2022 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Mike

If you are not familiar with competitive duplicate bridge in North America, you may wish to read the entry posted here first.

Because of the threat of COVID-19 only two bridge tournaments were held in all of New England in 2021. Both were three-day sectionals in Watertown, MA. 114 people won masterpoints in the first one in October. 178 people won points at the Holiday Regional in November. This was better, but still unspeakably bad attendance. In the last tournament held in Watertown in 2019 exactly twice as many people won points—356.

The tournaments in Watertown were run by the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA). I was not a member, and I attended none of the three tournaments listed above. However, I was a member of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA), the “unit” for the state of Connecticut. The CBA ordinarily held six sectionals per year. Two of them were restricted to players with less than 199 masterpoints.

The June Tournament: I am pretty sure that the unit’s official bylaws required that the final decisions about the scheduling of tournaments be voted on by the board of directors. I can say without fear of contradiction that no such votes were taken between March 8, 2020—the last day of our last pre-pandemic tournament—and June 2022. In point of fact the board did not meet at all during that period. We did not even have a Zoom meeting.

Somehow a decision was made, probably after consultation between President Frances Schneider and Tournament Manager Cornelia Guest, to hold a three-day tournament on June 3-5, 2022 at the St. Barbara Greek Orthodox Church in Orange, CT. The schedule was essentially the same as used in 2019-2020. I don’t know who, if anyone, approved the date. The Rhode Island Bridge Association (RIBA) held a tournament the same weekend. The district was supposed to prevent conflicts like this, but someone evidently fumbled the ball.

The first notification of the tournament went out on May 8. Here was the text of the email.

Dear Michael,
CONNECTICUT 2022 SECTIONAL
June 3 – 5

St. Barbara Greek Orthodox Church
480 Racebrook Road Orange, CT 06477

See the attached flier for tournament information.

The “attached flier” can be viewed here.

In my opinion the notification should have been sent earlier, and more effort could have been put into content of the email. For over a year the people whom we needed to attract had been paying only a few dollars to play bridge. Persuading them to return to face-to-face play and pay a lot more would require more effort than this brief announcement displayed.

As usual I sent an email to dozens of my partners past and present, but I only one responded to the invitation to play in Orange. Sonja Smith said that she could play with me in the pairs games on Saturday. She was a very good player, and I knew that she and her husband Chris were planning to move to North Carolina before the end of the summer. So, I jumped at this chance to play with her.

I was also committed to making the trip to Orange on Sunday if only to attend the board meeting that had always occurred on Sunday morning before the Swiss teams game. Chris brought Sonja to Exit 38 on I-91, and I drove the rest of the way. On Sunday I drove myself. I planned on offering to play if they needed me.

I was quite excited at the prospect of playing in duplicate bridge tournaments again. During the drive to the tournament Sonja and I discussed our convention card. We agreed on a set of conventions that was much reduced from what we had played the last time that we played together. I had pretty high hopes that we could do well.

I was not expecting the large crowds that the unit’s sectionals had been experiencing before the pandemic, but the turnout was still disappointing. The open pairs had only thirteen tables, and the 299ers had to play a three-table Howell. Friday had been even worse. The Open Pairs had fourteen tables in the morning and twelve in the afternoon, but there were not enough 299ers to play in either session. Their games had to be canceled. They either had to go home or play against the Grand Life Masters.

Sonja and I had some difficulties in the morning. Most of it was my fault. The competition, as expected, was very good. They avoided mistakes and took advantage of ours.

In the afternoon, however, we rallied with a score of over 62 percent, but that was only good enough for fifth overall out of twenty-six. Still, we both had a very good time, and we returned home with a couple of silver points.

The Sunday meeting was the usual frustrating session. Everyone was morose about the attendance, but only Jan Rosow had a workable suggestion for improving turnout. She suggested changing the upper limit on the limited game to 500 points. We all agreed, and Cornelia was directed to arrange for a sectional in October.

The other main outcome of the meeting was to appoint a committee to prepare a slate of new board members. I managed to avoid participating in that endeavor. Frances had been president for much longer than she expected and was obviously ready to pass the baton to someone else. In fact, she had asked me if I would do it. I had to decline because of commitments to the district.

After the meeting we were all pleasantly surprised to see a fairly large group¹ ready to play in the Swiss. Sixty-seven people were waiting to play. John asked me if the offer to play still stood. I said that it did, and I played a very simple card with him as my partner. Our teammates were Barbara Federman and Jim Levitas, who were from California². She was an experienced player, but he had less than ten masterpoints at the time.

