Category: Work

It was near my house

I worked for the INSCO Systems Corporation, aka Insco, for thirteen mostly happy years, the longest I ever worked in the same place.

Lots of things ‘happened’ there and this article was getting too long, so I decided to break it up into six easier-to-digest parts. This is Part 1. I’ll try to keep the technical stuff to a minimum; these are about people.

Writing about my previous employer, Hess Oil, I mentioned my cousin seeing a highway billboard advertising for computer programmers. I got one of those jobs, and it turned out to to be a pretty good one.

Some of the ‘happenings’ written about here might make the company look clueless at times, and one or two of its people mean-spirited, but that can be true in any bureaucracy. I enjoyed my years at Insco. I kept my head down, stayed out of office politics as much as possible, and have many fond memories.

Moving the work to New Jersey

Continental Insurance was outgrowing its office in New York City, so they commissioned a three-story modern building in Neptune, New Jersey where they would relocate their data processing. Expecting a tax advantage, in 1968 they established the site as a separate company, naming it INSCO Systems. During the next tax season, they discovered there was no real advantage to having a separate company, and changed the name back to Continental. I’ll call it Insco here because that’s what the employees always called it.

Getting hired
I hate commuting;  it’s a waste of time and money. Insco was only thirteen miles and one toll plaza away from my house, so even knowing nothing about the company, I was interested in working there. I sent them a resumé but I didn’t have expertise in the operating system they were using. I got a personal letter that thanked me for applying, said my resumé looked fine, but that one skill was lacking. A few weeks later they ran a newspaper ad; I answered it and got another nice letter, same skill still lacking.

After one more cycle of this, they realized they were not going to find that skill in Central Jersey. They designed a four-week training class, ran a new ad and contacted people like me that they’d been turning down.

I came in, filled out an application and had the usual is-the-applicant-sane initial screening. Next, they gave me an IQ test (employers could do that then), then a “spatial reasoning” test, imagining rotations of 3-D objects. The 3-D puzzles were easy, and after a technical interview with a department head, in May of 1971 I was hired.

Starting work
They had already moved the mainframe computers from New York  to Neptune, along with the programming staff who wanted to relocate. After the class, I was assigned to a development group and given the first of many assignments.

About two months later, I got a phone call asking me to come downstairs and see Bob Hoberman, the head of Personnel. Mr. Hoberman said he had heard good things about my work, but Orange High School couldn’t find any record of my graduating. I explained that I didn’t actually “graduate” graduate, but had taken the state high school equivalency tests a few years earlier, and had a GED certificate. He really wanted to help, and said “So, when you said on your application you graduated high school, that was a figure of speech?” I grabbed that phrase like a drowning man, and said he was correct. Thank you, Mr. Hoberman, you are a gentleman.

I never received the actual GED certificate in the mail, and asked my wife to help track it down. She talked to a nice woman in Trenton and found out I had juussssstt missed passing one of the five test sections, math. The woman went all-out, working with Mimi to identify any “life experience” that might get me some extra educational credit. Finally, she asked if I’d been in the military, and bingo, I had some life credits  and a GED.

The company had two mainframe computers – a production one to collect data from branch offices around the country and handle insurance-policy production and claims, the other a VM system to support development and testing of the production programs. VM stands for Virtual Machine, and each VM user has their own separate and independent virtual computer, with exclusive access to an imaginary card reader, card punch, printer, and tape drive. It’s so clever it’s almost magic.

Application programmers wrote their programs with pencil on paper forms at their desks, got them punched into cards by the keypunch department, then used the terminal room workstations to test, modify and improve them.

“Talking to the metal”
After I’d been in applications development for about a year, an opening came up in the technical unit, the group that fed and tended the mainframe computers. I knew assembler language, which is how software “talks to the metal”, as the expression goes, so I had a leg up. I interviewed for the opening and was offered a transfer. Special thanks to vice president Phil Keating, who did not oppose my transfer out of his group, saying he wanted to have at least one friend in the technical unit.

Managing attendance
At some point, the company switched to flextime, a policy that respects employees’ need to sometimes conduct personal business such as medical appointments during work hours. Borrowing from Wikipedia,

Flextime allows workers to adjust their start and finish times as long as they complete the required daily/weekly number of hours. There is a “core” period during the day when all employees are required to be at work, and outside that a flexible period, within which all required hours must be worked.

