Achievement Inflation

An old friend's name popped into my head today, and on a whim I googled his name. He (Paul) is several years older than I but still plugging away. We worked in the same area in the early to mid-1970's, and when Rob moved to Chicago and took me with him, Paul was promoted to fill Rob's vice-presidential slot.

I was astonished, then amused, to see that his resumé describes that position as encompassing 750 employees. I doubt that on its best day it ever exceeded 300, and would not be *too* surprised to learn that it never reached 250 - perhaps not even 200.

Well, it was 30 years ago, and who's going to call him on it now? And how would they prove it?

This has brought to mind another colleague, Fagin, with whom I worked in the early to mid-1980's, when I was an assembler programmer in junk mail. This was in a small but growing company, and at one point I wrote an application that in one area catapulted the company to the top in its field. The application was merge/purge, and whether you know what that is or not is unimportant.

In the industry it made a name for my company, and for me.

A few years later, Fagin, who at his best could be classified as a junior programmer, was hired by a competitor, one for which I was consulting at the time, and I learned that Fagin had claimed on his resumé that *he* wrote the breakthrough merge/purge. His new company wanted a new merge/purge written and he was hired on that basis.

Soon after that he called me, saying he wanted to get together for dinner, and he had some questions he wanted to ask me. *Immediately* I said "Fagin, I'm not going to help you with that merge/purge. You're just going to have to understand that."

That was pretty much the end of the conversation, and for that matter, the dinner, which never materialized. Another non-arrival was his new company's desired merge/purge. He knew he couldn't write it and hopped to yet another company before he was found out.

Without staking a claim to sainthood, I can tell you that I never padded my resumé, and on occasions when I was a prospective employee or consultant, I *always* mentioned my limitations - areas about which I knew little or nothing, and simply took the position that everything is learnable.

I once jokingly referred to my "inferiority complex" while on a date, and the date affected an astonished look and asked "Your inferiority complex - where is that, your big toe?"

It's true that I am usually confident, even sometimes overconfident, and now I just cannot identify with the lies in Paul's and Fagin's resumés. I doubt that Paul has lost a moment's sleep, but Fagin must have had some restless nights before he jumped ship.

For your amusement, here is an example of my overconfidence: Maryellen, mentioned elsewhere in this blog, once proposed that I do some technical writing for a magazine for which she was already doing exactly that. I said that I had never written for professional reasons and she said, "Yeah, but Donnie, you can do *anything*." I replied, "Well, there is that."

A Voice from the Past

Well, not everyone I have known is busy dying. A friend and co-worker from the late nineties in Virginia - we'll call him Vic - has tracked me down some thirteen years after I left there.

We worked in a small company that provided data processing services for  junk mailers  direct marketers, nearly all of it on the fund raising side (charitable, political, etc.). Interesting stuff, although not as interesting as the catalog side of the industry.

We talked for some time, perhaps a half hour or so, I don't really know, on the phone and have exchanged a number of emails. Vic was in his late twenties when I knew him, single and hard partying, sometimes burning the candle at both ends, which is more easily done at that age.

Now he's a little north of forty, married, kids, dogs, the whole nine yards. I haven't said this to him (although he'll be reading this, I think), but he has matured greatly. I suppose we all do but it is not as noticeable with people one sees frequently as it is with someone out of touch for more than a decade, and the difference between someone in his twenties and that same person in his forties is dramatic.

We've been sharing memories and updating each other on what we know about friends and acquaintances. He's had to contribute more of that than I have, as over those thirteen years I've seen only two people we have in common.

We had another employee about Vic's age at the office, of Philippine extraction, whom Vic occasionally called "Secret Asian Man." For any youngsters reading this, that's a reference to the song Secret Agent Man, the theme song for a 1960's TV program, Secret Agent. Secret Asian Man is also married now.

Sharing memories is fun stuff.

Dug in and Not Budging

For some reason a bit of junk mail history has popped into my mind. It's not very interesting except in that it illustrates how people can get out on a limb with an obviously bogus position and cling to it for dear life.

At a company I worked for in Virginia in the 1990's, a client had sent us a master file of records on magnetic tape. The records comprised a history of donors to political organizations and had been copied from a disk file elsewhere.

The record format included dates and amounts of the most recent ten donations, with a YYMMDD format for the date and a seven digit field for donations, cents implied. Perhaps the last 25 or 30 records on the tape consisted of (presumably) genuine names and addresses, but each date was 222222 and each amount was 2222222. In addition, there were twos in the fields for identifying the political organizations that received the money and in the two-digit codes associated with the donations.