We bumped around the middle of the pack until round six out of seven, which we won with a blitz. In the last round we met an A team that was much more experienced than we were. We would have won if not for the last hand that John and I played. Debbie Benner stretched her nineteen-point hand to open 2NT. Her partner, Art Crystal, who had over 5,000 points, had passed in the first round, but he jumped to 6NT.

The cards sat favorably, and Debbie was able to bring home the slam. At the other table Jim and Barbara did not bid as aggressively. We lost the match by one point.

We won the B strat, however, with 81 points. We also tied for fourth in A, which was very good for a patchwork team. I was very happy with the 6.7 masterpoints that I won in just two days of work. In fact, the drive home was probably the most pleasant experience that I had had in Connecticut since the start of the pandemic.

The board’s reaction to the first sectional: Treasurer Cindy Lyall released a report on the financial hit from the first sectional on June 21.

As requested at the Board meeting, please find below an accounting for the Orange Sectional Tournament that took place from June 3-5, 2022. A spreadsheet version will be included as part of my next Treasurer’s report. If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me or Cornelia. Unfortunately, the loss from the tournament was just over $4,000.
Thank you,
Cindy
Revenue:
Table Receipts: +$4,984 based on 89 tables (26 on Friday, 29 on Saturday and 34 on Sunday)
ACBL Related Expenses:
Less Fill ins: -$112
Less Tournament Director’s Hotel Accommodation (3 nights): -$631.35
Less Tournament Director’s Per Diem: -$258.75
Less Tournament Director’s Fees ($210 per session): -$1260
Less Sanction Fees: -$281.88
Less ACBL Duplicated Hands: -$32
Less Sectional Surcharge: -$180
Less Caddies, Clocks, Supplies, Boards, Bridgemates, Predups, Hand Records, Free Plays, Pizza: -$935.23
Plus amount Paid to ACBL: +$30.21
Net: +$1323
Additional Unit Expenses:
Cornelia Stipend: -$250
Gene Remuneration: -$750
Snack Expense: – $266.28
Marketing: -163
Venue: -$4160 (Space $3000, janitorial service $700, Table rental $210, security deposit $250 which will be applied to next event)
Total Additional Unit Expenses: -$5,589.28

Loss of $4,266.28 – Please note that the $250 security deposit for this event has not been returned as it is being applied as a deposit to our next event, as such the “loss”for this event is $4,016.28.

In early September the second sectional was announced in the same pedestrian manner as the first. I sent the following email to all board members:

I see that in Orange the limited games have been expanded to under 500. By my calculation this increases the target audience (for unit 126 and 188) from 2235 to 2607. That might help, but it might also reduce the open attendance if people drop down.
Are we doing anything to attract the under-500 group? Many of these people have never played F2F. I propose that someone arrive a half-hour early each day and conduct a lesson in the mechanics of F2F play: bidding boxes, BridgeMates, alerting and announcing, how to avoid leading out of turn, how to prevent your partner from revoking, etc. I will volunteer to create a syllabus and do it on one of the days.
I also think that we need to send two sets of emails targeted to this group, one this week and one in two weeks. If this is already planned, fine. If not, I will volunteer to do it.
Have fliers been sent to the clubs? I have not seen one at the Hartford Bridge Club.
If we don’t want another financial fiasco, we must act soon.

I sent two emails to players in Connecticut and Westchester County, NY. I then sent the following email to board members.

I have attached three things. On 9/16 I sent Email1 to 1,600+ players from CT and Westchester. 64.8% of them opened the email, and 1.3% clicked on the link to the flyer.
On 9/30 I sent Email2 to the same people. 56.3% opened it, and 2.2% clicked on the link to the flyer.
In the emails I mentioned that “an experienced player” would be available on Friday and Saturday to explain the differences between F2F tournament play and online play. The attached F2F Outline contains a list of things that I could think of and a full-page picture of a Bridgemate. I can be there both days. If anyone wants to help, I would appreciate it.

Email1 can be viewed here. Email2 can be viewed here. The F2F Outline is posted here.

During the period between the tournaments the unit’s nominating committee came up with a list of candidates for the vacancies on the Board of Directors, but the information was promulgated to neither the membership nor even the board. Peter Marcus, of all people, would be the new president. Phyllis Hartford would be vice-president. There would be five new members: Phyllis plus Roger Caplan, Linda Green, Linda Starr, and Debbie Prince. This would give the Hartford Bridge Club five members of the board, the most in the ten years that I had been involved.