I didn’t have any childcare issues or rely on public transportation, so to me flextime wasn’t that big a deal . But it did mean I could go for a run in the morning without starting out in the dark.

My boss’s boss, senior vice president Gordon Gilchrest, was old-school; he hated what he saw as the unpredictability of flextime. When we discussed the policy, he kept interrupting with “But when will you be here?”. I wanted to answer “Whenever the hell I feel like it, that’s the whole idea” but instead I just said I’d probably come in two hours later on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He wasn’t thrilled with that either, but at least it was predictable.

Tracking our hours
Right about the time flextime went into effect, the company bought, or had sold to it, the “Accumulator” system, with an Accumulator placed in each department, near the secretary’s desk. It was a little bigger than a hardback book, with maybe 20 slots on the front. Each employee had a card with their name on it sitting in one of the slots. Each card, or ‘plug’, was like a tiny odometer, clocking how long it was plugged firmly into its slot, meaning the employee was at work. When the employee was not at work, the plug was pulled out far enough to disengage, making a soft click and stopping the clock. At least that was the theory.

Side story: at 8:30 one morning, a supervisor saw two clerks from  his department having a cafeteria chat with someone from another unit, and suspected they were clocked in and chatting on company time. Co-opting an unrelated figure of speech, he asked “Are you girls on the plug?”, to which they replied indignantly “NO WE’RE NOT ON THE PLUG.”

Humans, professionals in particular, don’t like punching a time clock, which is basically what the Accumulator was. Consciously or unconsciously, people forgot to push their plugs in or pull their plugs out as appropriate when they started work, went to lunch, or left for the day, making the system effectively worthless. Plugs were recording weekly attendance from zero hours to over 100.

Flextime became a permanent policy, but the Accumulators, rendered useless by human nature, were removed. There are no photos of the Accumulator out on the internet for me to show you, suggesting they never worked anywhere else either.

Telling the executives apart

The building’s floor space was set up on the “open” plan, that is, broad areas divided into cubicles, with walls, more politely called ‘dividers’, four feet high. Project managers got corner cubicles, nice because there were walls on only two sides and you could look out the window without standing up. There was also greater privacy because a corner cubicle was generally not the shortest distance between two points. Department heads, assistant vice presidents and vice presidents got enclosed offices, with windows and a door.

Status was important. You could determine the size of an office and the relative rank of its occupant by counting the four-feet-square fluorescent lighting fixtures making up the ceiling. For example, there were two levels of assistant vice president and thus two office sizes, leading to expressions such as “Is he a six-light or a nine-light AVP?” There were smaller distinctions also. In one case, a new AVP was housed in a standard six-light office but it was furnished with the fancier desk phone normally issued to the next higher level. A complaint of “too many buttons” was made by another six-light AVP, and the offender’s phone was rightsized.

In another case of jealousy and comeuppance, my final boss at Insco, Ramesh, a vice president who used his six weeks of vacation each year to visit his homeland, had been issued a standard executive desk, but with an oversize desktop – there was an extra four inches of mahogany between him and his visitors. The day after he left for vacation, two of the other vice presidents were in his office with a yardstick, confirming a longstanding suspicion. Next day, workers removed the desktop and took it away, presumably to be cut down to proper size, along with its owner. The two drawer-pedestals underneath were left without a top, their contents exposed to the world.

Ramesh was not popular with his peers, and the other vice presidents just happened to stroll by his office that day, suppressing snickers.

Ramesh was not popular with me, either, and once at an industry social gathering where there was drinking, he introduced me to one of his countrymen as “My employee, Paul Smithee”. I took out a business card, indicated the Continental Soldier and said “That’s funny, you don’t look anything like this.” Writing this today, I realize that was right around the time Ramesh began making my life at work more difficult.

There was another indicator of status, in the employee parking lot. About twenty of the spaces closest to the building entrance were striped off and available on a first come, first served basis to employees of a certain job grade or above. I had made it to that grade, and one morning I pulled in simultaneously with a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, a car that seemed badly out of place in an insurance company parking lot. Mr. Spohn,  a vice president and gentleman, stepped out looking embarrassed. When he saw me, he felt compelled to explain “It’s my son’s.”

