Nine To Five

My Career and Professional Life

This is an abbreviated version of the story for brevity's sake.
Click here for the lengthy detailed story.

The Learning Years

When I was growing up, computers were a thing, but they were either science fiction versions like in Star Trek, or huge mainframes in the basements of banks and insurance companies. I was in high school at the peak of the disco era when Radio Shack released the TRS-80 Model I. My friends and I would go down to the local store and stare at it agog. As a self-described science nerd I was intrigued by computers, and how one would go about programming them, but it was just a passing curiosity. I was going to be an architect, and at the time there was no cross-over. Computers were used for data processing and printing bills.

My first real experience programming a digital device was actually on a Texas Instruments programmable calculator. It would store and execute a sequence of instructions in the form of keystrokes on the calculator keypad. In addition to the basic computational functionality of a conventional scientific calculator, it could store and retrieving data from the memory, and it had functions that allowed for loops and if/then/else branching. It had a rudimentary editor where you could step through the sequence of instructions, insert or delete steps, and otherwise make updates. I didn't really realize it at the time, but these were all the characteristics of a simple computer.

I used it on my calculus final exam. While all my classmates were solving a differential equation by iteratively calculating a complex formula over and over again to plot x/y coordinates on a graph, I programmed the calculator with the formula to run through the iterations automatically. I began to perspire as I fell further and further behind trying to get the formula programmed and debugged, but once I did, the calculator started spitting out figures and I sped to an early completion.

That was it for me as a programmer for a while. I turned back to my architectural training. When I went off to college the architectural curriculum focused on studio art and art history, but I continued taking math courses because I understood it to be required for the architectural trade. I could do the math, but I didn't like it. It really bogged down my semesters and introduced an arduosity I could have done without. The first semester of my sophomore year I decided to take a computer programming course on a lark just to take a break from all the math.

The programming language they taught us was BASIC on a DEC PDP minicomputer. I got it instantly. My brain was able to think the way that a computer processor worked. I could crank out the assignments and craft computer code that was sleek and efficient. I could track down and fix bugs at a prodigious rate. My programs were like works of art. I gobbled up the material as fast as the professors could dish it out. My classmates started coming to me with their questions, and even the professors would seek my insight from time to time. I felt like a savant. I decided then and there to change my career path from architecture to computer programming.

The institution I was at didn't offer a computer programming major so I transferred out to a school that did. All the classwork was done on their Burroughs mainframe computer. They made me start the course sequence from scratch, beginning with Introduction to Programming. Writing the code was easy, but they made us do it on punchcards. Upperclassmen could use the video terminals, but they made the freshmen use punchcards. You would drop your stack off at the computer room, and later come by to pick up the printout. I think they did this in part to reduce the considerable demand on the video terminals, but I secretly suspected it was also to haze the new kids and make them pay their dues like the old-timers had to do.

Once I progressed to the advanced courses I was able to use the video terminals, but getting terminal time was a fucking nightmare. There was way more demand for terminal time than there was availability, and the school couldn't be bothered to have a mechanism to manage the queues and/or reserve time. It was Lord Of The Flies. It was such a battle to get terminal time that it made it nearly impossible to get my assignments done.

It was so bad that I was ready to give up my computer programming career, but then a miracle happened. The personal computer revolution had taken hold. The college announced that the DEC Rainbow would be their computer of choice. They would be sold in the college store, and assignments would be accepted from that platform. I'm not sure why they chose the Rainbow. The IBM PC was becoming the standard, but for some reason the college didn't go with that one. I coerced my parents into buying me one, and I was off to the races. I could do my programming at my own pace in my own room. MS-DOS was easy to master, and the Pascal language they were now teaching us was great to program in. It was still a lot of hard work to get through the assignments, but I made it through and graduated with a CIS degree.

Early Jobs

After graduation I wound up in Washington DC where a friend was in grad school. The first job I was able to land was doing data entry at a doctor's office. I would arrive as the office was closing and type the day's notes into their records system. Data entry was beneath me in terms of my abilities, but it was a paycheck, and it was a learning experience. I was able to see real-world data for the first time, and get a feel for how it was structured in a real-world information management system.

After I was there for a short while I got my first real job offer. I was hired by a company that produced accounting software for the IBM PC. My job was to do phone support. Customers who had questions or problems would call up, and I was on the small team that would provide the answers. This was also not the kind of work I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be the one writing the programs, not helping people use them. But it was a rung higher than data entry, and also valuable experience in establishing a foundation as an information technology professional. Doing support was kind of like boot camp. It would teach me in no uncertain terms what the user experience was like, and it would serve me well later in my career.

