Residue of Years

Ah, the holidays are over and retirement is no longer something new and unusual. So, it's time to get down to business, YES, I have all that backlogged genealogy and about fifty more years of photographs to scan. But first, there is one last leftover task to complete that relates to my late 'career'.

You've probably read that in today's job market, it is projected that people will be changing jobs (and companies) every couple of years. And I had quite a few different jobs in different industries when I was younger, but once I found a place I liked with people I liked - I stayed. So I was with Shared Medical Systems (SMS) and then Siemens who bought SMS for 33 years. Geez. If you stay at a company only a couple of years, you're not going to gather that much flotsam, but three decades? Whoooaaa.

So, what's the task? Why, the 33 years of stuff! I wouldn't consider myself a hoarder, but even the most careful person is going to accumulate a lot of stuff in timeframes that span epochs. When I was clearing out my office and storage I threw away mountains of materiel that I thought I might need some day but never did. I'll bet there are a lot of people relieved that I've gotten rid of some of that! I no longer need it as 'insurance'. But even so, I brought home fifteen boxes (small boxes, OK) of stuff that needed further sorting plus my awards and plaques and crap from over the years.

I brought them home and put them all in the basement to cool. It might have been dangerous to handle all that stuff while it was still warm. Some of it might have gone off!

You see, this is an instance where my genealogy experience had me err on the side of caution. What if there was something in that mess that some future biographer, tired of picking through this blog and trying to time-sequence it, might need to finally determine what the hell it was I did for a living!

Heaven knows I don't know.

Just to set the record straight, that's not what my office looked like, it actually looked like this, but you can't see the crap because it's hidden or in storage. What you can't see doesn't exist! I learned that a long time ago. Hah!

So, down in the basement, I've got boxes and it's time to take care of them before they go bad and start to smell. I'm guessing a lot of it is going to be recycled, but it's time to close the chapter. Even at the risk of nostalgia and a ravaging paper cut.

And I know some of you are wondering who was in the early photograph I posted at the beginning of this post. Well, that's Katherina Pokornoski and her husband Stanislaw Zak c.1873. She's my half great-grandaunt. And I've got her photograph!

Part Deux

Haven't seen me for a while, have you? Hmm? No, I've been busy for the last year or so but all that's changed now. You wanna know why? 'Cause I'm OUT, OUT, I say! Out of the work force, stepped away, locomoted out, retired, free at last, free at last!

So, this is really Part Deux. Part Two. Part II. The part of my life that comes after work. If you've been reading this silly blog, you know I've been working full time since I was sixteen. At the last job I had (SAY! I like the sound of that!) I worked for Siemens/SMS for thirty-three years. Well, chronologically anyway, because if you count overtime, I worked there for forty-five work-years at least. There were some years that I worked a year and half, easy.

But that's what we did in those days, I really liked doing my job, it was satisfying and I felt as if I was doing something that mattered. My last job was running a great big data center that served about a thousand hospitals taking care of their data processing needs. I really hope I left the Information Systems Center in a better condition than when I found it. And sure, doing that job felt good, but it feels a lot better now!

So, as of the end of October, the stress began to fall away from my shoulders very much like the autumn leaves are falling from the trees outside. Not all at once, but gradually, gracefully.

Hopefully, once this process is completed, it won't leave a barren, dead, empty stump behind (you maybe guessed I'm not a Fall person) but instead will reveal something nice that was being hidden underneath. Much like what happens when you have a full body scan at your friendly, neighborhood airport nowadays.

Perhaps a normal person is under there somewhere, lurking. Frankly, I wouldn't count on it. By the way, you can invert those body scan images (create a 'negative') and they become quite lifelike. So we can get irradiated AND have the last vestiges of our privacy invaded in one easy step! Hmm, the 'pat-down' is sounding better all the time and I have time for it - I'm retired!

Flight of Fancy

I had to travel recently on business. Suddenly.

Travel is so exciting. It can be even more exciting when you don't have time to adequately plan. So, I was asked (!) recently to take the place of someone who had a customer visit planned. The person had gone and gotten themselves hurt (yeah, right), so I was sent in to absorb the wrath of a large and dedicated team of angry physicians.

Why me? Well, part of the fallout of working with the same customer base for thirty years is that people get to know you, remember your unusual name, you know the drill. So they felt comfortable yelling at me.

