CHAPTER 182 Y2K AND THE END OF THE WORLD 2000

 CHAPTER 182 Y2K AND THE END OF THE WORLD  2000

In January 2000 Rick resigned to go to MBNA, where he lasted about two months. He then was with Verizon. He left Wilmington Trust before he got fired, which he would have in February at the Valentine Day Massacre.  I don’t really think it happened on Valentine Day, but it  was close enough.  Harry and Joyce were asked to come down to a meeting room on the street floor and they never came back. Poof, vanished like magic. They were both terminated.

I was shaking again.  I was sweating again. I expected I was next.  A meeting was called and it was official that Mary was our one and only Section Manager and I was Marketing Senior Database Administrator and Analyst and Sherry Shen would be my direct Supervisor and we would hire someone to be Direct Mail Clerk.

Sherry Shen is Chinese.  She grew up in Communist China. She is mysterious  about a lot of her life and even her age (if I had said inscrutable would it be considered racist), but she is super smart and a hard worker. Her and I worked very well together (somewhat like Linda and I) and we began to solve the Analytix problems. We actually got it to where people could use it and trust it.  We also came to understand that Trust would not work in this system as it was currently structured. We knew that Wilmington Trust’s data was not the best, but we solved some problems for I/T that they had overlooked and on and on.  

We first hired a woman as Direct Mail Clerk, but she lasted only a couple months, then she quit because she couldn’t stand the pace.  I don’t blame her. I couldn’t either.  It was always tense and you were always looking over you shoulder.   

Next Diane Sparks resigned. This was a shock, because she had been a star at the bank for a long time. I would bet her and Rita had clashed. Both were very controlling women.  A new Division Head was needed for Interactive Services and guess who that was to be?

Fil Sherry!

We have moved into the middle of the year of 2000,  The Great Y2K. “Y2K may be the end of life as we know it” scenario has become the biggest let down of the Twentieth Century, snuffled out like an  insignificant candle in a room of florescent. The computers were still clicking away and no elevators

crashed, no airplanes fell from the skies and no ATMs went berserk and splattered the sidewalks with money.

Yet for some of us life has changed dramatically.  Just over a year ago Rita Turner was  over Marketing, but had not made her presence known in my life to much degree. Fil Sherry was coasting through his faux-managing of Deposit Services, Doug Harder was the third ranking Section Manager in that Devision and rising fast, Ted garrison was the new Division Manager of Data Preparation, Jim Parmiter was the Division Manager of Accounting, Bill Shinn was over Profitability and Jim Wadsworth was transferred to Branding.  Mary Murphy was Manager of the Small Business Center.   Sherry Shin was the Direct Mail Clerk and I was just getting to know her.  Bert Willet was underwriting loans and training all commercial lenders. My former Supervisor in Accounting had become the head of the team trying to create a new Trust System.  

A year earlier I ws an Analyst in Marketing Information in a

Division headed by my old boss, Dave Ernst, working near my old friend, Deborah Williams and near an old colleague, Joyce Babiarz. I was reporting to Harry Urian, becoming friends with the tech guy, Rick Kazmarczyk, working  alongside Kim DeSabatino, Nathan Hardy, Larry Taylor, Mawla Hanza, the Egyptian part-timer, secretary to all Janet, and Marketing Research manager, Barry Strepko.  That was how it was up until July 1999, and then the cracks appeared, the Boss volcano began to awake.  Lava streams began to burn a path through our lives.  Dave Ernst died. Kim committed crime and was terminated.  Then we were reorganized from the Pei building  a brand  new building named the WTC Plaza under Mary Murphy, who from the beginning wasn’t certain why she had gotten the AnalytiX monster dumped in her lair.  Rick escaped before the executioner came, but Harry and Joyce fell beneath the axe and were gone.  Diane Sparks resigned and Fil Sherry slithered out of Deposit services into the Division Manager’s hole in Interactive Services, where he continued his none-productive life style.  Sherry Shen was my new supervisor, and as it were to be, a new friend.

Over in accounting, the PMG Profitability System was fizzling along like a firecracker with a faulty fuse that would light.. Well, Chairman Capano tried to compress the time to do it and that was a bad decision.  PMG was more puffery than substances. There was big turnover at PMG. The old Wilmington Trust People, who had been at PMG, and I  am sure sold their system to Wilmington Trust, bolted PMG and formed a rival company. Jim Parmiter, seeing the handwriting on the wall, resigned and joined that new company too. Bill Shinn was moved out of a manager position to be devoted to budgets and reporting, the Profitability System taken from him. The system administrator of the Profitability System left, as  did half the analysts that had worked with me. The rates were growing outdated and in reality no one really trusted the figures anymore.  

My old buddy, Len Minner also resigned from WTC, because

they had given up on the in-house Trust System and hired SunGuard to install Global Plus.  Len also joined Jim  Parmiter and those others in their new company.  SunGuard’s Global Plus was supposed to be in place by the Fourth Quarter of 2001, but as usual with WTC, the date has continually been pushed back and maybe it was never installed, for all I know. 

Deborah Williams was working in a different area and had no one left to administer the Strong Points System.  When they terminated Joyce,. No one knew how Gemini worked and no one but me knew anything about the Strong Points System. The powers that be hadn’t thought these things through. I tried to help, but certain things had changed. First of all, the woman who had replaced me had taken and moved the guts of my system into her own system and lost all the easy interfaces I had built for the users. Everything had to be done by going into the system tables or queries directly, and she had changed a lot of these and built new ones without any naming conventions, so it was very difficult to find your way around.

I was able to get the uploads and downloads working, but didn’t have time to straighten out the reporting functions. And worst, I wasn’t even supposed too.  It use to be WTC awarded  people for initiative and teamwork if they helped out other areas if those areas had a problem you could help with. Now doing that was something you got a black mark for on your evaluation. And I was constantly being told I wasn’t to help Deborah…nor Bill Shinn, because accounting had never gotten an administrator for the databases I had built there, now they were calling me every time they had a problem, needed an update or wanted to try something new.