The problem with this job was that I knew computers, but I didn't know accounting. I could help them install the software and manage their files, but most of the questions were how to use the software to conduct their business. My knowledge of accounting principles was basically limited to debits and credits. I didn't understand things like amortization schedules and fixed asset depreciation. I had to do my best to learn all that stuff on the fly. It was a steep learning curve, and I didn't really have anyone to teach me. I mostly had to have the customers explain it to me as I tried to explain to them how to use the software to manage it.

I wasn't crazy about the job, but as the weeks piled up I was getting better at answering questions and closing tickets quickly. The problem was that I didn't like living in Washington DC. I decided to resign my position and return home to seek employment closer to my friends and support base.

First Real Job

It took longer than expected to find another job. All the opportunities were an hour south of me in Syracuse. It was a rather dark time, and it felt like an eternity, but it was actually only a few months before I got an offer. The Bennet Funding Group was an up and coming company that was expanding. Their core business was leasing fax machines and copy machines, which was a very popular and profitable business at the time, and they were making money hand over fist.

It was a small IT department, with my manager George and coworker Andy. Between the three of us we had to cover responsibilities all the way down the stack. This was actually my first opportunity to do computer programming, which was what I wanted all along, but we also had to support the software, so I was fielding tickets like I had been doing in Washington DC. We had to do operations, running batch jobs, doing backups, etc. There was even hardware support, installing terminals, running cables, and even unjamming the line printers. It gave me valuable experience at all levels within our microcosm.

I was doing the work I wanted to do, making a decent salary, living on my own, and paying my bills. My career and professional life had finally started in earnest. It wasn't all roses, however. Since Bennet Funding was a financial firm, most of the programming was to support accounting. I thought I was done with that after my time in Washington DC, but here I was again. I wasn't crazy about it, but at least I had a more solid foundation at this point.

The other fly in the ointment was the technology. They were using an MAI Basic-4 system, so all the code was in the BASIC. I was comfortable with it as a programming language, but it was wholly inappropriate for large enterprise information systems. It's about as unstructured as it gets. The programs invariably devolved into spaghetti code, making support and enhancements a nightmare. This made the work stressful, exacerbated by an inexperienced management team that was unsympathetic to our struggles in fulfilling their capricious requirements on unrealistic timelines. I was getting good experience, but it was coming at a high price.

Within a year George resigned his position and I was promoted to manager. The new job responsibilities were a lot to bear. Andy was resentful for having been passed over, and began acting out. All this increased my already considerable stress. After a while it got to be too much. I approached management, who for once did the right thing. They made Andy the manager, returned me to my programming duties, but gave me a new title to help me save face.

I soldiered on for a while, continuing to develop and enhance software, but the writing was on the wall. Beyond the fact that I wasn't enjoying the work environment, I was learning of financial impropriety within the company. There were more investors lined up with money in hand than there were customers looking to lease fax machines. The CFO didn't want to turn down the vast sums of money that kept showing up at the door, so he started double-selling leases. This transformed a legitimate business into a pyramid scheme. I was already motivated to leave, but this made me want to get out of there before the shit hit the fan.

By the grace of God an opportunity fell in my lap. A college friend was working in IT at Cornell University down the road in Ithaca, and he alerted me that they were hiring. By this time I had a reasonable resum&eacue;, and I wound up getting hired. It was very gratifying to give Bennet Funding my 2-weeks notice. All I did those two weeks was play Leisure Suit Larry on an IBM PC. It took both weeks to get to the end of the game, but I cracked it on that last Friday afternoon. There was no going-away party for me. There was no cake and ice cream. My boss didn't even say goodbye. When I left the office on my last day I had to track him down to shake his hand before he just went off to whatever he was doing. I walked out and never looked back.

From Corporate World To Higher Education

The difference between Cornell University and Bennet Funding was night and day. I had gone from a tiny team in a poorly run small private company to a massive educational institution with an army of IT staff. The working environment was also a dramatic relief from Bennet Funding. Cornell culture was one that sincerely valued their workforce, and they wanted us to be happy.

My department was structured around the major administrative offices in the university, each having a small team of programmers headed by a Project Leader who would get the requirements and give us our assignments. I was hired onto the Alumni Affairs and Development [AA&D] team to help rewrite the complex gift data entry system. There was a lot of accounting involved. I didn't seem to be able to escape that.

The technology I was programming in was all new to me. Central IT was on an IBM mainframe computer running Natural ADABAS, which was a database with its own proprietary programming language. It took me a while to learn this new language. It wasn't all that complex, but the syntax was a little nutty. It was designed to read like regular English, but that made it a little verbose, and it was all rather inscrutable to me. It was difficult to find anyone who could just explain it to me clearly, but after a while I caught on.

