equipment from were refusing orders for the same reason. Some guys from North Dakota had visited and wanted to talk about selling our software to their customers. They had a bigger clientele than we did and we would be looking at a good bit of business even if it was at a reduced price. That deal was done and it looked better but the money wasn't going to be enough to save them. Before long the guys from Fargo offered Fred a deal - sell them a copy of the software and let them go their own way with it. It was only a million, helluva deal for them but barely kept B&H from sinking for another six months. They just wouldn't stop spending, and the million didn't go far. The customers started getting worried and were looking at switching to the company from Fargo.

Fred became impossible to talk to. Some of the banks wanted to buy the company and started working on a plan. Doug, Dianne and I gave him a proposition - sell us ninety percent of the company and he could continue to work as a salesman. We were planning to work for nothing until it was back on its feet - potentially a year or more - but unless he couldn't be in charge he wouldn't hear of it. Finally our paychecks bounced.

We made a conference call to Fargo and made a deal to work for them at a branch office in Arkansas. They agreed and we advised Fred we were leaving. The folks in Fargo rented office space and set us up and most of the customers followed us. Fred and Clara kept the office open long enough for Jim (one of the previous partners to whom he owed around a million dollars) to come back and try to save it. The bank foreclosed on the big fancy office and they rented a place to work from with the two or three employees that remained. Fred harassed us for a while, threatening to sue us, we had to do depositions for some case or other but finally he left us alone. He was rather pitiable in a way, having lost his meal ticket and no way to get it back and sixty years old. But when things went wrong he got mean and abusive and it was hard to feel any sympathy for him. Clara had been worse - she was kind of unstable anyway - and was pretty abusive. A year or two later we learned she had died of cancer at fifty-nine and I felt guilty about not feeling anything but there you are as the fellow said.

I wasn't excited about the folks in Fargo and only took the job for something to do until something better came along. They had never developed anything, just sold what someone else had built. No imagination or creative energy at all - just milk the existing product. I figured eventually they would want us to move to Fargo and so started looking around. A couple of years later I found what I wanted and split. A few years after that the big software companies gobbled up all the little ones and paid ridiculous prices for them so they made out good. If Fred had let us save the company we would have been one of the ones being bought for ten times what it was worth.

I answered an ad for a position with a local company looking for a Unix systems administrator. I had done a couple of interviews and was looking at something but this one gave me a good vibe. And it as about a 12K raise which looked real good. Once again I found a dysfunctional company where being a star was easy. Hell, I wasn't ever trying to be the go-to guy but it always seemed to end up that way. The guy I would be working for did my interview - after the HR drone did her bit (she was a hottie though) - and he was pretty impressed with some bits of info I dropped without knowing how important they were.

It was part of a small floral services company, mainly they did order transfers (where you call a florist and have them send flowers to anywhere in the country) and sold some other stuff. The little computer operation was a shop management system that made it easier for big shops to do that more efficiently and profitably, and had a built-in accounting system. I was rather horrified to find that the system was written in something called BBX aka Business Basic. I had encountered it earlier when my previous employer looked at selling an accounting system written using it. Probably the fact that it was an interpreter rather than a compiler that I found weird. BBX had some nifty features - mainly COBOL-like file management - but these folks would routinely by doing BREAK-changesomething-RUN on live systems.

I later learned that they had bought the product from an amateur programmer who had managed to get it working well enough to make some sales. Enough that when he got in financial trouble the customers wanted to rescue him. Redbook, the company I went to work for, had bought it and had it back on an even keel but needed tech help bad. The original company was in Michigan and some of the personnel had moved to Arkansas to continue working there. My boss was an self-taught programmer who had learned a little Unix but was struggling. During the interview - he had two plausible candidates that showed up - he figured pretty quickly I was what he needed.

He had a couple of guys already working for him, one a young guy from the mailroom and the other from the old company. Neither knew much more than he did, so I spent the first year getting things organized and people educated, built a help desk database - the software was so full of potholes they had about twenty people taking calls from about four hundred or shops. And we four tech guys handling the 'hardware' end as they called it. Like my previous employers they sold Unix boxes, by this time commodity Intel 486 systems running SCO Unix with a handful still on Xenix. New customers or those getting hardware upgrades had one of two of the hardware guys sent out. It was all green-screen 'ASCII terminals' and cables had to be run and terminated.

I suggested purchasing four-pair cables with RJ-45 connectors in various lengths and using RJ45-to-DB25 adapters to make the cabling job faster and easier with only an occasional need for an extra-long cable or two. That saved days on most installations. I wrote an illustrated manual addresssing most tech support needs and later built an intranet site (this was 1995 or so) to help the software support (and my own) people get problems fixed faster. We saved a lot of money and the employer appreciated it and I got big raises each year. For a few years.

