Category: Family

While complaining elsewhere about my commute to New York City, where I loved my job but hated the commute, I said

“So, I have soft-stabbed an old lady and said “fuck you” to a total stranger. It’s time to get myself out of New York, and also an opportune time to get my family out of Newark. I call an employment agency and ask them to find me a job as far south in Jersey as they can.”

The first reputable agency I found was in Woodbridge. I interviewed there with a nice lady named Karen; I don’t remember the name of the agency.  I wore my British tweeds,  maybe the best investment I ever made. Karen wasn’t technical, but I walked her through my resumé and she liked it. She had programming jobs available at Hess Oil & Chemical, right there in Woodbridge, but unfortunately nothing further south. I thought to myself, well, it’s not the Jersey Shore, but it’s a step in the right direction.

When I arrived at Hess for my interview, I met with Ted, one of the two managers involved with “Data Processing”, as people called it before things got fancy.  He was interested in the time-saving programs and designs claimed on my resumé, and gave me an intensive quiz on how one in particular worked. Satisfied, he asked if I had any questions of my own and how soon could I start. Then he brought me to the office of Dave, his fellow manager, to show me off.

The relationship between Ted’s department and Dave’s was not explained, but I could sense some friction between the two managers. I soon discovered that the Hess management style was to cultivate rivalries between peers. The theory behind the style is: Hands off, let them fight it out, the cream will rise to the top. This sort of rivalry produces conflict rather than collaboration; it is contagious and extends down to team members, making for an unhappy workplace.

From The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2020: “The chief of SoftBank’s Vision Fund used a campaign of sabotage to undermine two internal rivals, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.” … “The tactics included planting negative news stories about them, concocting a shareholder campaign to pressure SoftBank to fire them and even attempting to lure one of them into a ‘honey trap’ of sexual blackmail.” So, there’s an extreme example.

I was not happy at Hess at first, and after a few weeks I sneaked down to the phone booth in the lobby to call Karen and ask whether I had any obligation to the agency if I quit. (Typically, the employer pays the recruiting agency a commission equal to one month’s pay of the placed employee.) She asked if I had been there a month; when I said that I had, she told me I could leave any time I wanted to. Feeling a sudden sense of freedom, I went back upstairs and stayed for the better part of two years.

The programmer/analyst offices at Hess were nice.  They were actual rooms, not cubicles, with a door, windows looking into the building interior, and outside windows looking over the parking lot and the world. I shared a two-desk office with Aldo, a  flashy dresser with a big personality, who’d been with the company several years. Our desks were one behind the other, facing the windows to the interior.  Aldo had been with the company longest, so his desk was behind mine, closest to the outside window.

A local retiree had built a business of visiting area office buildings, shining shoes. He was  on a loose schedule, and you knew what day he’d be in your building. The first time I saw him, he showed up at our office door carrying his shine box and asked Aldo if now was a good time. This was a new one on me – I’d seen shoeshine guys working in and around Grand Central, but I’d never seen one who would give you a shine at your desk.  After a few minutes of brushing and rag-popping behind me, Aldo said “Hey, give my buddy a shine too, I think he needs one.” I said “No thanks, I’m fine”, but Aldo said “Come on, it’s my treat” and directed the guy to go ahead. So, I got my first deskside shoeshine, which turned out to be a good  one and oddly relaxing. Aldo liked to buy things for people, and I was not the only one he’d treat. He was generous, and at least as far as shoeshines were concerned, an over-tipper.

One day Ted came to our office with a thick folder. Working through the material in the folder, he gave Aldo a new assignment, a project that would print an inventory of every product in Hess’s 40-odd gas stations. It took quite a while for Ted to explain. I couldn’t see what was in the folder, but the whole thing sounded pretty complicated.

After Ted left, there was complete silence for a moment, then Aldo exploded. “Fuck this! I’ve been here for nine years! I want easy shit!”. A minute later, he threw the folder into our shared wastebasket. When I left the office that night, it was still there.

About three weeks later, Ted came to our office again, asking, “Aldo, how’s the gas station inventory coming along?” Aldo put a confused look on his face and asked Ted what he was talking about. A short  discussion ended with Aldo flat-out denying he had been assigned such a project. For me listening, it was sad and embarrassing. Ted walked back to his office and returned with the original folder, which had been rescued from the trash by the cleaning crew. He dropped it on Aldo’s desk, and said “This time, don’t throw it away.”

Somewhere along here I relocated my family to the Jersey Shore, another step in the right direction, and we invited Aldo and his wife to spend a day at the beach with us. They didn’t have any kids of their own, but it turned out they got along great with ours. At lunchtime we went up to the boardwalk, with Aldo insisting as usual that it would be his treat. When the waitress took our orders, she started with Aldo, and when she got to what he’d like to drink, he said “Coke”. When she asked “Small, medium or large?”, he looked almost hurt, and replied “Big. Everything’s big with me.” Even years later, “Everything’s big with me” remains a Smithee family catchphrase.