But I know how to do that, that's not the issue. It was the trip! The trip was a TRIP. I had the itinerary of the other guy, but I couldn't match the dollars because it was now about a day before I had to leave. So my trusty administrative goddess and I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to get from a large, metropolitan east coast city to a large, metropolitan mid western city at the last minute. Multiple, multiple attempts with various options including one that involved a stopover on the moon. It's not so easy, lemme tell ya.

But we got it done and I decided to go into work for a couple of hours in the morning before the flight because I HAD to get some stuff out of the way. My other work didn't just disappear because I was going to disappear. I recall my wife looked at me funny and implied she thought I was nuts, but hey, I'm a company man, it's my frickin' job, OK?

And it's a darned good thing I went in, too, because the Earth would have stopped spinning if I hadn't done what I was supposed to do. I mean, it's happened before.

So, I finished my work, picked up my travel paperwork to print off my boarding pass and happened to notice in an offhand sort of way, that the flight was going to take off in an hour and fifteen minutes! Holy crap! One of the many other flight options we had discussed had stuck in my head! The incompetence washed over me like a warm summer shower leaving me a little bedazzled by so quickly reaching Level 27 in the new Facebook game 'Incompetence Wars'.

Now, in the olden days, I would have had a hemorrhage or two and perhaps died on the spot. Ah, but not so, not any more. Now I have gone through the fires of hell and have had my mettle tested by a German colleague who was both a physician and a policeman. This crucible has burned away the impurities leaving a kind of shrunken but sturdy metallic outline of what I used to be. I survived that clown, this little thing was nothing! Nothing, I tell you!

So, I jammed my laptop and papers in my bag and hit the road. Now I certainly wasn't going to get to the airport two hours ahead of time, that was a chronological certainty. Sure I had a couple of other strikes against me, sure my luggage was still at home because I thought I would have plenty of time to pick it up on the way to the airport. Sure, I didn't have a boarding pass yet, but I did have a secret ace in the hole! Ha HAA! No, I won't tell you yet.

Once in the car, I call my wife. I ask her to try to print the boarding pass. Nope, too close to take off. She checks to see if the flight's on time. You BET IT IS! She checks for later flights, yeah, sure, but they're full. Deb says,"I wondered why you were going in to work, I couldn't see how you were going to make it." That explains why she looked at me funny, but what the heck, I give her LOTS of reasons to look at me funny, this is just one more banana in the bunch.

Now, it's thirty-five minutes from the office to get home and maybe twenty-five minutes to the airport. Then boarding pass, security, banging on the door of the plane. Pretty tight. Pret-ty tight! Deb drives me to the airport, there is no parking in this scenario, I arrive fifteen minutes before the flight leaves.

I rush in, breathless, expecting the worst... BUT, there's no one in line! The lady smiles at me at first and when she sees what flight I'm on she gives me a look that is an uncompromising blend of shocked pity and unutterable contempt.

She sums it up for me. She says, "You'd better hurry." No kidding.

I run up the escalator and into the motherless hands of... Security! I take off my coat, my shoes, my belt, my shirt and my pants and go through the portal in my socks and underwear. Hey, there could metal in that stuff! As I'm stepping through the portal, I remember I didn't take my little baggie of liquids and goo out of my suitcase. That's it! That's what will do it! My goo! My goo will screw the whole thing up.

But, no! The goo got through! The conveyor poops my suitcase out and the guard strikes me only once across the shoulder. Did you ever try to get dressed in a hurry? It's harder than you think. Shoelaces take an especially long time, so does lacing a belt. So does putting on your pants.

I get it all done, but OH MY GOSH! it's TIME! I glance at the monitor as I go by to confirm the gate and oh, look, a gift. They've moved the flight to Concourse B from Concourse C. Interestingly, we had driven by Concourse B to get to Concourse C. So, I run. I shouldn't run, I have no knees any more, but I run anyway.

Breathlessly, I arrive at the gate. The gate agent looks me over with a combination of derision and disdain. She says, "I guess this is your lucky day, we should start boarding in about a half hour."

You see, folks, this was US Airways. And US Airways was my ace in the hole. Even though the telephone agent didn't tell my wife the flight was late and even though the counter agent didn't tell me the flight was late, I knew, I knew that I could ALWAYS count on US Airways being late out of Philadelphia.

There are few things in the world that you can really count on. Mighty rivers may change their course, great nations may change their boundaries, even the sun itself will go supernova some day.

But you can rest assured that on the day the sun explodes, US Airways flights will be late leaving Philadelphia. This was just my lucky day.

Conversion

Change happens.