The flower business is pretty weird at times. There is a joke that says you can make a small fortune in the business if you start with a large fortune. Most of the shops we dealt with were large shops in big cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles but there were some in smaller cities. Most had multiple stores and even the small ones had revenue in the millions. There is a stereotype of homosexual florists but I met very few shop owners who were. Some of the 'designers' (the employees that put the flowers in the containers according to a recipe) were, the male ones anyway but most were women and normal.

There were a handful of Mafia types, literally. That has been the case since the days of Al Capone but whether the motivation was the same I don't know. Flower shops are great for laundering money. One neat little feature in our software as a program that would make a user-specified percentage of the day's cash sales disappear. Officially it didn't exist but every time a software upgrade went out we would get calls to reinstall "Hal" as it was called. I only had to talk to an actual wiseguy once, when his computer system underwent a disaster that seemed about to cause a disastrous data loss. Normally when dealing with that New York shop I talked to his kids but on this occasion it got elevated to him. He was calm and civil but I worried about coming to an untimely end if I didn't get it fixed. There was shop in Philadelphia that was run by a mob dude, he took us to lunch one day and his bodyguards went with us. They were fooling around, taking their guns out there in the restaurant, I worried about those dudes some.

We got things lined out pretty well but all good things have to end. The owner was getting old and his only kid was a ditzy girl and he deciced to cash out. We got bought out by one of the two or three big companies in the business. Based in LA and part of a much larger enterprise they were pretty generous with pay and we got big raises and they pretty much left my little department alone, not actually knowing what we did besides make them a lot of money. Being a big multibillion dollar outfit, from California yet, they were the real Dilbert world. I had always had to put up with a certain amount of politics and incompetence but in smaller companies there was less of it as they would be out of business before long if they didn't control it.

Over the next two years they bought three small companies that had florist software packages similar to the one they had just bought only none of them were as good. The owner's attitude was typical - I believe it was the second company, doing well and getting about ten new clients a month. After the report he said "Let's get that up to thirty." Just like that. Didn't happen of course. Anyway that was the general way of it, edicts came down from people who had no idea of what it took to carry them out. My little corner didn't change much and my boss insulated me from most of the foolishness.

They had a CEO, young guy about my age I guess. Didn't impress me or anyone else but he was the CEO. About to begin the last year of a three year contract. So planning for a move to greener pastures he polished his resume some by making the books look good and firing a few hundred people was part of the plan. So it was that after a couple of good years under the new owners I found myself on the wrong side of the line. They put the personnel in a spreadsheet and sorted by salary and started marking the ones to get rid of until they had cut enough to make the numbers good. I was on vacation when the layoffs were scheduled and the boss called and told me to come in for an important meeting. I already knew what it was about but had been told I wasn't in the pool of people being cut. I was told wrong, or the situation changed, whatever.

I arrived and everyone was pretty subdued and I noticed my own people avoiding me. Stil they waited until after I got back from lunch before I was called in by my boss and an HR dude from LA and told our relationship was over. I dropped my keys and access card on the desk, scribbled my signature on a piece of paper without bothering to read it and walked out. Before I got out of that wing of the building I had two or three people asking me for help with something or other. I just grinned and said "Sorry, I don't work here any more." and kept going. It was a pretty good massacre, somewhere around three hundred at that location, took two days to get it all done. They gave you a big envelope full of stuff, I didn't bother looking until a week or two later.

I went home and and ordered a pizza and grabbed a cold Rolling Rock and prepared to enjoy some downtime. It had been fifty-hour minimum weeks for the past several years and I was ready to relax. Chomping on pizza when the phone rang and I saw it was a friend from the office and ignored it. Whatever it was could wait and the pizza couldn't.

The CEO started his new job with a recent startup with a supposedly next-big-thing health care product. I checked up on him occasionally and was amused but unsurprised when they fired him after just over a year. I was told that the contract guaranteed the first and last year of pay and in the event he was terminated full pay for the year in which he departed. So he got three years pay for working just over a year. It was only a million a year (this was about 1994 or so) but nice work if you can get it.

Leftover pizza in the fridge and a third Rock I called my friend. She got canned too. I felt really bad about that even though I knew she wasn't going to be hurt as bad as some of them. She was well off money-wise, worked two jobs and one was with Kroger. She was close to thirty years there and had a good 401K and a good bit of money put away. Some didn't have it so good.