It took the better part of a year to get the gift data entry system programmed, tested, and implemented. After that I bounced around from team to team a bit. I tried my hand as a database administrator, but I learned that I could quickly get in over my head when things got too technical. My wheelhouse was to get familiar with a programming language and use it to develop software that gracefully met the customers' needs. I was very successful at that. I had a knack for cranking out systems and making customers happy.

After a couple years I decided I was going to stay at Cornell for the long term. When I got there I was escaping the nightmare job at Bennet Funding. I figured this was just where I would land, catch my breath, and decide where I wanted to go next, but the truth was I had no reason to leave. I was happy working on a college campus, and was coping with the inefficiencies that come with the distributed and risk-averse leadership structure. I figured it was time to lay down roots. I bought a house and had every intention of completing my career at Cornell.

It was around this time that the Feds finally caught up with Bennet Funding. Someone finally blew the whistle, and an investigation revealed massive financial mismanagement. It was the largest Ponzi scheme at the time, and they would hold the record until Bernie Madoff came along. It made the national news. There's nothing like seeing your old boss being escorted into a federal courthouse on network TV. My boss wound up getting a light sentence, but the CFO served 19 years.

The Next Wave

Back at Cornell, the technology was beginning to evolve. The mainframe computer was limited to 80x24 character "green screens", but the graphical user interfaces (i.e. point-and-click; drag-and-drop) was becoming the standard. The tech wizards in the department developed tools that would allow a graphical user interface running on a Macintosh to access data on the mainframe. I was an early adopter. I didn't have the technical skills to be developing those kinds of tools, but I was anxious to put them into practice and produce systems with the enhanced usability. I even wrote documentation that would help other developers adopt it. I was starting to shine in this new environment.

While this evolution was staring to take hold, something came out of left field that took us all by surprise. A project to develop a new HR/Payroll system on the mainframe had been going on for years and years. The product they were creating was top-notch, but it was an example of runaway scope with no schedule. Development just kept going on and on with no end in sight. One day the customer announced out of nowhere that they were tired of waiting and were abandoning the project.

Up to that point, custom software had been the name of the game. Commercial software was typically in the form of word processors and spreadsheets, but large scale business packages were now becoming available. They were typically pre-programmed with core functionality and the ability to configure and customize for specific customers' needs. Someone in the HR office learned that a company named PeopleSoft had an HR/Payroll package that could be implemented at Cornell. They opted to ditch the custom software that was still nowhere near ready, and go with PeopleSoft.

None of us were expecting this. It was a 180 degree culture change. It was an all-hands-on-deck scenario, plus new hires, plus outside consultants. We needed new hardware and database systems to host the application. We had previously been a Macintosh shop, but now we needed PCs to run the "fat client" that the users would use. The customers needed to learn the new software, decide how to configure it and where to customize it, and otherwise adjust their business practices to conform to the application. They needed our help with this, plus guidance from the consultants.

Then there was the matter of extracting all their historical data from the mainframe, transforming it where necessary, and uploading it into the new database. That was the team I was on. Our work was pretty tightly focused on that task. There was no brain work on our part. We just took direction from the customers who had been making the decisions in concert with the consultants. From there it was a pretty mechanical task to map which field in the mainframe went to which field in PeopleSoft, and what transformations were needed.

This made us the tip of the spear when it came time to cut over to the new system. The conversion was the first step in the process. If our work failed for any reason, the whole rest of the implementation would be backed up behind us. The good news was that once we were done we were done. Our stuff would be thrown away, and we would get on with our lives while other teams would support the new system. All our stuff worked flawlessly. The conversion ran over a weekend without issue. Once the load into the new system was complete we washed our hands of it and walked away.

This left me wondering what lay in store for me, but fate put something at my feet. By now it was the late 90's and the World Wide Web had become entrenched in society, but web pages were mostly frivolous sites, silly games, or promotional material. However tools were becoming available that would allow web pages to incorporate application logic and access databases. This opened up a whole new world for us to develop stand-alone applications that didn't require the mainframe or heavy duty systems like PeopleSoft.

The tool we adopted was called ColdFusion. I took to it like a fish to water. I had already become proficient in HTML, and ColdFusion seamlessly integrated it with functionality to interact with a backend database. In those early days we used Microsoft Access. I didn't know Access as a tool, but it was easy to define the data structures. I even knew how to use PhotoShop, so I could make banner images and other graphics. I became a 1-man development machine. I would crank out applications as fast as the customers could specify what they wanted. It was the most productive time in my career.