My last entry on travel reminded me of a story. Back in the days of yore, when giants walked the earth (OK, thirty years ago), I had just begun work at Shared Medical Systems (SMS - later acquired by Siemens) and I worked in the group that did 'Conversions'. In those days, SMS was growing rapidly, getting tons of new hospital customers all the time. Converting from one electronic system to another is a hard time for a hospital, most run on very thin margins and any disruption to their cash flow is very painful. So we tried very hard to get their billings moving again as soon as we could. And we did that by 'converting' their old files from whatever system they used to run on into the SMS file structure so we could do billings right away, in many cases the very next day after the conversion.

I was very pleased to be in this group doing that work because it was SO challenging. In those days, there were many more manufacturers of computers and many more proprietary file structures, some specifically built for one hospital. So every conversion was different and each was a little like forensic archeology. We had to pick the files apart and tease the information out of them and specifications were always poor because the company or group losing the account was never tripping over themselves to supply proper information. They were probably hoping we would fail so they could get another shot at the hospital. So we wrote our conversions in a language called PL/I (Programming Language One), which allowed us to manipulate data down to the bit level so we could actually change characters around if we had to. And we often had to. This is what coding in PL/I looked like:
It was such a strong language, we could decode bizarre 7-bit junk or data with arcane random buffer lengths or files that had another file to tell where certain data was posted (which was never included in the batch they sent us). But this is where I learned my love of forcing the system to do what I wanted it to even if it had no intention of giving me what I wanted. It was a real rush to pull a jewel out of a steaming pile of crap. The executives knew we were doing magic and were grateful to us and sent us letters of appreciation. But no money.

So, what's this got to do with travel? Well, the most money came in when we acquired a group of hospitals and that was fairly regularly. The deal maker was a Vice President named Mike Mulhall who had such commanding presence that his statements were regarded as stone fact simply because he had uttered them. These were not negotiations, they were pronouncements. It was amazing to watch. So he and I would travel to these places and meet with a room full of people and 'negotiate' what was going to happen. They would bring in their technical experts and I would question them about their file structures, aging decisions, financial codes, etc. etc. right in front of everyone. Then I would give Mike my estimation of the difficulty factor for the conversion and he would apply it as one factor in the financial part of the deal. It was a little like the Pros from Dover had come to town and we were there to crack this kid's chest and get in a round of golf.

Only it wasn't golf, it was drinking. Mike drank more than any human I'd ever seen. On our fairly frequent trips, we would go the airport and into one of the many airline clubs he was a member of. I didn't sit in those cold plastic chairs at the gate for YEARS. When they called our flight, he called for another round. We only left when it was FINAL call. And then, when we boarded (always as the door was closing) he'd ask the stewardess for a drink so it would be ready as soon as we were in the air. At first, I tried to keep up with him, but that was just dumb. Mike was a studied, hardened professional drinker, but he never showed a sign of intoxication other than a reddening of the face as the evening (or day) progressed. There was more than one occasion when we would fly to our destination and go right into a meeting after drinking for hours! I have no idea how I pulled that off other than Mike expected me to, so that made me capable. It was a little worse when the meeting was first thing the next day because although he didn't feel it, I sure did.

Then my team and I actually had to DO the conversion and there was never enough time. But that's a story for another day. Imagine staying awake for three and half days straight and writing better code three-quarters of the way asleep than I did wide awake and rested. If I tried that now, I would be DEAD, DEAD, DEAD.

On the day of conversion, we didn't have any fancy file transfer, we had one of our guys hand-carry a set of tapes back from Michigan or Arizona or wherever. Timing was crucial as you can imagine. Between the day-end of the other system and the airline schedule, there was often a very tight timeframe. Our courier told the story once of his speeding across town in his rental car, squealing to a stop in front of the terminal door, jumping out with his case of tapes and as he ran through the door, he tossed his rental car keys to a cop standing there and said "Medical Emergency!" and just kept running. I can't remember if he said he made it through the airplane door as it was closing or it had already closed but either way there was no time for any rental car return.
We waited breathlessly for a ticket or bench warrant to arrive in the mail, but all we ever got was the rental car receipt. That means the officer may have personally driven the car to the rental car return himself and then had to arrange getting back to his post or made it happen some other way, but however he did it, we're grateful.

Can you IMAGINE trying a stunt like that now? We would be shot six times before we ever got through the first door. Traveling was different in those days.

