The Best Job I Ever Had

 

In 1979, I had stormed out of IBM White Plains in a huff, terminally miffed at being mistreated in ways that foretold (I supposed) the permanent end to my association with IBM.  In 1984, I rejoined IBM's National Service Division (NSD) in Tampa after about 5 years working for other companies.  I was hired by Judy Manowitz into her "Architecture" group that developed and enforced site-wide standards for the systems and operations staff.  It was really quite boring because it was mostly paperwork-related, but it gave me lots of free time to do stuff I actually enjoyed, like programming.  Since the early 70s, I had been developing an elevated fluency with a language called CLIST to the point that I could teach it better than the highly-paid technical staff that created it.  When the operations crew accidentally caused a horrible administrative catastrophe because someone forgot to update a particular control statement, they asked me if I had any way of preventing it recurring, and I solved it by writing a little snippet of CLIST that automated the update.  I developed a reputation as someone who could do wonderful things.

A year later, management concluded that there really wasn't much need for an Architecture Department since what we did amounted to "winding the clocks".  The Architecture department was disbanded and the staff reallocated to other managers.  Judy placed me with Bud Rowsey's newly-formed "Site Tools and Productivity Department" where my job was to write custom software to help the programming staff get through their work.  I was partnered with Karen McCloskey, and together we fielded requests from random staff members to automate this or that, and responded with CLIST-based processes that increased productivity across many functions.  I used to say that our real job was making programmers smile.  It was the best job I've ever had, and I still miss it.

Some time in 1988, some bean counter in Armonk (IBM Corporate HQ) discovered that while all the parts and manuals were warehoused in Mechanicsburg PA (and shipped from there) the software that ran the automated equipment that packaged and shipped parts and publications orders was all located in Tampa, and there was a real monetary cost to having software running in Tampa burning up the telephone lines to Mechanicsburg telling the warehouse gantries to fetch a packet of nuts and bolts and add it to an outgoing order.  They decided that all that software and the programmers who maintained it were to be relocated north.  The response from Tampa was a collective middle-finger.  It was said that Mechanicsburg made 141 offers and got six (6) acceptances, all from people who had been born in Pennsylvania.

Tampa management (in the person of Joe Rufin) found a project in another part of IBM that badly needed the kind of infrastructure that NSD was about to abandon — raised floors for mainframe computers and other devices, stand-alone power supplies, &c., and they agreed to requisition the entire crew of several hundred employees.  A team of senior logistics experts put together a plan to move all the NSD hardware from Tampa to Mechanicsburg aboard chartered 747 freighters, leaving the Tampa site ready to receive similar-if-not-identical ISSC hardware.  On December 5th, 1988, all of us changed our assigned division from NSD to ISSC, Innovative Systems Support Corporation, a wholly-owned sub of IBM.  The best job I ever had evaporated before my very eyes.

Because my skills had no defined spot within ISSC where they might be put to use, I, along with seven others similarly afflicted, were assigned to a spare department whose mission was to keep us busy and out of trouble.  Our new manager, Betty Ware who by that time already had over 35 years service with IBM, began to rent us out as fill-in employees assigned to random projects (often run by her many contacts within the company) where our particular skills would be useful.  All she asked was that the benefitting manager cover her salary costs.  In this way, she typically managed to use little-to-none of her annual budget for the eight of us.  I worked on projects in Poughkeepsie NY, Raleigh NC, San Jose CA, and Rochester MN over the course of the next few years until IBM offered a pre-retirement package that was just too good to pass up, and I left IBM for the last time in July 1992.

All my subsequent jobs have always included some portion of automation work that makes me more efficient — and that somehow make their way to other programmers who find my tools surprisingly useful.  I still like making programmers smile.