Gordon
Gordon, my boss’s boss, was senior vice president in charge of all things directly computer related. He was the first executive to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. This allowed him to get daily face-to-face status reports from each of the three computer room shift leaders.

Gordon and I once had to go to the company’s New York office, and on our way back walked by a loading dock where the workers were passing around a hand-rolled cigarette. Without thinking, I commented “Smells like those guys are having a good time.” Gordon asked “What do you mean?”. I told him what the smell was, and he said “How do you know that?”. I got myself off the hook for knowing what marihuana smelled like by telling him the absolutely true story of how my wife and I were at a PTA meeting and a sheriff’s deputy came in with what he called “an artificial marihuana tablet” on a tray, set a match to it and passed the tray around so parents could recognize the smell and manage their children accordingly.

Some of the guys from work formed a hockey team that played in a league at the Ocean Ice Palace. Even though I hate the cold, I let them talk me into coming along to watch their first game. They knew Gordon had played hockey back in college, and asked him to referee. After the game, one player invited everyone to his apartment for a beer. Two players slipped into the kitchen to smoke, and after a while someone noticed Gordon was missing. Apparently, he got a whiff and left without saying goodnight. He just didn’t want to know.

IBM SE Marty
IBM assigns a permanent on-site systems engineer, or SE, to big customers like Insco. The SE serves as interface between the customer and IBM, and as a general rule all communications should go through them. The SE works to keep the interface friction-free, and tries to stay close to the customer’s technical executive, in this case Gordon.

Gordon had me writing a monthly status report about the VM project, copying other Insco executives as well. I never got any feedback to show that anyone was reading it, so I dropped “Stop me before I kill again” into the middle of a paragraph. No response. In the next report, I wrote “Since no one ever reads it, this report will be the last.” Marty came to me a day later and said “Please don’t stop writing your reports, everybody loves them.” That was a surprise: Gordon was passing what I assumed to be an Insco internal report on to Marty, and she in turn passed it to her management.

My job meant I had to sometimes lodge  complaints about IBM support. Right in front of me, an IBMer tracking an unresolved problem asked Marty, “How can we keep Paul happy?” I told him I didn’t want to be happy; I wanted the problem to be fixed, and for a while I called Marty our Happiness Engineer.

When a group from Insco went off to a technical conference, Marty would often go too, staying at the same hotel and joining us (and sometimes paying) for dinner. I always believed her main assignment on the road was to make sure we didn’t go off the reservation and talk to someone from another computer company.

I usually told my wife about anything of interest that happened on a trip, and once I said “I was talking to Marty, and she said…”, interrupted by “’SHE said’? MARTY IS A WOMAN?”  I said “Yes, I told you that” and she said “No, you never told me that!”, and we agreed to disagree, in silence. I’m sure I told her that years earlier. Pretty sure.

Movers and shakers

With few exceptions, the people I worked with at Insco were good, friendly people, and I miss them. Seeing the building being torn down last year made me very sad.

Arthur
When I started at Insco, I inherited maintaining one of Arthur’s older insurance programs, and got to know him. He was an incredibly productive programmer and a CPA – a mad genius who could write an entire property insurance system without a written specification, based only on Insco’s contract with some far-off state agency, inventing the parts that were necessary but not written down. It seemed like he worked 12 hours a day; any night I stayed late I’d pass his desk on my way out, him still furiously spinning out code, surrounded by cigar smoke and stacks of program listings. Arthur was old and gray and frail, and he loved the company and his work.

I had known Arthur for only a year when I saw his name on the local newspaper’s obituary page. He died in Jersey Shore hospital, no mention of the cause. He left behind a wife and five children, a terrible thing, but to me most terrible was that this worn-out old man was only 48 years old. I kept a copy of his obituary to remind me of what’s important.

Paul Prinzhorn
Paul was a young programmer and philosophy major who was taking a night course in statistics at Rutgers-Newark. As he started home one night, he was stopped by two locals who wanted his wallet and briefcase. He resisted, and they stabbed him to death. When I heard, I thought, one more crime that will never be solved. But while writing this I found out, via newspapers.com, that the two were identified by a witness, arrested, and in 1982 sentenced to life in prison. 1982 is a long time ago, but I hope “Life” means life, and they are still there. That’s why I pay taxes.