I mostly worked with the AA&D team, bringing me back to where it all began for me at Cornell. They were also next in line for a big core system replacement. PeopleSoft had an all-new product that AA&D could use to manage their contributor base and process donations. Because of my extensive background with them, I would be at the center of this project. My direct responsibilities would be limited, but I would have indirect responsibilities in every other aspect of the effort. I was spread very thin, and under a fair amount of pressure. The good news was that we had a good team, we all got along well, and everyone supported each other.

The project was a heavy lift and we had a deadline that couldn't move, but we got through it together. The implementation went smoothly, but it was the aftermath that practically killed me. Things worked fine initially, but when their first wave of fundraising got underway we were hit with a volume of usage that we were unprepared for, and it washed over us like a tsunami. What we had built was grossly inadequate for what it was being called upon to do, and I was on the hook to support all that critical functionality. I had to work some miracles to keep up with the demand while others quickly developed an industrial strength solution. It was like carrying refrigerators on my back while walking across a tight rope wire. It was the most stressful time in my life, and it practically broke me.

Finally the new system came online and I was off the hook, but I was exhausted and burnt out. I looked out to the future, and I wasn't crazy about what I saw. It looked like I would be tethered to the AA&D business area for the foreseeable future, and stuck supporting this assemblage of systems that we had just implemented. I really wanted to walk away from it, but that didn't look like an option. I decided to do something radical. I had become involved with a crazy artist that I met while on vacation in Palm Springs, and he was painting a rosy picture of a life the two of us could make together. I requested a leave of absence from Cornell to shack up with him in Palm Springs. This would allow me to cut the cord with AA&D, recover from the death march I had just survived, and explore other options for my personal and professional life. The request was approved, and I went off and had an exotic adventure for a few months.

A New Chapter, Lemons, And Lemonade

I had hoped that my time in Palm Springs would lead to new career opportunities, but that didn't pan out. Neither did the romantic relationship. I returned to Cornell on schedule. But I had accomplished what I wanted to. I was ready to get back to work, and I was free to pursue other opportunities away and apart from what I had left behind.

After meandering around for a while, I wound up on the team that was running with the ColdFusion tool. They had replaced the Microsoft Access database with Oracle, which was much more powerful. The team was rather small doing rather meager work, but the department started investing into us. We got a new manager who was a real go-getter, we staffed up, and the assignments came rolling in. I thrived in this environment.

At first I was a sole contributor, working with the customer to understand their needs and developing solutions to fulfill them. Eventually my role morphed into a team lead. I continued to be the primary contact with the customers, but I was the front man for a sharp crew who took on much of the development work. We started establishing coding standards that allowed us to crank out rock solid solutions at a rapid pace. We were firing on all cylinders, and performing at the highest level. It would wind up being the pinnacle of my career.

Unfortunately nothing good lasts forever. Another change was afoot that would muck up what we had going on. Cornell decided to implement a formal project management practice. This was the right thing to do, at least on paper. Projects had gotten bigger and more complex. It was essential that structure was applied to keep things organized and on track. In practice, however, things didn't go that well. The methodology that was adopted was far too heavy and bureaucratic, and the practitioners weren't very skilled. It became a tarball that slowed projects to a crawl, and customers and technology people alike wanted to avoid the project management office at all costs.

My team was mostly exempt from all this. Our projects were too small, and we were cruising along just fine, but eventually we got caught up in the gravitational pull. We started getting project managers assigned to our projects. It didn't go well. It was like hooking a U-Haul trailer up to a Lamborghini. We were quick and nimble, and they were slow and lumbering. I did my best to ride roughshod over them, but that just pissed them off and got me in trouble with management.

Eventually I sidestepped the whole thing by requesting that I be the project manager on our projects. Management agreed as long as I followed their practice. It added a little overhead to my work as I needed to nominally adhere to their bureaucracy, but it didn't take much to placate them, and we were largely left alone again.

Unfortunately more upheaval was afoot. The next phase in the department was to augment project management with a business analysis practice. This too was the right thing to do on paper. The business analyst was intended to be the liaison between the business people who needed technical solutions, and the technical team who could develop them. This was in large part what I had been doing, and in fact had been doing that ever since I started at Bennet Funding back at the beginning of my career.

I actually applied to be a business analyst, but I didn't get the job because management didn't share my vision of how the role should integrate into the software development lifecycle. Spoiler alert, I was right and they were wrong. They wound up with a guy named Grant who talked a good game but didn't have the chops to be successful at it. Everything he knew about business analysis he had read from books. It was like an executive chef trying to run a kitchen when he'd only read cook books and never actually worked the line.

For whatever reason, Grant got assigned to our projects, even though there were plenty of other projects going on that had a greater need for a business analyst. My role was officially the project manager, but I had also been doing the business analysis organically as part of my practice. Grant muscled his way in to take over that part of my job. We clashed from the very start. He considered himself to be an authority on everything, and wouldn't listen to me despite the fact that I had an unbroken string of successes in my wake playing the role that he had come in to fill.