We'd had the file a couple of days, had run a conversion on it and examined the results, corrected a few things after looking at the output, and run a second conversion, when the owner of the client company called for me.

Client: "How's the conversion going?"

World's Greatest Programmer: "The conversion is complete. It all looks pretty good except that we had to drop a few records at the end that contained garbage data."

Client: "WHAT? Those represent money. You can't drop any records."

WGP: "Well, once you get by the name and address on the input, the rest of each record is filled with twos."

Client: "That's money! You can't drop records! I can't believe you dropped those records!"

WGP, losing patience and counting to one: "Ohhhh, I'll bet you'll believe that before you'll believe that on the 22nd day of the 22nd month of 1922 each of those people made ten donations of $22,222.22."

Silence, followed by

Client: "Let me speak to Walter."

Walter was my boss and the owner of the company. I put the client on hold, walked over to Walter's office, and explained the situation. Walter picked up the phone and I hung around just long enough to learn that he was going to have exactly the same conversation with the client that I had just had. Well, with a little more tact on our end, perhaps.

We had our wicked way in the end, of course. Garbage is garbage and there's not much to be done with it. For you mainframe techies, the twos came from unused index records on the disk originally containing the file.

Once in a while it can be productive to get out on a limb about something, and sometimes it can be fun, even if the limb gets sawed off behind you. Stubbornness for the sake of sheer stubbornness is something else. I can't imagine what the client thought about the origin of donations made in the 22nd month of a year six decades before the existence of his company.

Thoughts That Popped into My Head - II

• Melanie, daughter of a black American and a Thai woman, worked for me at a junk mail company in Virginia. She was in her early twenties and still living at home, and invited me to a cookout hosted by her family one fourth of July.
  
  Driving to her house at around noon on the appointed day, I saw a greenhouse that was open. On a whim I stopped in and picked up two roses, one for Melanie and one for her mom.
  
  Good move. Mom adopted me on the spot, although I was at least her age and possibly a year or two older. But I *needed* a mother while I was there because excepting only Melanie, her father, and yours truly, *everyone* - about twenty-five or thirty people - was Thai, and that's what they spoke. Only the three of us, and to a small extent her mother, conversed with each other in English.
  
  For all I knew they were plotting to overthrow the government, but my mind was soon set at ease in that regard when in the midst of unintelligible chatter I would hear something like "slot machine" or "jackpot."
  
  I chatted with Melanie's dad for a while, and when Melanie told us that all the food was ready and laid out on the deck, we grabbed paper plates and headed that way. I stopped when Mom snatched the plate from my hand and signaled that *she* would fill the plate for me.
  
  I'd had a few things at Thai restaurants, but really didn't know much about Thai food. Most of what I'd had was in any case an Americanized version.
  
  Mom filled the plate with some of the most delicious home cooked food I've ever had.
  
  Her dad was an interesting man, retired from the Army and retired from Civil Service, and working at a local school. But I write this anecdote just to tell the charming story of how he resolved unhappy situations with his wife. *He* never argued, although she would occasionally attempt to provoke him into it. He would sit down on a sofa and watch TV while she stood over him berating him for one thing or another, really just letting off steam. When he'd had enough, he would stand up, wrap his arms around her and give her a big hug, and go upstairs and turn on a different television set. She'd vented, he'd shrugged it off, and both were happy.
  
  
• As you know, Debbie and I stayed in touch after we split. Although hundreds of miles apart we saw each other several times, sometimes called each other, and frequently emailed.
  
  One day sometime around 2003 or 2004, seven or eight years after the last time I saw her, she began a curious line of conversation during a phone call. She asked me whether I thought her sister was attractive.
  
  Umm, yeah, not spectacularly so, but certainly not actively repulsive.
  
  Did I think her niece was attractive?
  
  Umm, yeah, a little heavy, but nice looking.
  
  Well, did I think a certain girlfriend she'd introduced me to was attractive?
  
  I had no idea why she wanted this particular information, but I saw right away where it was headed.
  
  Cutting to the chase, the most attractive woman you ever introduced me to was Paulette.
  
  (Paulette was a long-time girlfriend of Debbie's, and married to Bobby. Both were strangers to me, but Debbie and I visited with them one Christmas vacation. They were friendly, and before long Bobby and I were upstairs doing one thing or another while Debbie and Paulette chatted in the kitchen. This was the *only* time I ever met either of them.)
  
  Debbie and I finished our phone conversation and resumed emailing. Several months later we chatted again and at some point she said "I told Paulette what you said."
  