Great Barrrington in August: I don’t remember exactly how or when the arrangements were made, but Abhi Dutta, Jim Osofsky, Mike Heider, and I agreed to play in the Swiss event on Sunday at the Western Massachusetts sectional tournament at the Berkshire South Regional Senior Center in Great Barrington, MA, on Sunday, August 14. Abhi and I also agreed to play in both sessions of the open pairs to be held on Saturday.

On previous visits to this tournaments I had taken the back roads through Suffield and points west. This time I decided to take the Mass Pike to Lee and then go south to Great Barrington. That was a good plan, but I became engrossed in the opera to which I was listening on Saturday morning, and I drove all the way to Northampton before I realized that I had missed the exit for the Mass Pike. Fortunately, I had left early enough that I still arrived in GB with ten minutes to spare, but Abhi was quite nervous.

Abhi and I played pretty well in the morning session, but we fell apart in the afternoon. However, Mike and Jim had a good day. They placed fifth overall.

I remember one startling fact about the morning session. There were two occasions on which we bid one of a suit, and the opponents overcalled 2NT. In the twenty-first century virtually everyone who played in open events treats that as the “Unusual Notrump”, showing at least five cards in the two lowest unbid suits. In both of these cases, however, when we asked about the bid the opponents said that it was strong and natural. Yes, that was what the bid meant when I was playing in the sixties, but what are the odds of being dealt a twenty-point balanced hand with stoppers in the opener’s suit? They are not good, and the happened to us twice, and both of those opponents were playing this defense. As of this writing I have been playing duplicate bridge for almost nineteen years, and I have never encountered this bid before.

The other thing that I remember was that in the first round of the first session we were East-West against a couple from Connecticut. I had played against them several times in sectional tournaments there, but I had not seen them for years. They told us that they had never used the BridgeMates to record the score before! They said that they always sat East-West at tournaments. So, I had to give the man a very brief lesson on how to use the machine, and I had to help him record each result. I don’t remember the names of the couple.

The Swiss was, from our perspective, absolutely amazing. There were eight six-board matches, and, unbelievably, we won our first seven. Our lead over the field after the seventh round was so large that we could have been blitzed in the last round and still won. We did lose the eighth round badly against a very weak team, but we still won the event by twelve victory points over two good teams from the Boston area.

My most vivid memory is of the match in which we played against John Debaggis and Motoko Oinaga, two Western Mass players who had occasionally played at the HBC. John had opened 2♦, which Motoko alerted as a Flannery bid showing five or more hearts and exactly four spade. John actually had six spades and four hearts. After the hand Abhi called the director and claimed that John had psyched (which is legal in a tournament). John agreed to this. Tim ruled that psyches were not legal when a conventional bid had been employed and penalized John and Motoko.

After the tournament I approached John and asked him if he really psyched. He sheepishly admitted that he had made a mistake. I advised him that he should always admit to mistakes in such situation. I then told him about the times that I had accidentally opened 1NT with two diamond suits (and no hearts). No penalty was imposed either time.

The October sectional: The second sectional was scheduled for October 14-16. The venue would be the same church in Orange that was used for the first such tournament. Eric Vogel told me that he could play on Friday and Saturday in the open pairs. On Sunday Linda Starr and I would be partners in the open Swiss. Our teammates were Abhi Dutta and Paul Johnson, who was Abhi’s partner when he lived in Connecticut a few years ago. I liked this arrangement’ I would get to play against the best players, but we would be in the B strat³ in all five events.

I got to St. Barbara’s at about 9:15 on Friday. I sat near the director’s table to see if anyone appeared to need help. The attendance seemed to be much better than in June. I did not end up giving any kind of a class. The same thing happened on Saturday.

The competition on both days was very good. Eric and I had a miserable morning on Friday. We played better in the afternoon, but our score was not quite good enough to qualify for a place in the overalls.

Our play on Saturday morning was better. The highlight was when I doubled Joe Grue, one of the best players in the world, and he was unable to make the contract. However, we once again failed to win any points. I made one very stupid play against one of the best teams.