At Hess, an employee’s office location could be downgraded as a punishment. One programmer screwed up somehow and got himself relocated to the back row of a six-desk interior office. On the other side of the wall behind him was the men’s room, and when he complained about the noise of toilets flushing, he was told to listen closely and keep a record of how many times it happened each day. He didn’t stay with the company long after that.

Hess had a mean, public way of firing people – at 4:15 on Friday afternoon, the PA system might click on and you’d hear a name called out, with that person directed to “report to” his manager’s office. Those hearing the announcement would think to themselves, “…and bring your coat”.

Life in the Cube

The morning after the moon landing in 1969, everyone came to work proud, happy, and suffering from lack of sleep; we couldn’t talk about anything else. This time we were all on the same team.

Another subject that took up a lot of employee time was arguing over the expected outcome of the upcoming fight between Cassius Clay and Jerry Quarry. Quarry was clearly the departmental favorite, but it didn’t work out that way.

Fun fact for oil company programmers: there are 42 gallons in a barrel.

Hess had an excellent cafeteria. Anything you wanted – a hot meal, a custom-built sandwich, maybe both; multiple desserts, seconds on anything, all were yours for fifty cents a day. The unspoken goal was to keep employees inside the building at lunchtime, not burning up time driving to outside restaurants and back.

Management sometimes reacted oddly to an event, making up new rules. Ted’s mother ran a keypunch service that kept track of bowling league scores, and on the q.t. each week Ted brought in a pack of punched cards and ran a program to calculate and print the latest standings. On one occasion he misdirected his printout to the printer at the refinery across town, which happened to have payroll checks mounted. For several weeks following, arriving employees had to open their brief cases so the guard could see they were not bringing in punch cards.

In December 1970 the Esso refinery in nearby Elizabeth was bombed, one of the era’s hundreds of protest bombings by underground radical groups. The explosion injured 37 people, blew out windows for miles around, and caused millions of dollars in damages.

Protest bombings were commonplace then, averaging  about five a day nationwide, and the bombers usually called ahead to warn targets to evacuate. There were false warnings as well, with the Hess building an occasional target. We were never told why we were being ordered to evacuate, but evacuate we did, wandering around the parking lot  and socializing while the police and fire department searched the building. This occurred maybe a half dozen times, a week or so apart.

One morning Aldo and I were in our office when someone we’d never seen before walked in and proceeded to open the doors of our storage cabinets. I asked “What’s going on?”, then a second later realized, and said “You’re looking for a bomb, aren’t you?”. In this case, the company had rolled the dice and decided to put us all at risk rather than suffer more lost productivity.

At Christmas, employees received a frozen turkey and that year’s model Hess truck, always a cool and sturdy toy. When the turkey shipment arrived, they were dumped in an empty room and we were called downstairs, one department at a time, to each take one. One year the merchant who ran the lobby newsstand was invited to take one for himself. We arrived to find him crawling across the floor, checking each label to find a bird that weighed a few ounces more. Two  Hess executives looked on, shaking their heads.

A signup sheet was circulated to include your home address if you were interested in exchanging Christmas cards. I was friendly with a technical writer in another department, Anne, and if I had to go to her office to discuss some business, I would hang around for a while just to talk. She was pretty, smart and divorced, and had a little boy named Scotty. She sent me a Christmas card, and Mimi, a fan of all  traditional rules of etiquette, found a lot wrong with it. Besides addressing the card to me only, not to “Mr. & Mrs. Paul Smithee” as would be proper, she signed it “Love, Anne and Scotty”.  “Anne” was not a name I had ever mentioned in my at-home recounting of life at Hess, so I had to explain her role there, and added “Scotty is her son.” Reexamining that long-ago discussion, I can see that Scotty’s identity was not something I should have known.

There is a saying that the four letters in “Hess” stand for holidays, evenings, Saturday and Sunday. The data processing department was pretty much immune to working overtime, but one Saturday an executive wandering through the building visited our floor and noticed no one was there. Thereafter, we had to have at least one person on duty over the weekend, “In case someone has a question”.

One day my cousin John told me he had seen a billboard advertising for computer programmers, on Route 66 in Neptune, not far from my house. A billboard?! They must be desperate. I’ll  just drive by and get the address.

It seemed that almost everyone in Florida started out somewhere else. Mimi and I ended up in Florida after my first project at IBM was cancelled and I flew down for an interview in the middle of January. I fell in love with Florida’s green, tropical lushness.

After my transfer was approved, we began house hunting west of the Florida Turnpike, where houses were cheaper and the streets had numbers instead of names. When a trial run from IBM to a potential house took 40 minutes, we decided to stretch the budget a little and get something closer, in Boca Raton proper.