  Oh? What did she say?
  
  "She said 'I always did like Donnie.'"
  
  Ever after, when Paulette's name came up in conversation, it was as "the lovely Paulette."

The Watering Hole

AKA Grisanti's

• There was a cute little waitress at Grisanti's, about twenty years old, serving drinks and breaking the young men's hearts.
  
  At some point she disappeared for a week and then one night walked in wearing a short skirt and white leather boots. She sat down with a few of us junk mail regulars and filled us in. She had acquired the boots during a week long skiing vacation in Colorado. She and a male companion had had a very good time there and she was still quite excited about it all.
  
  Several days later a few of us were sitting around a table next to the bar, playing Liar's Poker or Yahtzee or some game that provoked lots of laughs and groans. In came our waitress with a young man, and she brought him to our table and introduced him as her boyfriend.
  
  Random Junk Mailer to Boyfriend: "So, you like skiing?"
  
  Boyfriend: "No."
  
  And while the rest of us were barely avoiding hernias due to the effort of not laughing . . .
  
  RJM: "You should try it. It's a lot of fun."
  
  
• Having set (and maintained, I am happy to say) standards, revised from time to time as I have aged, regarding the minimum age for any women with whom I might get involved, I acquired a few younger female friends at the junk mail company for which I worked. I don't know how they did it but they had somehow intuited that they were quite safe from me, and there were perhaps a half dozen on whom I could call if I was between girlfriends and needed a fourth (or even a second) for dinner or some circumstance. Later, Debbie acquired the habit of referring to them as "your harem" or "your concubines."
  
  One of these was a young woman named Jennifer and one Friday at work I spotted her from a distance. She was wearing a short black dress and looked good. I didn't get a chance to talk to her and didn't see her again for the rest of the work day. That evening, however . . .
  
  At Grisanti's the usual crowd from the company assembled, and at some point I saw Jennifer, who was *not* one of the regular crowd, standing at the bar and still wearing the black dress.
  
  An older man and woman were seated at the bar and she was standing between them and chatting with them. I grabbed my drink and walked over. I arrived just as the three of them finished some conversation.
  
  Donnie: "Jennifer, the next time I see you wearing that dress I'm going to bite you on the thigh."
  
  Jennifer: "Donnie, have you met my Mom and Dad?"
  
  In no time at all it was all over the bar: "Did you hear what Richards did?"

The Pigs at the Trough

In 1983 I incorporated myself as a one-man consulting firm. (I did this three times during my working life, each time promising myself to hire no one, each time keeping that promise). I would consult on personal computers, mainframe programming, federal procurements, and management in general.

John, the owner of a consulting company that my boss and I had used in the past, put me in touch with Joe, the president of a direct marketing (junk mail) company. John and Joe were two of the founders of this company, which had grown to twenty-five or thirty people, and which provided the data processing and some printing for clients - companies like Office Max and Bed, Bath & Beyond, (not actual clients of this company) which periodically mailed catalogues to customers and potential customers.

I did a lot of assembler programming for them, first as a consultant, and after several years as an employee. The employment offer was for six figures and Joe and Sean (the Executive Vice-President) readily agreed to my one condition - that I would never report to anyone other than the President or Executive Vice-President.

There were two of us who were six figure programmers with a great deal of freedom. We seldom reported to anyone at all and often got involved in efforts outside of programming. The average age of the company's employees was probably twenty-four or twenty-five, and we had much experience that they did not have. I was forty-five when I was hired, and the other, Jay, was a few years older than I. Jay referred to the two of us as "gold collar workers" - not quite in keeping with the general definition, but it seemed to fit anyway.

This was a great company to work for, particularly in the early days.
Everyone was friendly and helpful, the younger people (18 to 25, say) were exceptionally responsible, most of the employees socialized together, and it was not uncommon to see someone stay after work voluntarily to help someone else who had to stay to get something done.

The President, Joe, was Mr. Personality. Great smile, much enthusiasm, and concern for those who worked for the company. The goal was to build the company to the point where it would go public or get itself acquired, and eventually it did get acquired. But before that . . .

The company began to grow, which was good news and bad news. The good news is obvious, but the bad news was that Joe suddenly realized that he was worth seven figures, on paper, at least, and it changed his personality. He had been the kind of guy who not only would do anything for you but couldn't wait to do it for you, the kind of guy who might say, "Why did you have to think of that? Why didn't I think of that?" He became the kind of guy who couldn't wait to say, "I bought a new camera last night. Nine hundred dollars."