Don’t resist, friends. I know it goes against every normal instinct, but don’t.

More Gordon
Gordon and I got to talking about when I worked at Hess. He dismissed the Hess notion of keeping people in the building at lunch time with a cafeteria that served great and unlimited food for only 50 cents a day. I told him Hess had another great idea; cafeteria staff rolled a cart into your department twice a day with free coffee, juice and soda. He looked at me as though I was crazy, but I said Hess saw it as win-win because the employees weren’t burning up time going back and forth to the cafeteria. He seemed to like the idea better after that, but didn’t say anything more and I forgot about it. A few weeks later I heard a buzz of excitement down the hall, and here came a cafeteria lady, pushing a cart of coffee, juice and soda, AND a selection of pastries. The catch? She also had a little cash box to make change: none of it was free; Gordon wasn’t giving anything away. Everyone was happy about the great new convenience, but only I knew what might have been.

Tech manager Bob
Bob was the first manager of the technical unit, the collection of programmers that fed and tended the two mainframe computers. I knew IBM 360 assembler language, which is how applications “talk to the metal” as they say, and when an opening in the unit came up, I interviewed with Bob and was offered a transfer. Special thanks to Phil Keating, the vice president who did not oppose my transfer out of his area.

Kermit Says
Bob had a strange approach to managing, but it worked. I don’t know if he did it to keep us entertained, or because he had a mental block about directly assigning work. He’d put a sock puppet on each hand (one was Kermit, I forget the other), crouch behind his cubicle wall, raise his hands and start a Muppet-voiced conversation:

Kermit: IBM sent us an operating system update!
Not Kermit: I hope it fixes all the bugs!
Kermit: Me too, but we’ll have to shut down the system to install it!
Not Kermit: Oh no!
Kermit: It’ll be alright, we’ll all come in at six o’clock tomorrow morning after production finishes!
Not Kermit: That sounds great! See you there!

Tech manager Dennis
When Bob left the company for more money, we got a new manager, Dennis. Dennis had a peculiar loyalty to the hardware brand Itel (sometimes misread as Intel), a cheaper non-IBM brand of disk data storage, and he persuaded Insco to install eight units. Itel was a subsidiary of Hitachi, a Japanese company, and thus automatically on the wrong side of Gordon, a veteran of World War II. Gordon took quiet satisfaction in every Itel hardware failure, which were common. When an Itel unit failed, their service person sometimes had to drive to the Army base at Fort Monmouth, about ten miles away, trading circuit boards back and forth between the two sites to isolate the failure to a single bad board. Dennis once asked me to make up a six-letter name for a new Itel unit, then was unhappy when I chose BRANDX.

Dennis was a bit shady, and he’d roam the department in the evening, searching for candy or gum. I kept this note in my pencil tray. It seemed to work. Notice how it suggests that nobody actually knows who “cheap bastard” is.

As the company added programmers, the VM system slowed down, and a faster machine was needed. I don’t know every detail of what happened next, but here’s the general idea as best I understood it. Remember I’m not a hardware expert.

When Gordon read the specification for the newly announced IBM 370/148, it appeared to be 20% faster than our current computer, a 360/67. Dennis said Gordon didn’t understand the specification – although the cycle speed was faster, the 370/148 would require more cycles per instruction, meaning any given unit of work would take about four times as long as on the old machine. Gordon disagreed with Dennis’s interpretation. There were heated arguments, but Gordon outranked Dennis, Dennis gave up, and a 370/148 was ordered.

Gordon was a great manager and negotiator, but not an expert in the fine points of computer hardware, and his interpretation of the 370/148 spec was wrong. The 370/148 was installed, and as more users arrived at work on its first day, performance went from slow to terrible. After a few hours, the users were ready to riot and Gordon took me aside to ask, in an indirect way, about the possibility of sabotage. No, there had been no unauthorized changes, by Dennis or anyone else. It took two or three days to get the old machine reinstalled, then IBM helped Gordon choose a better, faster model. The whole thing was a disaster, and a huge embarrassment for Gordon. For me, the worst part was that Dennis was right.