Everything came together for us in the afternoon. For the first time in the three days (one in June, two in October) that Eric and I played together, we seemed to get some breaks in the form of mistakes by our opponents. Of the thirty-two players who played in that session, we were the only ones to score above 60 percent. We won 9.35 silver points. This was only the second time that I had won a pairs event at a sectional. The drive back to Enfield was very pleasant.⁴

The board meeting on Sunday morning was more interesting than usual. Peter talked about the sectionals for next year. He indicated that clubs could run limited sectionals. They could set the limit to any number of points up to 750, and they could exclude Life Masters if they wanted. I ended up on a communications committee, but we only communicated by email. I was also confirmed as one of the unit’s delegates to the district’s Executive Committee.

A guy named Bill Segraves was the new webmaster. I had never met him before. He seemed very eager and competent. The board was badly in need of someone with those attributes.

The new board members attended. I knew all of them well except for Debbie, whom I played with a few weeks later, and Phyllis, who—despite her surname—was from Stamford, a very long way from Hartford.

Our team played pretty well in the Swiss. We received a very bad draw for the seventh round. Linda and I had to play against the pair of Steve Becker and Larry Bausher, two of the very best players in the state. Our teammates had an even worse draw. Their opponents were Rich DeMartino and Geof Brod, both of whom were Grand Life Masters—the highest rank in bridge.

We played well enough to win, but we were once again defeated by a clever bid by one of our opponents. Linda opened a nineteen-point hand by bidding one of a minor—as I would have. We ended up in 2NT. At the other table Geof upgraded his hand because of his five-card suit and opened 2NT. Rich raised to 3NT. Both declarers scored nine tricks, and the game bonus was enough to give them the victory.

We ended up fourth in B, which was worth 1.98 silver points.

152 players earned points at the tournament. That was a big improvement from the 116 that won points in June. However, it was still far short of the 248 players who won points in the sectional held in March of 2020. Cindy Lyall later reported that the unit lost a little under $2,000 for the tournament.

1. In all 116 players won points. In the last sectional in Orange before the pandemic the number was 284. So, attendance was down almost 60 percent!

2. I don’t know how they heard about the tournament. Someone told me that they were in the process of moving to Connecticut. However, as of December 2022 their addresses were still both in California. Jim was not even on the December ACBL roster, which meant that he had not paid his dues. I learned that Jim was a University of Michigan graduate who was a little older than I was.

3. Some events at tournaments had more than one “flight”. Some flights had a limit on the number of points each player may have. If not, they were called “open”. Each flight was usually divided into two or three “strats”. The lower strats had limits on the average number of points. In Connecticut the cutoff between the A strat and the B strat was usually 3,000 masterpoints, but sometimes the directors assigned different levels.

4. The only unpleasant part was the first few minutes. There was not a cloud in the sky, and after I turned onto the parkway I was going straight east. In several places the sun in my rear-view mirror or the one on the left was absolutely blinding.

1993-1999 TSI: AdDept Client: Home Quarters/Hechinger

Posted on December 22, 2022 by Mike

DIY chain. Continue reading →

The first Home Quarters Warehouse (HQ) stores were opened in 1985. They were large warehouses selling hardware and other home improvement products. They later competed with Home Depot. Only two years later the company was purchased by Hechinger, a chain of hardware stores/lumber yards that was an institution in Washington and Baltimore. Hechinger allowed HQ to run as an independent division with its headquarters in Virginia Beach, VA.

I do not remember making a presentation to HQ, but I might have. I seem to recall going to an IBM office in Norfolk.I know that the company’s IT department was already was using AS/400’s for other applications. So HQ did not need to invest much in new hardware for the AdDept system. I seem to remember that, because the operation was not as complicated as our previous installations, we gave them a very good deal on the software. I think that the installation occurred some time in 1993.

I was surprised to discover that Hechinger owned HQ at the time that I installed the system in Virginia Beach. In the summer of 1995 management of HQ’s advertising (and everything else) was brought to Hechinger’s headquarters in Landover, MD. The HQ offices in Virginia Beach were closed.

Memories of Virginia Beach: HQ had a very nice office in Virginia Beach. My recollection is that I flew via US Air into Norfolk, probably having changed planes in Baltimore. Then I rented a car, and drove to Virginia Beach. I remember encountering a very large number of active-duty members of the military on these journeys.

Once, because I had two other stops to make, I drove my Saturn all the way from Enfield. I must have been a glutton for punishment in those days.

TSI always did some custom programming for each AdDept installation, but I do not remember any code that we wrote for HQ. Most of their advertising was in inserts or broadcast. We might have written an interface to feed advertising expenses to their accounting systems.