The company grew, eventually to around four hundred people, built its own building and moved into it, and became more bureaucratic. Some of that last is unavoidable with growth. When you have thirty or forty employees it's no big deal if they want to walk into the computer room and run their own jobs, for example, but you can't handle the confusion if you allow that with four hundred employees.

But the main problem was that Joe (and one or two others) got greedier and greedier. Several members of the Board of Directors had founded a printing company on the side with the intention of adding to the size of the work for which the junk mail company was responsible. It would farm out the printing to the printing company. Alas, this second company was not a success and wound up owing the original company a substantial amount of money.

The pigs were at the trough now, and the Directors would vote themselves huge annual bonuses and then send the managers and supervisors out to tell their people, "Well, it wasn't such a great year. We don't have much money for raises . . . ."

I became very uncomfortable with this. My friends on the board were screwing my friends at their desks, and I was unable to do anything about it. The final straw was that one year they voted to forgive the printing company a five hundred thousand dollar debt owed to the original company. This was a clear conflict of interest, and that debt should have been paid out of their pockets, but they effectively screwed the original company, and once again there "wasn't much money for raises."

I quit. I just couldn't stand to watch it any longer. I knew at the time that it was going to cost me a bunch of money whenever the company was sold, and it certainly cost me more than a half million dollars. I was unemployed for nine months and subsequently started all over at $50,000 a year. But in this world you do what is right or you collaborate in what is wrong, and I wasn't going to collaborate in shafting my friends, some of whom are still my friends today.

A Las Vegas Quintet: Part III

23 OF US

After the Las Vegas trip with Mandy, the manager of the Caesars office in Chicago called. "They loved your action. I'm sending your airfare check to you. Any time you want to go out there, just let us know. It doesn't have to be a junket - you can just go whenever you want to."

Free room? Free meals and drinks? Airfare reimbursed? "Donnie, fly first class. It'll be taken care of. Just call us." Cool.

Mandy and I split. I went to Las Vegas a couple more times that year and perhaps once every two or three months for the next couple years, taking a girlfriend when I had one, going alone when I didn't.

One day someone started a movement in the junk mail company I worked for - "Let's get a bunch of people to go to Las Vegas together." In the end, twenty-three of us went, mostly employees and spouses or SO's, and in a couple of cases friends or relatives. I was fairly certain that none of them knew much about gambling, and I invited all of them to come to my house one night, as I could at least teach them about casino craps. I purchased a ten or fifteen dollar set that included a craps layout and chips, and in the event all but one of the group showed up for the lesson.

For many of them this would be their first time in Las Vegas and the first time in any casino. In case you're interested, here are some of the things I told them about gambling in general:

• Don't start gambling right away. Walk around the casino, observe some of the games and players, ask questions of the casino employees when there is anything you don't understand.
  
  
• It's an exciting atmosphere and everything is calculated to entrance you and to keep you gambling. There are no clocks. There are no windows - you can't look outside and see whether it's day or night. Get used to the atmosphere before you gamble.
  
  
• Drinks are free to gamblers. Don't overuse this perk. If you start feeling a buzz, you've probably had too much and you've certainly had enough. It's one thing to feel bulletproof and invisible when the dice or cards or slots or roulette wheel or whatever are going your way and you're winning, but it's entirely another thing to feel bulletproof and invisible because you're drinking too much. Your judgment disappears and is soon joined by your money.
  
  
• You know how much money you're taking. Decide how much is for eating, drinking, shopping, shows, and so forth, and how much is for gambling. Divide the gambling amount by two - that's the maximum you should allow yourself to lose in one day on this trip. If you're going to have two gambling sessions on each of the two days, divide the gambling money by four. Do not exceed that amount in one session for any reason. In particular, if you're losing don't tell yourself "My luck's bound to change." It isn't. There is no "maturity of chance." Whether you've won or lost on the last play, the odds are the same as always for the next play. If you're flipping an unbiased coin and you throw heads ten times in a row, the odds for heads and tails on the next throw are fifty-fifty.

Interestingly, only the one person who did not attend that night lost all her money in her first gambling session. She spent the next two days following friends around, unable to gamble, unable to shop.

I taught them too much about craps to repeat here, but here's what was by far the most important:

• Bet "Pass" and/or "Come," or bet "Don't Pass" and/or "Don't Come." The come and don't come bets are exactly the same as the pass and don't pass bets, but they are made when there's already a point.
  