Jenny and me? Nah.
One more thing about Gordon. I never saw it in his dealings with me, but apparently he could be impatient and nasty in his dealings with his secretary, Jenny. She and I were friendly and she knew I understood Gordon, and one day she came downstairs in an emotional state, looking for some sympathy. She appeared in my office doorway and asked if she could come in. Of course she could, and I closed the door. (How different things were then!) Gordon had finally worn her down, and she spent the next five or ten minutes crying about the way he treated her. I can be sympathetic when I want to be, and she eventually calmed down. I opened the door and she left, still red-faced. Meanwhile, my own secretary, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, had been listening at her desk outside the door. Based on all the crying, she tried to float a rumor that Jenny and I were lovers, but nobody was buying it.

Crashing

Before there was VM, there was CP-67, a predecessor that ran on an earlier IBM machine, the 360-67. I call them both “VM” here for convenience, and because for people developing programs there wasn’t much difference, except for the terminals/workstations. Invented before the silent CRT, the noisy 2741 terminal was based on the IBM Selectric typewriter and printed the same way, by banging a typeball through an inked ribbon onto paper, one letter at a time in a machine-gun clackety-clack.

In the early days of VM, you could expect at least one system crash a day, sometimes more. People made a habit of issuing a “Save” command every few minutes, sometimes more often, to minimize how much work they’d have to repeat after a crash.

On a VM system with the noisy 2741 terminals, a computer crash really was a crash. Suddenly the room went silent and all keyboards locked. For a second, the human mind imagined the silence might be a coincidence, that maybe everyone was forming a new thought and had stopped typing. As the silence stretched into several more seconds, we accepted that the system was crashing under us; the silence was the system organizing itself to restart. During those last seconds, there was a collective sigh – we knew any work since our last Save was lost.

The silence ended with an actual crashing sound – every terminal in the room simultaneously banged out the system’s Welcome message, “IBM CP-67/CMS online”. The best way to think of that sound is to imagine a stack of dishes dropped straight down, staying together until they hit the floor. That sound confirmed the system had indeed crashed, and was followed by a dispirited “Awwwwwwww.”

Charles
Charles was a programmer who smoked a lot of marijuana. Maybe he was stupid already, but who can say.

One day he was sitting next to me in the terminal room. In his befuddled state, he typed in a command that deleted the only copy of the program he had been working on. He still had a paper listing though, so he began typing it in. The program was relatively small, maybe 200 lines of code. After he’d been typing for an hour or so, the system crashed, and Charles let out a sad “Ohhhhh.” I could tell he hadn’t saved his work, because he went right back to the top of his listing and began typing it in again. After a while the system crashed again, and he put his head down as though he was going to cry. I said “You didn’t say ‘Save’ this time either?” He hadn’t.

He looked so upset that I felt sorry for him. I wasn’t his boss, so I couldn’t tell him what to do, but I made a sort of tough-love suggestion. I said “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, go home, and think about whether computer programming is the right line of work for you?”

He did leave for the day, and the story had a happy ending, for both Charles and for Insco. A few weeks later, Charles gave notice. He’d found a better job, as a programming consultant for one of the big accounting firms. Those of us who heard just rolled our eyes.

James and the Giant Printer

Insco ordered a high-speed laser printer, the new IBM 3800. The VM operating system didn’t support the 3800, so IBM arranged time for us to develop our own support code in their Madison Avenue office. We would give IBM a copy of our changes to provide to other 3800 buyers. VM shops were a small, friendly community in those early days, and innovations were freely shared.

Jim was a systems programmer who knew his way around VM, and was also an expert mechanic who kept his church’s old school bus running and getting parishioners to church each Sunday.

After some planning, Jim and I headed for New York. We brought along a copy of Insco’s own customized VM system, on a disk pack in one of those plastic carriers that looks like an oversize birthday cake. Boarding the subway for the trip uptown to IBM, I suddenly imagined that our system might be erased if we sat too close to the motors, and we kept to the center of the car. The system survived just fine.

Insco was reasonable about letting people stay in a hotel short-term rather than commuting back and forth, and that’s what we did. After we finished up each evening, we had a leisurely dinner and headed back to the hotel. James was not a drinker and kept to his room; I headed for the hotel bar. In moderation, of course.