I dealt mostly with the manager of the advertising department’s business office, but I do not remember too much about her. I recall one trip when I was called into an executive’s office. He told me that they were dissatisfied with the pace of the installation. I was, too. I remember that I stayed for a couple of days that time, and we made great progress. I don’t think that we ever had any significant problems with the installation after that.

I only remember one other employee in Virginia Beach. I think that she scheduled and ordered their newspaper buys. One day we ate lunch together at Taco Bell, which she said was her favorite. I probably would have eaten there anyway if left to my own devices.

Memories of Landover: I don’t think that any of the people who worked in the HQ advertising department made the move to Landover. The new department wanted me to show them how to use AdDept for both HQ and Hechinger stores. Most of the latter were located in and around Washington or Baltimore. HQ stores were spread throughout the country.

I made a couple of training and consulting trips to Landover. I seem to remember working with a guy named Joshua. I was not impressed with him or anyone else there. Hechinger had always been a company with strong local roots. The people in the advertising department seemed to me ill-equipped to run a company that was trying to compete with Home Depot throughout the country.

One other detail stands out in my memory of Landover. One evening after work I drove to a mall that was rather close to my hotel. I do not remember what I intended to purchase. When I had been in the mall for a few minutes it suddenly struck me that no one there was white. It was a strange feeling that minorities must experience almost every day.

The last period:An investment group named Leonard Green & Partners had acquired Builders Square from Kmart. After a delay because of poor earnings by Hechinger, LG&P acquired both Hechinger and HQ and merged them with Builders Square in 1998.

The result was catastrophic. I remember watching the last Builders Square Alamo Bowl on December 29, 1998. The announcers dutifully used the entire four-word name for the contest, but there in the middle of the field was the HQ logo, and no one ever explained what it had to do with the game. The new company had decided to rebrand all of the Builders Square stores as HQ, but it was apparently too late to change the name of the sponsorship.

Incidentally, Purdue upset heavily favored Kansas State in that game 37-34. It was not as close as the final score would indicate. The score after three quarters was 37-13 before Purdue Coach Joe Tiller took his foot off of the gas pedal.

This kind of flub was emblematic of the new company. I found the following quote in the Baltimore Sun:

What did they do wrong? “The short answer is: everything,” said Jack D. Seibald, a retail analyst for Blackford Securities. “They’ve had a screwy management that has not kept its eye on the ball.”

I enjoyed working with the people in Virginia Beach, and I think that we accomplished quite a bit together. HQ was thriving and Hechinger was flailing when the two divisions were combined.

I need to mention that when Hechinger declared bankruptcy in 1999 the company owed TSI a few thousand dollars for training trips. They paid us every penny. Many of our clients declared bankruptcy at one time or another. Most of them—except the newspapers and Filene’s Basement—paid us some portion of what they owed, but no one else paid the entire amount.

2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Mike

The closing of TSI. Continue reading →

People have often asked me whether I was retired, and, if so, for how long. I have usually told them that I never exactly decided to retire. In 2014, however, TSI’s clients made it clear to me that it was time for me to quit.

That year was definitely a turning point in my own life. I did not rate the events and decisions of the early months of that year as a genuine crisis—unlike the four others that have been detailed in this project. During the previous several years I had seen the trends developing, I had explored every alternative that I could think of, and my financial position was good, at least in comparison with its state before the late nineties.

By late 2013 Denise Bessette, my partner, had moved from Stafford, CT, to Cape Cod. She was working from home with occasional trips to East Windsor. We could communicate by email, telephone, or through messaging on the AS/400. During this period I was 65 years old; Denise was ten years younger.

The cause: The precipitating event was a letter received in late 2013 from one of our contacts at Dick’s Sporting Goods¹, a long-time user of both AdDept and A^xN. I cannot find a copy of the letter, but it was basically an announcement that Dick’s had contracted with a media buying service to schedule and purchase its newspaper ads.

Other AdDept users had previously made similar decisions.² At RadioShack (discussed in detail here) the decision coincided with dropping the use of the AdDept system entirely. The advertising department there used it to place, manage, and pay for advertising in hundreds of papers, but it never used many of the other modules. Nevertheless, one of the employees most closely involved confided to me a few months after the outsourcing that she thought that they might have made a mistake.

A few years later Belk (described here) outsourced its newspaper buying. Unlike RadioShack, Belk by that time was using AdDept for a very large number of tasks besides scheduling and purchasing newspaper ads. Denise Podavini, the financial manager for advertising, never considered dropping AdDept. Moreover, when I explained to her that TSI would be losing a large source of revenue from Belk’s newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN³, she voluntarily authorized TSI to increase the maintenance charge to cover the difference. That reaction astounded me.