What was worse was that Grant also wouldn't listen to the tech team who were the consumers of his work. He just produced the kind of documentation that the books he had read told him to produce despite the fact that it was of little use to the developers. When they tried to work with him to get him to produce something that was what they actually needed, he was dismissive. They wound up duplicating his efforts to get the requisite information directly from the customers, who wondered why they had to go through the whole process a second time.

We struggled through a couple of projects with Grant and things went from bad to worse. I chalked much of the problems up to a personality conflict between me and him. Eventually another business analyst was hired, and she had a much more friendly disposition than Grant. When she got assigned to our next project I had high hopes that things would go well, but they didn't. Like Grant she was good at working with the customers, but had no clue how to work with the tech team. This was half of her job, but she didn't see it that way. When we complained that we weren't getting what we needed, we got criticized for not being team players.

What made me absolutely insane was that all this time I could have been doing that job myself, and doing it infinitely better than they were. It was intolerable to me that I wasn't allowed to do that. Instead we were forced to work with people who simply couldn't cut it, and no one was listening to our protestations. I knew I couldn't go on like this. I could not survive in this environment, but I was too old and too established at Cornell to go anywhere else and start over.

There was only one way out. I approached leadership and asked if I could become a business analyst myself. It was a make or break moment for me. If they said no then I didn't know where I could go or what I could do. Luckily for me they said yes. The only catch was that I had to spend some time under Grant's tutelage learning how formal business analysis should be done, which was absurd because he couldn't hold a candle to me. I agreed, but it was only a token arrangement. I forged ahead with or without Grant, and to his credit he pretty much let me fly on my own.

Things got off to a rocky start for me. If I had stayed with my old team then it would have been smooth as silk, but I wound up assigned to a project on a totally different team in a technology that I wasn't familiar with. Like the business analysts before me, I was able to understand what the customer wanted, but struggled to communicate that back to the tech team. My strength had always been that I knew what the tech team needed to know and how they needed to know it, but I was at a loss with this unfamiliar technology.

To make matter worse, they didn't welcome my presence any more than we had welcomed Grant's. They would have been happier just doing it themselves. I became frustrated with the whole situation, which negatively impacted my demeanor, and tensions grew. Eventually they wound up cutting me out of the whole process altogether. It was the first time in my career where I had failed. It was a low point for me.

The Fixer

Things turned around when I swooped in to save Grant's bacon. He had championed an effort to adopt a new technology for digital document management. It was no small affair to implement an all new platform like that, and he was struggling. He had a couple of pilot projects in the works, and they were floundering. Add to that the fact that the infrastructure teams who had to support this new technology were being obstructive. He was able to keep stringing things along, but management described it as "swirling around the drain." The whole effort was on the precipice of an expensive and highly visible failure..

Despite the fact that I was in a rough patch, I was called in based upon my strong technical background. I assessed the situation to find the problem areas. I knew that Grant was simply in over his head, but his inexperience and inability were exacerbated by his headstrong personality. Rather than listen to the people who were telling him what they needed, he was contradicting them and attempting to direct the action.

I set that aside for the time being and focused on the details of the first pilot project. Grant had written nothing down. All I had to go on was his verbal descriptions and some long email chains. I had to shake my head. He wasn't even producing the useless documentation that the books taught him to do. No wonder the project was failing.

I didn't gloat. I didn't throw stones. I just rolled up my sleeves and got to work. The project was to implement a central repository for all registrar documents. Cornell was divided up into multiple colleges and professional schools. Each one had its own registrar office, each with its own set of documents, each stored them in separate repositories in different technologies. The project objective was to consolidate everything in a single repository that everyone could share.

This was a considerable undertaking. It would have been a challenge for anyone. I had enough experience at Cornell to know that individual offices liked to do things their own way, and getting anyone to agree on anything was nearly impossible. It was no surprise that it was more than Grant could manage. I, by contrast, was up for the challenge.

I called a working session with all the University registrars. This would ordinarily have been a nightmare to schedule, but they were all pissed off at how poorly things were going, so they were motivated to show up and demand satisfaction. To anyone else this would have been intimidating. This was a group of powerful, high-level administrators, and they were all frustrated and discouraged. To me it was exciting. I knew I could win them over in a heartbeat.

I had every expectation that they would show up wanting to rake me over the coals, but I was confident in my abilities, so I was cool and collected. As they meeting came to order I knew they wanted to unload on me, but before I gave them the opportunity I delivered the "there's a new sheriff in town" speech. I calmly but firmly set the stage for how the project was going to proceed. They were cautiously compliant, but let it be known they expected results. I smiled and said they were in good hands.