Mike Mulhall died very young and it was a long time ago. He had a heart attack at the New York Athletic Club after a steam bath. I learned a lot from Mike, we traveled all over the country together, we were a good team. He is missed.
 

Decisions, Decisions

I was asked a provocative question last week.

"How do you find the time to do a blog?"

It was provocative because it had been a week since I made an entry. Sorry. I was actually feeling a little antsy because I hadn't written anything. Blogs are habitual. But put last week aside for a moment, I'll get around to how that fits in with this narrative. The answer to her question is that I don't 'find' the time. It's not laying around somewhere, I make the time because of Maslow. Maslow's Hierarchy of Need is a well known and well respected actualization model. It attempts to define why we do things, what our motivations are and how they rank. People gotta eat. Gene Kelly said, 'Gotta dance!' I gotta write this crap. And, yes, writing this blog is a little less critical than excretion, but barely.

When I tried to categorize this 'need', I found it spanned all the top four segments. I wrote a little while ago about details of some jobs I had when I was younger. This information may be critically important to someone. . . somewhere. . . sometime.

For example, my father worked for a company called the White Company in Baltimore when he was young. What did he do there? Was it his first job? How old was he? Was he a truck driver, or was this where he was introduced to auto and truck mechanics which he did all the rest of his life? I'm pretty certain the White Company wasn't some sort of front for a racist organization because apparently, they started out making sewing machines. That's pretty innocuous.

But I can't find out any of this information (yet) because my father didn't keep a blog. So, I won't make that same mistake. As a result, I take a couple of hours and write stuff and insert some spiffy images so people will have something interesting to look at when they get bored and that's practically a certainty.

But why is it so strangely important to me all of a sudden? Well, a symptom of the answer was what kept me from blogging last week.

I run a data center for a company that does data processing for hospitals. That's like the perfect storm of criticality. Computer work itself is important but when you're doing it for hospitals - Oh. . . My. . . GOD! - it doesn't really get much more critical. But it's actually OK, because we're the best in the business and have been doing it longer than everyone else put together. So we have processes and structure and documentation and we're well motivated. But we still have the occasional sixteen hour day like last week. And it's nothing like it was years ago when that was more normal for me than I like to remember. And I know there are doctors and nurses out there laughing, 'Only sixteen hours? Ha Ha Haaaa!' Hey, talk to me in thirty years. I also put in my three days straight without sleep more than once and have the burst blood vessels in my eyes to prove it.

But the event reminded me that I'd better be writing this stuff down if that's what I want to do. For a vast collection of things, my brother and I are the only ones who have any actual memory. That worries me a lot because my brother has lost almost all of his memory and most of his mind as well.

I mean, who's going to tell the hilarious story of when we were having a bonfire on 118th. Terrace and someone threw in a closed fingernail polish bottle. Of course it exploded and the shards of glass hit the person standing closest to the fire, that would be me, right in the face. Ha ha, good times. Three of the pieces hit within millimeters of my left eye (my left eye again!) at 2 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock. Three near misses, all around the eye! So I run into the house with my face covered in blood, screaming my head off. Boy, that must have been something for a parent to see, huh? It's a shame they didn't have video cameras in those days, that would be great stuff to show at parties and reunions.

The part I remember clearest is walking to North Miami a few times to see the doctor. Mom never learned to drive and there was only one car anyway. Plus, we were down at the end of a dead-end road and the idea of taking a taxi was in about the same league as taking a rocket ship. So, we walked. I remember it was fun taking the walks.

So, I have made a decision to write things down. My brother and I are the carriers of this baton and we're not carrying it alone. So, there.

That's me grabbing at my brother's trike. In the writing business, that's called foreshadowing.

What the Hell

Marilyn Monroe is famously quoted as saying, "Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?"

I'd like to add that you often reach that decision state when you're tired. Frankly, a lot of the major directional decisions I've made in my life were made when I was tired. I'm tired right now, but I've got this thought in me and it has to come out.

When I interviewed with the company that I still work for, SMS, (now Siemens), I came right off an all-nighter at the computer lab and right into the interview. I knew instantly that this was the company I wanted to work for and canceled all my other interviews as I walked out. Now that I think of it, I guess it's a good thing they hired me. The interview was in January, they hired me and I didn't start until I graduated in August. It did take the pressure off the last couple of semesters. What's more, this is what I looked like when I interviewed and they hired me anyway!