By 2013 most of TSI’s department store clients had been absorbed by Macy’s, which had then consolidated into one office in New York City. At that point that office was using neither AdDept not A^xN. Dick’s outsourcing would have little effect on the income from AdDept. It might actually have given us a custom programming assignment or two. However, it would certainly mean the loss of all the revenue from Dick’s papers that had subscribed to A^xN. There were over a hundred of them, and losing them would cost us thousands of dollars every month.

When we received the news from Dick’s my immediate evaluation was that this was the death knell for TSI. Denise was quite surprised at my reaction. We had worked together for thirty years, many of which were quite lean, and she had never seen me give up when the company faced a challenge. She spent a week or two manipulating possible projections on spreadsheets, but she finally came to the same conclusion that I had.

The plan: Denise and I met several times after working hours or out of the office in order to come up with a plan that treated our employees, Jason Dean and Ashley Elliott, our remaining clients, our vendors, and ourselves fairly. We began by making a list of things that we certainly needed to resolve:

A termination date for A^xN and support for AdDept.
A plan for the employees.
Taxes and other governmental issues.
Our lease for 7B Pasco Dr.
Letters to AdDept clients.
Notifications to vendors.
Disposition of assets.

We scheduled an appointment with our accountant, Tom Rathbun. As it happened, he was planning to retire. So, our news pretty much coincided with his plans. He provided us with a list of items that we needed to do to assure that we fulfilled our obligations to the government. We decided to terminate A^xN and software support for the AdDept product on July 31. That would provide four months to whittle down the accounts receivable and accounts payable for the final closing of the books on November 30, 2014.

The employees: Even before we met with Tom, Denise and I had decided to let the employees work until March 31 or to terminate as of January 31 and receive a four-week severance package. They both took the severance option. Denise had expected both of them to stay, but I was not too surprised when they resigned. I was amenable to either option. The severance option was actually a little better for TSI. We saved money on payroll, and it offered an immediate opportunity to sell more of the office equipment sooner.

We wrote letters of recommendation for both employees. Here is the one that Denise wrote for Jason Dean:

To Whom It May Concern,
TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., is a small company that has provided intricate and extensive software systems to businesses large and small since 1980. Jason Dean joined our staff on October 15, 2007 as a programmer analyst and quickly became an integral member of our programming and support team. In 2010 he was promoted to lead programmer analyst. Jason worked on the development of new systems and the modification of existing systems in free-form RPGLE, SQL, BASIC and CL on IBM midrange business systems. Development was focused on a comprehensive data base system for retail advertising clients. His responsibilities also included program testing and documentation, client support, and a myriad of in-house support tasks.
Jason’s performance on the job has been uniformly excellent. He is well-organized and has extremely high standards for the quality of work produced. You can depend on him to consistently deliver sophisticated applications that meet those standards, and within or well in advance of project deadlines. He quickly and easily comprehends new strategies and technologies. He is an outstanding quality control tester. His methods steadily test both the functionality and logic of the program with robust data sets. His diligence has called out a number of subtle issues during the development cycle. Jason also had the opportunity to train and impart those standards on a new programmer, the results of which were outstanding.
Jason’s ability to handle client support is impressive. He is very adept at posing the necessary questions to extract information required to resolve client issues. He consistently maintains a positive, professional and helpful attitude even when dealing with a difficult caller. He won consistent praise from our clients.
Jason’s termination had nothing to do with his job performance. Business conditions necessitated that we take steps to close the business.
I unhesitatingly and without qualification recommend Jason Dean for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about his work at TSI. I can be reached at Denise_Bessette@cox.net or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 508 760-2847 (home).

The letter that I wrote for Ashley was posted here.