  
• Don't Pass is better by a minuscule amount - tenths of a percent. However, you have to have the right temperament to be a "wrong way" bettor. Most people bet pass, and the last thing they want to hear when they lose is "Yeah!" from someone who won five dollars while they lost. But if you can stand being surrounded by hostility - and I'm not exaggerating - then the "Don't" bets are for you.
  
  
• Betting pass and come, don't pass and don't come, getting or giving the odds, you can reduce the house percentage against you to less than one percent. All other bets are sucker bets. Remember it - All other bets are sucker bets, no matter what your friends tell you, no matter how much money they won betting "Any Craps," or placing numbers, All other bets are sucker bets. It's not as if you can't win with other bets, and it's not even as if you can't have a winning streak with other bets. It's just that you will win less money when you win - more precisely, your profit percentage will be smaller - and the house percentages on those bets will grind you down faster and more often than the percentages on the good bets.

I had imposed my wicked will on the group and got everyone to promise to gather for dinner the first night at Spanish Steppes in Caesar's, where I would buy. A little to my surprise, everyone showed up and I bought dinner for 23. With the tip and group photo - a copy for everyone - it came to about $3,000. I was already $4,000 ahead and didn't worry about it.

When I checked out a couple of days later, I went downstairs to see "the man with the pen," the casino employee who decided what would be comped and what wouldn't. He called up my action history for the weekend on a monitor, whistled, and asked, "Did you ever see your room?" We chuckled about the amount of gambling I had done, and I then said, "There's a dinner bill on there that I don't expect you to pick up. It's not really mine."

"Did you sign for it?"

"Yes."

"That makes it yours."

"Yes, but what I mean is that I bought dinner for 22 other people. We all came out here at the same time - not really organized, different hotels, different planes."

He looked at the monitor for a few seconds and said, "We can pick that up."

Most (all?) of us still have the group photo. I've seen them on office desks, and living room walls.

NEXT: GLUTTONY IN LAS VEGAS

Me and Cassie At a Ball

• About 20 years ago, a married couple, Jeff and Cassie, both worked at a small junk mail company at which I also worked. One week Jeff was absent from mid-week on. That Friday night Cassie showed up at the local watering hole, sans Jeff.
  
  "Hi, Cass. Where's Jeff?"
  
  "He's still got the flu. And he's really a PITA. 'Cassieeeeee, will you bring me a glass of water? Cassieeeeee, will you go get me a hot fudge sundae?'"
  
  Flash forward to the following Friday. Among the early arrivals at the bar we see Jeff, but not Cassie. Jeff and I sit at a tall round table with our drinks, and I cannot resist: "Cassieeeeee, will you bring me a glass of water? Cassieeeeee, will you go get me a hot fudge sundae?"
  
  Jeff grins and says, "Bitch told you that, huh?"
  
  
• Several years prior to that, the company for which we worked had been smaller and in a different location. There our most frequented bar was at a Chinese restaurant.
  
  Jeff worked nights and at that time I was an independent consultant, arranging my time as I wished. Jeff would show up to collect me at around two o'clock every Friday, and we would go "warm up the bar" for our colleagues who would begin to trickle in around five o'clock.
  
  Virtually the entire work force smoked marijuana and it was typical for us to leave drinks on the bar or on a table and tell the bartender that we were going out to "listen to the new speakers" in someone's car. Jeff and I would do this a couple times on a Friday afternoon while having two or three drinks and waiting for the others to arrive.
  
  One afternoon we were sipping our first drink, and I told Jeff I had a new music cassette and I wanted him to listen to one piece from it. "OK, Donnie. What is it?"
  
  "I don't want to tell you."
  
  "It's OK. Whatever it is I'll listen to it."
  
  "It's Chopin's Grande Valse Brilliante, my favorite light classical piece."
  
  "Aw fuck."
  
  "You never know, you might like it."
  
  On finishing our first round we decided to go to the car and smoke a little grass. When we were finished I asked, "Ready?"
  
  "Yeah, OK, but I'm not gonna like it."
  
  I turned it on, sat back, and closed my eyes. About 30 seconds into it I snuck a look at Jeff and his expression had changed from one of resignation to one of interest. A moment later he chuckled. I asked him, "What?" and he waved me off.
  
  When the piece finished he said, "I like it, Donnie."
  
  "Good. So what was that chuckle about?"
  
  He laughed. "Well, I was picturing me and Cassie at a ball, all dressed up. I had a ruffled shirt and pants tucked into tall boots, and she was wearing a very low cut gown that went all the way to the floor, and she was covering her breasts with a fan. At that point where I laughed, she cleaved me."