I think we were in the city four days, changing code and running back and forth between our workroom and the seemingly locomotive-sized printer. We used up a lot of paper getting that monster working, but it finally did, quietly and at great speed.

Insco’s own 3800 arrived one weekend and was installed dead center in the computer room. It took up a lot of space and was the first thing you saw when you walked in. When I got my first look, I was surprised and disappointed: our world-class, superfast printer was crooked. Instead of sitting parallel to every other piece of equipment in the room, it was misaligned, just enough to look a bit silly. The computer-room manager said the installers had a terrible time with it (it weighed 2200 pounds), and said the resulting position was the best they could do. The manager’s vice president said it wasn’t off by very much, and did it really matter? I was not happy, and for a while I had to see it every day.

Chairman Ricker
I never met Continental’s chairman, but he became something of a hero to me. On his next visit to Neptune, the first thing he said when he saw his new printer was “Why is it crooked?” Nobody tried to convince him it wasn’t, and it got fixed.

When you’re the chairman, it’s easy to make things happen. He often flew between the New York and Chicago offices, 720 miles, and when he became chairman, he adjusted company policy to allow first class travel for any trip exceeding 700 miles.

Hypervigilance

Queeg had been a captain in the Merchant Marine during World War II, and he seemed to think he still was. Queeg was not his real name of course, but he reminded us of the unstable disciplinarian captain of the WW II minesweeper USS Caine, the Humphrey Bogart role in The Caine Mutiny. In peacetime, Queeg was vice president in charge of Insco’s physical plant – such things as cleaning and maintenance, heating and cooling, landscaping, the parking lot, and building security.

New rule
Soon after the building was fully staffed in 1971, Queeg held an all-hands meeting to familiarize us with the rules. Back then, people dressed for business: women wore conservative dresses or suits, men wore suits and ties. Queeg reminded us of the dress code, and added that men would need to wear their suit jackets when away from their desks. I raised my hand and asked how far away from our desks could we be before we needed a jacket. He was annoyed by the question, but instantly invented a rule, “Ten feet.”

Attitude survey
I think Queeg’s high-handedness was responsible, directly or indirectly, for a lot of employee unhappiness and turnover, especially during Insco’s early days. After a while, the personnel department developed an anonymous attitude survey, ostensibly to identify problem areas. The survey was immediately suspect because it wasn’t available for everyone to take – people were selected for it, perhaps one in every five or ten employees. People thought “happier” employees had been chosen, to make things look better at headquarters. Many of those not selected wanted to air their views, and asked for a chance to take the survey. These requests were denied, resulting in more discontent. Management eventually relented, and a new survey was offered, this time to everyone. The results were not made available.

Old Coffeestain
One day coming back from the cafeteria with a cup of coffee, I got on the elevator; Queeg and one of his direct reports, the site electrician, boarded right behind me. There was a fresh coffee stain on the beige carpet. Queeg said, I assume to the electrician, “Bunch of fucking pigs work in this building.” I couldn’t believe my ears, and winced. The electrician gestured at my cup, and in a roundabout way excluded me from, and apologized for, the insult, telling his boss “He’s got a lid on his.”

Surveillance
Trying to gather intelligence on what employees talked to each other about, one day he slouched down in the chair of an unoccupied corner (low traffic) cubicle, just listening. Word spread, and after several people walked by and pretended surprise to see him, he got up and left. He didn’t even have enough respect to invent a reason to be there. Jeez, bring a book and pretend you’ve found a quiet place to read.

Returning from lunch one day, I was surprised to see a security camera facing the elevator doors, a sign of things to come. Because the camera was new, I presumed there would be a crowd in the security office watching the feed, and faked a little flamenco dance. That’ll keep ‘em entertained. One more thing to hate us for.

I don’t know what our security guards’ crimefighting backgrounds were, but most of them seemed to come with an us-against-them mentality. “Hate” is a strong word, so instead I’ll say the guards disliked us – for making more money than them, for laughing and enjoying ourselves, for our low-grade disrespect, for sometimes soiling the carpet and making the Captain angry.