That was enough to win them over. I had transformed them from a group of disgruntled power players into an engaged and productive working team. From there we got down to business. It was an arduous task to get all these different people on one page. It took weeks of repetitive meetings, and they didn't like having to sit through it all, but I made them stick to it and eventually we emerged successful.

From there I worked with the tech team to develop the solution, and the infrastructure teams who had been obstructing Grant's progress. I had struggled in the past on how to transform the functional requirements into a technical specification. What I did this time was just partner with the tech staff, listen to what they needed, and provided the information as best I could. I did what Grant wasn't able to do. I listened to them and treated them like my customer. It worked well. After all the time it took to get the registrars to compromise on a design, the development and implementation went quickly.

This was my first big success as a business analyst, and management took notice. I continued on with some other projects using this digital document management platform. By now I was more familiar with the technology, and it was a piece of cake to get the requirements and write specifications for the developers. I racked up more wins, and management was watching. I was easily succeeding where Grant had failed.

The down side of my new notoriety was that I became known as someone who could rescue struggling projects. There was a project to adopt a learning management system, which was similar to Cornell's vast academic course catalog, but geared towards employee training programs and other small-scale offerings. It was a commercial software package, but much smaller in scope and scale than the big enterprise implementations. The software had been selected and purchased, a consulting team had been engaged, but the project was still struggling.

Based on my success rescuing the digital document management projects, I was brought on board to get this one on track and across the finish line. I simply sat down, looked around, assessed what was going on, and calmly laid out a plan. There was a project manager who thought he was king shit but was basically clueless. I called a one-on-one meeting with him to define our roles. I told him directly that I was about to start stepping on his toes, and that it would be in his best interests to let me do so. We negotiated a line of demarkation between us. He would manage up, dealing with project sponsors and other leadership. I would manage down, liaising with the consultants, directing the worker bees, and generally overseeing the implementation.

It worked well. I didn't want to deal with the leadership anyway, and was happy for the other guy do cover that. The worker bees welcomed my presence. There were a lot of colorful personalities on the team, including my own. Our project meetings felt like cocktail parties. But the levity did not distract from our productivity - it facilitated it. We were able to noodle out what needed to be done, and then go about doing it. I didn't know why it had been struggling. To me it was child's play. We just kept marching along until we were done. We cut over to the new system without incident. I had another success under my belt.

By now my reputation as a fixer was solidified. I had mastered the business analysis role, and was comfortable in whatever challenge they wanted to give me. Right around that time some huge changes hit the fan. The group that did the project management and business analysis was to be reorganized. Some people would be reassigned internally, some would be scattered to the winds, and some would be left hanging and presumably laid off.

I was in the group that would be reassigned. The process went like an NFL draft. I was the #1 pick. Everyone wanted me, and they fought over who would get me. By contrast, no one wanted Grant. He wound up in the group that was left hanging. I never wished him any specific ill will. I never would have tried to get him fired or anything. But his conspicuous undesirability laid bare the vacuity of his arrogance and bravado. I felt triumphant over him. On his last day before he was sent packing I felt like Ben-Hur after the chariot race when he stood triumphantly over the broken and dying Masala.

I was assigned to the team that was adopting Salesforce, which was the new shiny object that everyone was obsessed with. The pilot project was struggling, and I was brought in to rescue it. The project team had plenty of talent on it, the customers were engaged and enthusiastic about the project, but they were spinning their wheels. The project director knew Salesforce and knew what she wanted to do with it, but didn't know how to run a project. There was lots of talk but no direction. It was like an orchestra that was warming up before a performance, and the conductor knew the song they were supposed to play but couldn't read sheet music and didn't have a baton.

I struggled to understand the project objectives. I rewound everything back to square-1. I pulled the information out of the project director's head, organized it properly into scope items, and worked with the project team to design them one by one. In this case the tech team was present at all the meetings, so I didn't even have to write specifications for them. I just elicited the information and they took their own notes. At that point we were off to the races.

It was a lot of work to develop the solutions, but it all went well. I really enjoyed facilitating the project meetings. I continued to bring levity and humor to the process. It kept everyone at ease, and propagated a sense of enthusiasm. We had to go through many rounds of prototyping, but little by little the deliverables took shape, and everything was just as the customers wanted. We deployed it and everyone was happy.

The rollout was no walk in the park. The tools we developed had to be adopted by many offices across campus, and it was my job to train them and otherwise oversee the transition. Some customers were more resistant to change than others, but my calm and cool demeanor won them over every time. I had really found my niche, I was enjoying what I was doing, and I was damn good at it.

