CHAPTER 180 LIFE AND DEATH IN THE LAST YEAR OF THE DECADE 1999
As I drove to work one May morning, the radio show I was listening to was interrupted by a public service announcement. The police were looking for an elderly man with dementia who had managed to wander away from a nursing home. I got into Wilmington and parked in the garage on Market.
I was about to cross to my office in the Pei building when I noticed a guy out in the middle of Market who seemed confused. I was hoping no car hit him, but he got across and went up the steps to the Pei plaza and then through the revolving door. I hurried over, but when I entered he was no where in sight. I went up to my floor and told Rick about this man.
we got there we saw the guy talking to the guard. We headed that way, but the guard ushered the old guy outside. We were pretty sure this was the man they were looking for and we followed. Outside I flagged down a bicycle cop and the cop made a quick call and a couple more bicycle officers showed up, and then an ambulance and they took the guy away back to where he had escaped from.
Learned I later from the man’s daughter that he was a retired lawyer who once had an office in the Pei Building. He thought he was going back to work.
Our good deed of the day done, Rick and I returned to our own office. Never a dull moment in the city.
Finally on another day in May 1999, Rick finally got AnalytiX to work on my PC. It was better than two months since I had arrived, bright-eyed and busy-tailed. I had forgotten most of the training I had by now, but soon discovered it didn’t matter. The basic training wasn’t worth the bother.
Speaking of Basic Training: my daughter Noelle had graduated from her Army Basic Training during the summer. We didn’t have the money to fly out to Missouri to see the ceremony at Fort Leonard
Wood. General Wood (right) has been recognized as a hero in the Spanish American War, but in reality was a racist who didn't deserve the honor of a Fort in his own name. But Buck Privates aren’t asked to choose their training grounds. It also appears Fort Wood was where they sent all the women recruits at the time. It was a hot place in the summer, but she had to squeeze her Basic in between her junior and senior high school years.
One thing she learned, she said, was you don’t roll your eyes at the drill sergeant. She was almost not off the bus when the drill sergeant said something and Noelle rolled her eyes at it. Next thing she knew she was doing pushups in a mud puddle with her fifty pound pack on her back.
By May of 1999 she was ready to graduate from Mount Pleasant High school, where she had been an honor student.
In fact, twice she had been named in Who’s Who Among High School students.
She didn’t have a lot of time to be a normal teenage graduate.
Immediately after graduation she had to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey as part of the Army Reserves. This photo shows Lois and I visiting her at Ft. Dix on Family Day, 1999.
Rick’s struggles resulted in him finding out to do any kind of import in AnalytiX you needed the ART or EXPORT modules and we didn’t have either installed yet. They came during advance training.
Well, Kim did have ART; I would ask her if I could use hers in the meantime – if I could ever find her. Rick said she snuck out to a bar every afternoon. When I did catch her one day and ask, she said she would, but somehow never found the time. “Oh, I am a poor teacher anyway,” she told me one day. I went to Nathan, but discovered he didn’t really know much about using AnalytiX. He would just export out data and use it in something else. He also was good at disappearing and not being much help.
Harry Urian (didn’t like his name, it sounded too close to urine) called me into his office and announced I was to be the Trust Analyst (there it is, Trust again, blast). He said Kim had done a lot of research into Trust and I should get what she had put together from her. Kim handed me a single item, which was a four-page form that was used by Trust people to open accounts. You know, you could check off if it was a Corporate Trust or Employee Benefit or Managed or Directed and that type of thing. It was not much help for what I was supposed to do. Kim said that was all she had.
Meanwhile, we had weekly staff meetings where nothing ever got resolved. The original AnalytiX design had not worked and Experian was doing a redesign for us, which was supposed to incorporate Trust into the so-called Bank Account Records. I don’t want to get into the weeds of AnalytiX too much; it is too much detail. I will just say, I decided to flowchart how trust records were supposed to get processed in the system and I discovered that some steps just fell off the edge of the world. We called the Experian designer in Denver about the Trust flow and the dead end tasks we kept having, but got a garbled explanation, and then the Experien designer disappeared and we never saw him again.. We got lost in a maze of disappearing Experian people. Things were getting strange. For instance, in the test redesign that Experian sent I discovered account numbers were wrong in the system. Well, it seems AnalytiX truncated the left-most zeros and since we had many account numbers with left most zeros, it gave us bad numbers that were a major part of house holding and tracking, this rendered those functions ineffective.
I started to get together with Rick and work on the system, and more and more problems came to light, which had long existed, but no one had caught them before us. We saw all these undiscovered issues, but everyone was just fighting over who was at fault. So I sat down and made up project tasks and schedules and sent copies to Harry and Dave suggesting we incorporate Project Management methods to get control of this beast.
Harry was afraid to reply. Dave sent me a memo that made absolutely no sense. It talked about stuff that had nothing to do with what I wrote. It was gibberish. What was wrong with this man? Why had he changed so from the outgoing idea man to a person hiding from the world? All day he sat at his computer, his back to his office door, doing something, but no one ever knew what.
Then Harry called me and said forget Trust; he wanted me to take charge of the whole project. Then Kim burst into Harry’s cubical and argued about this arrangement, and then Harry waffled and on it went.
I became friendly with Rick. His family was in construction and he had once worked as a carpenter. He even came to my home and helped me hang some new doors on the bathroom, but I couldn’t respect his work habits in the office. In fact, he had no work habits. He came in late. He was supposed to come at nine, but it was unusual if he showed up before ten. Then he would head to Lunch by eleven thirty and maybe be back by two. Even when he was there he would be emailing family and friends. One day I walked into his cubicle and he was sitting there burning disks for all the students in some class he was attending.
I also learned he had been written up for a fight he had had with the Server Manager and for another one with Kim, in which he used the F-word.
Later I discovered that Kim was keeping a secret file on Rick, noting his every move. She was sneaking into his appointment book and reading his emails.
Of course, I discovered Rick was also sneaking into Harry’s office and looking in his appointment book and reading his emails.
Meanwhile Dave finally left his office to go to the bank managers and tell them what a wonderful system AnalytiX was and sell them on all kinds of wonderful things it couldn’t really do.
Our boss wanted to know when the redesign would be done and thus see something practical come out of this multi-million dollar system that Jim Wadsworth had bought two and a half years ago.
In July of 1999, Dave dropped dead. Well, not exactly. At his Forty-Seventh birthday dinner with his family he dropped over into a coma. He stayed in a coma for a week and then he died. Dave, who constantly preached at us about healthy diet and exercise and who run marathons and bicycle races to the Shore just suddenly died.
Our boss came and wept her crocodile tears about poor Dave and how we should all be there for his family. We went to his funeral at a nearby Benedictine Monastery in Wilmington and there was no casket, no urn, nothing but a picture. In discussions with Deborah, we concluded Dave found his way to escape AnalytiX and the wrath of his boss.
Harry was the whipping boy now. The boss was on him all the time to get AnalytiX moving, but he was too scared to do anything. Rick was still doing his own thing and Kim was suddenly having a problem pregnancy and not coming in to work. People asked me to do some stuff in her stead and I had to get in her computer to get information. I did, but I had to change her password to do it.
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