I also made the decision to join the Navy when I was tired. I was going to school full time and working full time so when my friend Bob Deeter suddenly suggested we should just join the Navy, I followed Marilyn Monroe's sage advice (as I always try to do) and said, 'What the hell' and we joined up.

We took the summer off before heading off to camp, I wrote about that in a previous blog entry. I also had the opportunity to drive my mother up to Minnesota to see her family. We went in my mauve Rambler American, the first new car I ever owned. Hey, don't laugh, it was a good car, I gave it to my father when I went in the Navy and he drove it practically the rest of his life. One of the high points of that trip was loading Mom, Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Edwin in the car and having some clown run a stop sign and hit the car hard enough to spin it all around. Ha ha, what fun. No one was hurt and damage to the car was barely noticeable. Boy, they don't make cars like that anymore.

On the way back to Miami, we visited my cousin Audrey and her husband-to-be Andrew Houlihan. They were living in New Orleans and I distinctly remember deciding that as long as we were in the neighborhood, we would have to swing by and see them. Yeah, it's hard to reconcile how Minnesota and New Orleans were in the same 'neighborhood'. But I'm so glad we did because I got to meet Andrew and I thought immediately that he was so cool and had this dynamite southern accent. My instincts were right because even now, after all these years, he's still cool.

But the summer ended, I went to the beach a few last times to finish working on my tan preparing for the skin cancer that would come later. When we were visiting my Aunt Del and Uncle Mel (that's Uncle Mel to the right) up north with my mother, I happened to cross my legs and the skin on my leg showed. Well, Uncle Mel's eyes bugged out like you see sometimes in old cartoons. He asked, "Are you that dark all over??" He was stunned. This was a man born and raised in Minnesota in the heart of white-leg country. I think it had a profound impact on his whole belief system.

By now, my brother Dave had already moved to the Buffalo, New York area and was preparing for his marriage to the lovely Miss Donna Krueger. So as I prepared to leave to go off to boot camp, it never occurred to me that I was leaving my parents with an empty nest. And while it's true that they were never what you might call 'demonstrative' it may have at least been nice if I had awakened long enough to recognize what was going on around me and acknowledge it somehow. 'It never occurred to me' - a phrase I often use even to this day. But I was excited because I was taking my first jet aircraft trip. Bob and I were off to Chicago and on to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center where I would be introduced to 'culture shock' before they had even invented the word.

Twenty-five Things

Here is a list of twenty-five things about me - in no particular order and of no particular value.

1. When I was younger, it used to bother me that I was so tall. Now, it is what it is.

2. I could watch the movie Airplane! over and over again, continuously.

3. When my right hand was crushed in the Navy and my index finger was nearly severed, my reaction was only mild annoyance.

4. I probably worked too much during the early part of my career. In one two year period, I worked three years. That's too much.

5. I am very happy with how my children turned out, I wish I'd had something to do with it.

6. I wish I had the opportunity to ask family history questions of my parents and grandparents. But that's not going to happen.

7. I find genealogical research to be like what Hal was referring to in 2001 A Space Odyssey when he said, "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all I think that any conscious entity can hope to do."

8. I hate it when I have no one to blame but myself.

9. Writing in this blog is surprisingly satisfying.

10. My cursive writing was so bad when I was young that I have been printing everything I've written my whole life.

11. I am not Mr. Spock.

12. My taste in music has been evolving. I seem to enjoy things of a more mellow nature now. For heaven's sake, what's up with that?

13. Alcohol is a gift that I find difficult to refuse.

14. I know enough about Microsoft Windows and the tools necessary to support it to be an effective systems administrator. What do normal people do when their home computer goes all 'Windows' on them?

15. I have had many, many different jobs in my life but I've been with my current company for 31 years.

16. I really like glazed doughnuts.

17. I have a vision for Maryland genealogy where everyone's family history connects to everyone elses in a single metadatabase. I have the same vision for all the Kleyleins in the world.

18. I have very vivid dreams and sometimes I can remember them in great detail.

19. My favorite color is blue.

20. I have been walking since I was eight months old.

21. I have been to almost every state in the United States.

22. Simon and Garfunkel were right when they said, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

23. If I had actually kept a 'Journal of Unexpected Results', I would be on volume three hundred by now.

24. I once won a Caribbean vacation just by dropping my name in one of those 'Win a Prize' boxes at an appliance store.

25. I have learned that you never know what will happen next.

Bonus: I have been sending out a 'QUOTE OF THE DAY' for twelve years. Today's quote was:

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

- Burke Breathed, Bloom County