The clients: I composed a short letter to the AdDept clients and mailed it on February 28, 2024, at which point I was the only person left in the office. Here is the text:

Denise Bessette and I have worked together for almost three decades. During this time we have taken great pride in our ability to provide first-class software and service to our clients at a reasonable price and first-class treatment of our employees and vendors. We have changed the business radically a few times to respond to various circumstances, but we have never sacrificed our basic principles.
Recent events now necessitate another change, one that we definitely regret. Two factors have made it impossible for us to continue doing business in the way that we have in the past. The first is the consolidation of the retail business. In one case thirteen of our installations collapsed into one and then, ultimately, none. The second is the trend toward outsourcing. The latter has led to the collapse of our Internet insertion-order business, on which we have come to rely. We were already running a very lean operation. There is nothing left to cut.
Therefore, we both feel that we have no choice but to shut down TSI as of July 31, 2014. We will do our best to provide the very best support of the AdDept system’s day-to-day operations through that date and even implement whatever programming changes are required on the same basis that we always have. We are definitely willing to act as consultants to help design a transitional process and to fill whatever other roles you feel are appropriate. If you wish to use AdDept beyond the above date, you are, of course, free to do so, and if you want one of us to provide some kind of support, it may be possible to make arrangements on an individual basis.
We both think that TSI has had a great run. We wish that it could continue forever because we really have enjoyed working with our clients to provide a system that provided them with what they needed to prosper.
Best wishes for the future.

As far as I know, no one asked for help designing a transition process. Some users may well have asked Denise for help. I have occasionally wondered how they coped with the situation.

Hundreds of papers received the orders for ads like these through AdDept and AxN.

After receiving the letter someone from Dick’s called us to assure us that they had not intended to drop the AdDept system. We explained that the problem was not AdDept; it was the imminent loss of revenue from the many newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN. Evidently no one at Dick’s had ever considered this ramification.

I have no information about how long any of the companies that were still using AdDept in 2014 continued to use it after July 31.

I did not write to any of the newspapers, but I did stop billing them for the subscriptions to A^xN after July 31. I was still receiving checks from a few of them through November. At that point I wrote off everything that was outstanding.

The lease: We had arranged with our landlord, Rene Dupuis (introduced here), to stay in his company’s building until July 31. Because a lot of equipment and furniture remained in the office in the middle of July, I asked Rene if we (i.e., I) could stay one more month. He said that because TSI had been an ideal tenant for such a long time, he was happy to accommodate us. Our section of the building was empty by August 31.

During the last month or two Rene brought one or two people up to TSI’s office to examine the property. I do not remember the name of the company that ended up renting it, but the lease was signed while I was still working there.The company even purchased TSI’s antiquated telephone system for $500.

Tax issues: TSI had been paying sales or use taxes to several jurisdictions. I found a copy of the Letter of Good Standing signed by a machine for Deborah Chandler, the Tax Collection Supervisor of the Compliance Support Unit. It stated that TSI owed the state of Connecticut nothing.

I also found a copy of a letter that I wrote to the state of Mississippi that stated that we had done no business there and that TSI was closing. No one replied to the letter.

I was not able to follow all of the dealings with the IRS, but in June of 2015 I definitely received two checks with income tax refunds for payments that TSI had previously made.

Tom provided me with all of the forms that I needed to file with state and federal agencies. None of them were difficult or time-consuming.

Furniture and equipment. I wore many hats in my time working at TSI. The most ill-fitting was probably the last one: used furniture salesman. I took photos of everything and placed ads on Craig’s List. To my great surprise I rapidly disposed of nearly everything. I probably should have charged more, but we had bought almost all of it second-hand many years earlier.

I found a list of the major items that I sold and their prices:

The desk in my office with one of the phone units.

Item	Price
Conference table	80
Black cabinet	50
Kitchen table, chairs	80
Three cabinets	133
Sales office desk	25
Twelve side chairs	125
Four trash cans	2
Cabinet	40
Black desk	25
Cubicles	100
Denise’s desk	25
Phone system	500
4-drawer cabinet	125

The biggest coup, aside from the sale of the telephone system, was the fact that I was able to get rid of the five-foot high⁴ dividers that were used to form cubicles. I was thrilled when a man whose wife (or maybe mother) was opening a dance studio in Windsor Locks almost directly across the Connecticut River from TSI’s office in East Windsor offered me $150 for all of the hardware. On a Saturday he drove a pickup towing a very long and flat trailer to the office. He and another fellow came upstairs, disassembled the cubicles, carried the individual sections down the stairs, and strapped them to the trailer. He thought that he got a bargain. I was afraid that I would end up needing to pay someone to take the dividers away.

The total that I received was $1,310, which I split with Denise.

I also remember giving out two very large plants to one of the guys who purchased the trash cans and some other mundane things. He took the plants that Eileen Sheehan-Willett had nursed from near-fatal neglect to monstrosities and put them in his truck. He was thoughtful enough to wait until he was out of sight to throw out the plants and save the pots.