Surfing On My Laurels

At this point I was cruising. I was still on the Salesforce team, but I got a lot of ancillary assignments. My official role was still business analyst, but I was really recognized as being a jack of all trades. I could do just about anything but write code. If I was on a project then it would be successful, no ifs ands or buts. That made me very popular, and everyone wanted me on their projects. I was proud of myself, but it didn't go to my head. All I wanted to do was get down to work and crank out deliverables.

A couple big projects were in the works to be developed on the Salesforce platform, and I would be involved. For once I would be there from day-1. Rather than rescue a struggling project and get it back on the rails, I could make sure that this one started out on the rails and stayed there all the way through. I could ensure that the project manager was laying solid groundwork and not overlooking anything or skipping vital steps. I could elicit the requirements upfront and fully define what we were there to do. I could identify potential problem areas early and get them on the radar before they derailed things. It was infinitely more satisfying than fixing all this stuff after it had been broken.

Once again, nothing good lasts forever. Just as we were starting to get momentum, Covid hit. That sent the University into a tizzy, and our projects were promptly cancelled. We were all sent home to work remotely, and soon told that this would be a permanent situation. My whole division became a full-time remote workforce forever.

All the tech teams started pulling their hair out, scrambling to provide the support the University needed to track infection rates and manage remote learning. You would think I'd be at the center of all of it, but I wound up getting sidelined. The one person in the department who didn't appreciate the value I brought to bear wound up being the queen bee of the whole circus. She tried to bring me in, but didn't understand how my skills should be used, and didn't have the patience for my detailed and exacting practices. She left me in the dust, and while everyone else was burning the candle at both ends, I didn't have much to do.

Since I was working from home now I wound up spending a lot of time napping and watching TV. I felt guilty about this, but I got over it. I was at the point I could see retirement on my long-range scanners, and I knew that Cornell had gotten far more than their money's worth out of me over the decades. I felt bad for my stressed-out colleagues who were working long hours and weekends, but I was glad to have dodged that bullet. I had stuff to do. I was given tidbits here and there, but it wasn't nearly enough to fill 40 hours a week. During the pandemic they talked about people who were "stealing time." Well I became a time kleptomaniac. I was okay with that, because I still did everything that was asked of me, and I did a good job of it.

Once the pandemic calmed down a little, things got back to normal and my work picked back up. I got a bunch of small projects and one big one, which was to select, purchase, and implement an industrial-strength mass emailing system. I used my vanilla business analysis skills to help the customers identify and organize the functionality they wanted so they could evaluate evaluate various products and pick best fit.

I mostly sidestepped the implementation and deployment, but my technical skills were leveraged for a specific task. The system needed a robust database that would be used to select the specific sets of people who would receive individual mailings, and information to include in the body of the emails in a "mail merge" kind of way. For example, an email might be like, "Dear , based on your start date of , your manager would like to congratulate you on years of service."

It would be a big and cumbersome effort to identify, assimilate, and load the data into the new system, but I was well suited to the task. I had the breadth of knowledge to work with the disparate areas that needed to be brought together, and the technical experience to coordinate all the tasks to make it happen. I also had the tenacity to work with the technical staff and prod them to get the work done. It was kind of like being a lion tamer, but instead of lions they were Komodo dragons, and instead of being in a cage we were navigating a maze. It was tough work, and it could be exasperating for me, but I was definitely the man for the job. I kept cracking the whip and directing them through the maze, and although they moved slowly and did a lot of hissing, we got through it and produced what was needed on schedule.

It was nice to have another big, complicated success under my belt. By now I had actually picked a retirement date. I announced it well over a year in advance so that everyone could prepare for life without me. I wanted to coast quietly across the finish line. I wanted to get a handful of cake-walk assignments I could just knock off in my sleep. I wanted to go out with a whimper, not a bang. But that wasn't what fate had in store for me. Not by a long shot. My swan song would be one for the ages.

The project was to replace the system used to track the hundreds of buildings and rooms managed by Cornell. It was cursed. It had been going on for years. People kept on getting assigned and later replaced because no one could make it successful. It became the project where people went to die. Everyone who touched it got burned. More and more people came and went, and no one was able to generate anything that resembled success. It became a joke in the department as we all watched it crash and burn. Years elapsed and it was seen as a colossal failure.

I was the one with the reputation for being able to rescue a disaster like that, but for whatever reason I never got the call. At least not until I thought I was safe. Just as my retirement was coming into view, I was told I would be assigned to it. It made my skin crawl. I knew I could do it, but I also knew it would take everything I had. It would put me through the wringer and leave me exhausted. But there was no getting around it. I had to suck it up and do it.