One night I was working alone in the terminal room and put my feet up on the workstation table while I studied the printout in my lap. A guard came by, stood in the doorway and stared at me, hard. I could tell it was all he could do to not slap my feet off that table.

People below a certain pay grade were paid $5.00 an hour for overtime. You’re right, it’s not much, but it was at least something, more than a lot of places. The back door was locked at night, and after six o’clock everyone had to exit through the front, signing their name and time in the logbook at the guard’s desk. One night several of us left at the same time, but twenty feet down the sidewalk I realized I had forgotten something. I turned around and reentered the building, to find Queeg leaning over the guard’s shoulder, checking the log to see if we had fudged our exit times. How did he get there so fast? He’d been hiding in the closet behind the guard’s desk.

So if this job was so great, why would I leave?

I wasn’t doing the programming work I loved anymore; mostly I managed the people in my department. Sometimes I had to get involved in office politics, in my opinion a low activity.

Twice a year I had to do performance appraisals; these gave me problems getting to sleep and a nervous stomach on appraisal day. My boss made me review  each one with him beforehand; in his management book,  everyone has something in serious need of improvement, even if we have to stretch the truth. This feels dishonest.

My group researched and travelled to manufacturers’ sites to identify the best new midrange computer for the branch offices. When we made our recommendation, we unfortunately chose a “wrong” brand, not the one favored by our higher-ups. The company president made a crack to me about “shitting in the punch bowl”, that is, spoiling something that was going along oh-so-well. Not a career booster.

Insco had been paying me pretty well over the years, and it seemed unlikely anyone else would pay me that well to do something I liked doing, so I wasn’t really looking for another job. Life at Insco wasn’t so great anymore, but it was still borderline okay.

Then one Sunday I was browsing the New York Times help-wanted section, and saw a job that seemed to have my name on it: IBM’s Yorktown Research Laboratory, not very far away, was looking for VM/370 systems programmers. Programming! Hands-on tech stuff! I thought about it for a day, then had a talk with Mimi. She was ready for a new adventure, and I started working on my resumé .

Some  people in Yorktown already knew about helpful improvements I had made to the VM operating system, and I was invited for an interview.

The clerk who phoned to set up the interview said to bring a copy of “my highest degree”. When I told her I didn’t have a degree, she said “Not even a bachelor’s?” She sounded very young. Remembering the “figure of speech” issue that came up at Insco thirteen years earlier, I had been very careful when filling  out my application, and I asked “Is that a problem?” She seemed flustered, and answered “Oh, no, no, not at all.” When you drop out of school, the explaining never ends.

I got through my interviews and the physical just fine, and was offered a job again doing the work I loved.

Side story: The physical was quite thorough, and included taking a blood specimen. While checking my blood pressure later, as the pressure cuff was doing its stuff, the doctor asked if I had any objection to them running a drug screen on my blood. I said that would be fine. I think the odd timing of that question was calculated to produce a pressure spike in pot smokers or such.

When I gave notice at Insco, nobody was surprised.

Here’s a link to my daily life at Yorktown and beyond. I stayed at IBM until I took their generous 1992 buyout offer and retired.

Comment on smoking: I started smoking as  a teenager, and have quit many times – for a few hours, a few days, once even for five years. I always went back. At Insco, the stress of being in management got me smoking again. Sitting on the beach the day after my last day at Insco, I realized I no longer had an excuse or the desire to smoke, and I quit again, this time for good. I do sometimes wish I had a cigarette though, even 36 years later. Don’t smoke, kids. You’ll be sorry.

Epilogue

Continental Insurance
Continental Insurance was taken over by CNA Financial, who now send me a small check every month.

The site
Sometime in the 1990s, Continental’s lines of business dried up or were sold off, and Continental leased the Neptune building to Prudential. I don’t know how long Prudential stayed there, but a Google Earth timeline shows no sign of life after 2006. When I drove by in August 2020, the main building was being demolished.

Old Rob and me
I recently got on the ordering line at a Jersey Mike’s, and recognized the gent ahead of me as someone who was a programmer at Insco 35 years ago. After we talked for a few minutes, I couldn’t help myself, and made a little joke, “Wow, you got old.” I don’t think it was well received. It would have been a better joke, and much more accurate, if I had said “Wow, we got old.”