I called her and got the news and who else she knew that got fired. There were some married couples working there, one of them the wife got fired and when her hubby was told he was staying he said 'No i'm not, bye' and walked out with her. Not that the management cared, it was more money saved. Customers didn't like it much - the product required constant support (partly because of its own deficiencies and partly because of not very smart customers) and things were pretty hairy for a few months.

Probably the worst thing my friend had to tell me was about a woman who had worked there for years, getting close to retirement age but not there. She was the HR director for the old company and they had kept her on to manage the local office. She helped prepare the severance packages for the people who were being fired - except the one for her. On the second day after everyone else was gone they HR person from LA handed her her package. That did irritate me considerably but I already knew that ninety-something percent of people suck and there you are.

About a week later my friend asked me if I received my severance check yet. I didn't know what she was talking about and she told me to look in my package. There it was, a paper to sign and return to HR, agreeing not to sue them. I'd been there six years and we got a month's pay for each year. So I signed it and mailed it and a little later got a nice check. Half a year's pay wasn't half bad. I had an unsolicited offer - I had been planning on takine a few weeks off before looking around for a new job - just over a week after being cut loose and it looked good so it was back to work.

Some of the people they fired when they bought the company a couple of years earlier had started up a small business of the same sort. A week or two aftr I got booted one of the senior developers quit and went to work for them. He immediately called me and the money was good so it was a short vacation.

That would turn out to be the best deal yet. It was early 2000s and having a website was pretty much mandatory for any business and especially for a business with local competitors. And even in the small towns flower shops have competition. So our employer did the smart thing and built their own data center to host the websites and other business. That was my job - my boss was the coder. I can cut code as well as just about anyone but he was even better. I'm more of a technician and a naturally talented systems engineer is about as rare as a super talented programmer. Developer, that's what programmer are called these days. Actually these days few developers do much coding, unless you call downloading libraries of code someone else wrote and plugging it in and hoping it works. If it doesn't work you have to figure out why (Google) and fix it so it does.

Sometimes a big part of the Internet suddenly stops working, usually for just a few hours but it affects all kinds of stuff. Big websites you use all the time do down for a while. That's because they're depending on outsourced services and sometimes on code that got broken. Usually it gets fixed by rolling back the latest change until a fix can be deployed.

I learned to code on mainframes back in the '70s, assembler and COBOL and BASIC, writing one line at a time, and we didn't even have full-screen editors. Not it was all web, and the majority of the Internet was LAMP and remains to this day some permutation thereof - Apache (the A) no longer enjoys the dominant market share it once did and MySQL (the M) has lost some ground to other database engines but Linux (the L) remains the operating system for almost the entire Intrnet. The part that matters anyway. The P used to mean several things - PHP, Perl, and Python - but most web server code is in PHP. PHP makes all the tricks we had to spend hours racking our brains to figure out dirt simple.

Building and managing a data center was also dirt simple and at the beginning didn't take a lot of my time so I helped with the coding. There wasn't much to start - the company had hired a college kid to work on it and got something started but it needed work. So we did all the coding for the first couple of years and it grew fast. About three or four years in we had something like six thousand websites. They were template sites - a basic design that fetched bits of data to build on demand - but pretty sophisticated. I also had to manage the domain registrations and so built a system to track registrations and expiration dates. I had to build the DNS servers as outsourced DNS (except for one-by-one management at domain registrars) wasn't much of a thing yet. An ice storm cut us off from the world in early February (if you want to see panic break something in February or May - most florists depend on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day to make a profit) and while the data center had a generator with redundant fuel supplies the telco fiber endpoint went dark a few hours after the lights went out. We were toasty warm with lights and the computers were running but couldn't talk to the outside world. They finally got the line up about three or four days before the 14th and we survived but the company's reputation took a hit.

That gave the employer all the motivation they needed to spend the money I told them to. We had single fiber trunk and we got two more from two different companies. They ran on two different routes and had generator backup on at the two new ones. I deployed the system into Amazon sites on east and west coasts and leased servers in data centers in Arizona and Illinois and we never had a minute of downtime again. It was a pretty sweet deal and lasted almost twenty years and I put a lot of money away, bought a couple of pieces of real estate that would come in handy if the system crashed. I was looking at working another two years anyway to get me to sixty-six and four months. That was the age at which I could retire and get my full Social Insecurity benefits. I could work longer and get even more and figured I probably would and put away some more money. Someone had other ideas.

I was in decent physical condition for a guy my age. Did a hundred pushups every morning and sometimes again later in the day, walked a couple of miles a day if weather permitted, worked all weekend on my hobby farm. Also ate entire pizzas and chickens and drank a fair amount of beer. Got up one day and went to work as usual, said hello and fielded a couple of urgent questions and went up to my office. That's all I remember for about ninety-eight days.