Boca was mostly an upscale town, but our development was one of the less expensive ones. I remember watching a Rolls-Royce wander through the neighborhood, obviously lost, with the passenger looking anxious about the modest houses and scruffy homeowners doing their own yard work.

Mimi loved helping other people and got involved with the library’s adult-literacy program. Her first student was a truck driver – one day his truck broke down in an unfamiliar area and he couldn’t read the street signs to tell his employer where he was. Another student was a woman originally from Itta Bena, Mississippi. She learned to read, then how to read a map, then how to read a map of her home state. One day she had a breakthrough, saying “You know, you could use this map to take a trip!”. The volunteers received fancy award plaques from the Sun-Sentinel and had their pictures in the paper. Mimi was proud of her award.

Beyond her literacy work, Mimi got a paying part-time job as a medical-records clerk at the hospital in Delray Beach. Her hours were from 9 to 3. She enjoyed working with a group  of other women, and knowing she was making a contribution. The other women soon discovered that  Mimi knew a lot about a lot of subjects, and would come to her with questions beyond those about proper spelling or writing style. Her manager had her ghost-writing herreports to upper management and they were happy. Mimi really loved that job.

For a while we socialized with our next-door neighbors, seemingly nice people from Canada who turned out to be stingy tippers of waitstaff and low-grade grifters. We saw the light when the wife scammed us on tickets to their daughter’s dance recital. We made better friendships with people we knew from IBM and the library.

We were in Florida for Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm that leveled entire towns 50 miles south of us,  but left Boca relatively intact. The Friday before landfall was predicted, my buddies at work laughed when I left early to tape my windows and bring the potted plants inside. They weren’t laughing on Monday when they saw how terribly the storm had damaged the state. We were lucky, and lost only some patio screens, but during the highest winds we hid in the dark between a sofa back and a wall, with a flashlight and a hatchet in case we had to chop our way out. We promised each other that next time we’d get in the car and head north at the first warning.

Even before the hurricane, Mimi wasn’t happy about being in Florida. She missed her family up north, especially her sister, for whom she’d been more like a mother than a sister growing up. One day we had visitors, and when they casually asked “How long have you been here?” we answered simultaneously – I said “About a year and a half”, but Mimi said “18 months”. When I heard her say it that way, I knew we weren’t going to be spending the rest of our lives in Florida.

It turned out that staying in Florida forever wasn’t an option. IBM had a company-wide downsizing of personnel, and offered buyouts to employees like me who would be of retirement age by a certain date.  They offered to credit me with an additional seven years of service, giving me the 15 years required for a decent pension. I signed up and never looked back.

I couldn’t find a job in Florida that paid anywhere near what IBM had been paying, so we packed up and started working our way back north, first stop Atlanta. In Atlanta I worked for the software company KnowledgeWare, and we learned how to live happily in a high-rise apartment building, one that happened to  overlook Stone Mountain.

“When you quit school in ninth grade and you’re smart, you spend your life in some small or large way proving yourself” – George Carlin

I interviewed for and was hired as an advisory programmer at IBM Research, based mainly on some helpful improvements I had made to IBM’s CP-67 and VM/370 operating systems when I worked for Continental Insurance. Unlike Carlin, I waited until my high school senior year to drop out.

From Wikipedia, edited for length: The Yorktown Heights building, housing the headquarters of IBM Research, is a large crescent-shaped structure consisting of three levels with 40 aisles each, radiating out from the center of the crescent. Due to this construction, none of the offices have windows. The lowest level is partially underground in some areas toward the shorter side of the crescent, which also leads to the employee parking lots. A large overhang protrudes from the front entryway of the building, and faces the visitor parking lot.

I was going to start off by saying “everybody here is a self-serving jerk”. Well, of  course that’s an exaggeration, but there are very few team players in Yorktown. Most people are only interested in advancing their own career.

To give you an idea of the attitude at Yorktown, a local doctor visits the site every week to do pre-employment physicals. Arriving mid-morning, he always has difficulty finding a spot in the visitor parking lot, and as a courtesy the company installs a “DOCTOR PARKING” sign in the spot closest to the front door. The sign doesn’t improve things for the doctor; the space is always taken when he arrives. One parker, a PhD of course, when questioned responds that he is a doctor, so what’s the problem? In my imagination I see  dozens of proud PhD’s setting their alarms for four o’clock in the morning to get to that spot of honor first. The sign is removed, and a week later replaced by one that says “MEDICAL DOCTOR PARKING”.

Company rules are more relaxed here. At most IBM sites, drinking at lunch would be unthinkable.  Founder T.J. Watson had a strict no-alcohol policy, and that included drinking at home. When our small department first goes out to lunch and the waiter asks “What will you have to drink?”, all eyes go to our manager. We expect him to take the lead, we will follow. He replies “Bottle of Sam Adams, please” and now we too are free to have a beer.