The only saving grace was the project manager who got assigned with me. Her name was Michelle, and she was someone I knew pretty well. We had worked together a little bit in the past and always got along great. She had sharp project management skills, and she took her work seriously, but she had a great sense of humor. She and I could joke and kid around, but still crank out quality work.

As soon as we both learned we would be assigned to this calamity we had a private meeting to strategize. We agreed that if anyone in the department could get anywhere with this death-march project it was us. We said we would make it a success or die trying.

The product had long since been purchased, but the team couldn't get any traction with the implementation. The consultants they had been using were borderline incompetent. When Michelle and I came on board the team had just engaged with another consulting firm. We had our fingers crossed that they knew what they were doing.

The lead on the customer side was someone I knew fairly well. Her name was Jade, and she was a grizzled old veteran like me. I had worked with her enough to know her style. She didn't suffer fools, she was 100% no-nonsense, and she took no prisoners. If you knew your shit then you were good with her, but if not then you would quickly become the subject of her ire.

At this point we were basically starting out at the ground level. The foundation was fully laid and now we had to go about executing the implementation. Things started off a little rocky. Our primary contact with the consulting firm always acted like she was putting on a front. Jade was keeping her cool, but Michelle and I could tell that she was always on the verge of chewing up and spitting out this person. It was tense.

Before things could go south, the consultant left the firm and was replaced with someone else. This hit us like a bolt from the blue, and looked like it would be another nail in the coffin of this fraught project, but the person who replaced her was a million times better. He was a direct communicator and meshed perfectly with Jade. He just went about doing what needed to be done. We were finally getting somewhere.

After all my trepidation I didn't wind up with much to do. Jade was fully prepared and extremely well organized. She had already done all the work I would normally work with her to do. My role became mostly to just keep an eye on things and make sure nothing was being overlooked.

Eventually I was given a side quest to lead up. There were a bunch of ancillary systems across campus that consumed this data for their own purposes. Each one of these would have to be retooled to connect to the new system. It was a great opportunity to modernize the techniques that were used to accomplish this, but it was also a lot of grunt work.

This was another thing that was well suited to me based on my technical background. The requirements were self-evident. It was a matter of coordinating the technical resources and overseeing the work. I was back to taming Komodo dragons, but instead of navigating a maze it was like ballroom dancing. I was the choreographer, and I had to get them all to dance together gracefully. The work wasn't difficult as much as it was arduous. Getting Komodo dragons to do-si-do and pirouette took patience and perseverance. I wouldn't say it took everything I had, but at that stage in my career I was basically running on empty, so by the time I was done I didn't have much left.

Michelle waded through her quagmire as I waded through mine, but in the end everything came together on schedule. There were a couple of last-minute heart-stopping moments, but between the two of us we were able to keep things moving and we had a successful deployment. We were both exhausted, but we had done it. We had succeeded where everyone before us had failed. It was a feather in both our caps. I would have preferred to avoid the whole ordeal, but the truth was I was proud to go out on top.

This all concluded just a few short months before my retirement date rolled around. I was finally able to take it easy. The last thing to be done was have my going-away party. Typically that would take the form of a few people in the conference room with a cake, some manner of farewell gift, and a couple of testimonials. That wasn't good enough for me. First of all I was going to invite everyone under the sun. I had a great many colleagues on the technical side, and my list of satisfied customers read like a who's who of University staff at all levels. I had the biggest invitation list anyone had seen before.

Beyond that, I was going to do the event my way. I reserved the biggest room we had in our building. I brought in a number of pieces from my computer collection and had them set up like a museum. There were testimonials from my supervisor and a couple of my closest coworkers through the years. When they were done I basically did a 1-man show taking a trip down memory lane from all the years I had worked there. I had PowerPoint slides and everything. I talked for almost an hour. I wasn't sure how it would go down, but people loved it. It was an education for some of the newer hires, and brought back a lot of memories for old timers like myself.

That was it for most people, but for those who wanted to stay I did a mini film festival, showing some of the art videos I had produced in my past. I printed up a little festival program and everything. I had to be very judicious in the videos I selected because so much of my work was patently NSFW. Not a lot of people stayed anyway, but those who did really enjoyed it. When it was all done I packed up my stuff and went home.

After that I did have a minor epilogue. I worked on an hourly basis for the next six months doing a few random tasks. My final deliverable was to draft a project formation methodology. So many times I had been brought in to rescue a project that had gone off the rails. My stance was that if you start off a project right, it can stay on the rails all the way through. The failings were always from omissions or mismanagement in the early stages. I worked with a task force and we crafted a step-by-step process that, if followed, would position any project for long-term success. It was a thing of beauty, and I was gratified that it would be my final deliverable after a 35 year career.

The department never wound up using any of it.

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