The four programmers on our project team usually have lunch together in one of the local restaurants. The other three are various degrees of beer snob; they drink the latest trendy or exotic brews. I usually order a Budweiser just on general principle. When the snobbiest of them mocks my choice, I say “Just because Bud is the most popular beer in the world doesn’t mean it isn’t any good.” He also sneers at the idea of playing the lottery. On my mental list of things to do when I hit the Big One is to send him a case of Budweiser longnecks. He’s fun to troll.

When I go to the Poughkeepsie site for a week of classes, I am steered to a nearby restaurant frequented by IBMers. I sit alone in a booth wearing my IBM badge,  a habit as natural as wearing a wristwatch. I surprise the waitress by ordering a bottle of beer; she smiles as though she’s just seen the cutest puppy ever running around her feet. While I have my lunch, people seem to walk by just to look at me; they see an IBMer daring to have a beer during the working day. They glance at my badge, not to take down my name but to learn what site this rare bird comes from.

If you visit Yorktown, you may hear one or the other of two fictional characters being paged over the PA system, Captain Strang and Mr. Sassoon. Yorktown is more than a computer lab, it’s a wet lab that uses hazardous substances, and accidents happen. The page  “Captain Strang, aisle 24, level one” means there is a FIRE! in aisle 24, level one, and an internal firefighting squad, or squads, respond. The words “Captain Strang” have an attention-getting bite designed to cut through any absent-minded reverie; say it out loud when you are alone. Say it out loud three times in front of a mirror and who knows what will happen.

A page for “Misssster Sassssoooon” mimics the hiss of a gas leak, another site hazard, summoning a squad in protective gear. There are dozens of compressed-gas tanks, large and small, behind the building. One cool thing to watch is a tanker truck delivery of liquid nitrogen, which creates a stagecraft-like London fog over the parking lot.

In the auditorium there are occasional “brown bag lunches” that anyone can attend. Similar to a TED talk, they feature a presenter knowledgeable in computing or some other science. Today, the presenter is Linus Pauling, who in 1955 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The doctor is briefing us on research he’s doing in his new area of interest, the structure of the human brain. His experiments require large numbers of cat cortexes, that is, cat brains. A concerned scientist questions Pauling closely about how the cats are obtained, how they are treated in life, and how they are put to death.

The only famous scientist I ever met personally here is Benoit Mandelbrot, IBM Fellow and father of fractal geometry. One day he steps up to the urinal next to mine and nods in greeting; I nod back.

In many cases a project is  pure research, there is no product and there never will be a product. A newly-minted manager has the audacity to warn a research staff PhD  about regularly stretching his lunch break to two hours on the tennis courts. His response is “Yes, but while I’m playing, I’m still thinking.”

There is a basic impracticality to some of what we do here The idea behind  the project I am part of is to prove that eight $200,000 midrange computers can cleverly share a workload and take the place of one $3,000,000 mainframe computer. Once it started becoming clear that yes, yes we can, someone in authority did the basic arithmetic in light of the reality that we are here to make money for IBM, not to save money for the customer. The project was cancelled. In today’s world I would be sent home with my personal belongings in a cardboard box, but in 1986 I am encouraged to check the internal job listings for another position inside the company.

I find a listing  in Boca Raton that might be a match. I arrange an interview and fly out of LaGuardia on a miserable, slushy January day. When we land in Florida, and I get my first look at the pure tropical lushness of it, I know how Ponce de León must have felt. I admit to myself “I’m probably going to take this job no matter what.”

IBM people hold high opinions of Yorktown. When Mimi and I start looking for a house in Boca, our real-estate agent happens to mention that her husband holds some sort of senior position here at IBM. Later, when she’s alone with Mimi, the quiz begins. She tries to guess, where in New York had I worked? Poughkeepsie? Fishkill? She guesses other sites in the Hudson Valley but comes up dry. She finally gives up, and asks the question straight out. When Mimi, always my biggest fan, says “Yorktown”, the agent is surprised and dispirited. One-upped, she improvidently volunteers that her husband had always wanted to work there, but couldn’t get an interview.

People in Boca think it odd that anyone would ever leave fabled Yorktown Research. My new friend Victor asks what it was like working there. He knows I was not happy. I think for a while, then ask if he remembers the smartest kid in his school, and what that person was like? He nods, and I go on. “Okay, imagine there are 2000 people in this room and they went to 2000 different schools. Now imagine that the smartest kid from each of those schools all went to work in the same building.” He understands.

While my family is getting relocated to Boca, our rental apartment and groceries are paid for by the company. After I turn in my first expense voucher, with supporting register tapes, I get a call from a person in accounting, who tells me “We’ll pay for your groceries, but you have to pay for the Heineken yourself.”

More about life in Boca