I found the following notes in an Excel spreadsheet called equipment.xls:

The 515 server was sold to Saks Inc. for $2500 on 7/31/14.
The 270 server, color printer, Dell PC, scanner, and backup hub were taken by Mike on 7/31/14. The 270 will be scrapped when the company is closed. It has no market value.
The black & white laser printer was taken by Denise on 7/31/14.
Fax machine and copier were donated to a local church on 7/31/14.
Two dot matrix printers with no market value were donated to the New England Bridge Conference on 8/31/14.
All other equipment was scrapped on or about 7/31/14.

The 270 and 515 were iSeries (i.e., AS/400) models. The 270 and the other equipment were transported to our house at the end of August (not July) in a truck that my wife Sue borrowed from her friend and bridge partner, Jan Bailey.⁵ The equipment resided in my office for a few months until TSI’s books were closed, and I was pretty sure that I would not need the server. It, the backup hub, a twinax display, and a snake’s nest of cables have rested peacefully in the basement and are still there in 2024. The color printer, which supported two-sided printing, the scanner, and the PC lasted for quite a few years before they were scrapped or recycled somewhere.

A few other things made their way to our house. The kitchen at 7B had a microwave and a small refrigerator. The former is still in use in 2024, but the circular plat no longer spun around. It was due for the junk heat. The latter was given to David Basch, the grandson of another of Sue’s bridge partners, in exchange for doing the heavy lifting in the move. A small shelf and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase were moved to my office at the house in Enfield. A good many smaller items also made the journey back to Enfield.

The largest item that I neither sold nor brought back to Enfield was the Uninterruptible Power Supplu (UPS). The UPS was a large battery with outlets for several power cables. Our AS/400 and a few other devices were attached to it. The UPS could provide enough electricity to last for a few hours.

Power failures were not unknown in Connecticut. Denise and I discussed purchasing a generator, but we could never justify the expense. We only experienced a couple of power failures in the nearly fourteen years that TSI’s headquarters was in East Windsor, and the UPS was sufficient to to get us through them.

The UPS was very heavy. I carried it out to my car and transported it to a nearby dumpster. It was all that I could do to lift it to shoulder height and drop it in.

The one-man show: From February through August I drove into East Windsor every morning. Every evening I drove back to Enfield. When I arrived at work I checked to make sure that all the equipment was working. I encountered absolutely no hardware problems. Once a month I sent out invoices for software support and for A^xN subscriptions. I usually ate lunch in the office by myself.

The highlight of the day was when the mail came. If there were any checks, I processed them in our home-grown accounts receivable system and then deposited them in the bank. I was often amazed that newspapers that I was fairly certain were no longer using A^xN continued to pay for the service. I attributed this to the fact that so many newspapers had outsourced their processing of accounts payable to an outside service. TSI’s bills seemed to slip through the cracks of the approval process.

I spent most of the rest of my days sitting at the PC. I already had a pretty good command of HTML, JavaScript, php and MySQL. I did a lot of work on the NEBridge.org website, and it was also during this period that I got the idea of maintaining a database of ACBL members who resided in District 25 (New England). Allan Clamage (introduced here), who served as the editor of the website, told me how to download roster files from the ACBL and set it up so that I had the authority to do so. The details of the database are described here.

The other major project that I worked on was my historical novel about Pope Benedict IX. The story of its genesis and why it was posted on Wavada.org but was never at Barnes & Noble is described in some detail here.

In some ways I wished that I had been a history major and gotten a PhD. Then I probably would have found someone with whom I could discuss my ideas about eleventh-century papal politics. On the other hand, I should remember that I only became interested in the popes in the twenty-first century, and I finished grad school in the seventies. Moreover, my interest in the eleventh century was a byproduct of a rather random introduction to a somewhat obscure ninth-century pope named Formosus.

I did not take a vacation in 2014, but I did go to quite a few bridge tournaments. This was the period during which I implemented a system of posting photographs of winners of regional events on NEBridge.org webpages. I called those pages “Winners Boards” because the background that I used looked like boards. I kept that feature up through 2021.

At about the same time I also began sending emails promoting the regional tournaments in New England. At first I composed the emails myself and sent them through my Wavada.org account. When I got blacklisted as a spammer, Bob Bertoni came to my rescue. That harrowing situation was described here.

The regional tournaments in 2014 were the first to include meetings of a committee that was known as “The B’s Needs”. It was initially chaired by Ausra Geaski, the president of the district. I attended every meeting.

The initial purpose of the committee was to recommend ways to make the tournaments more enjoyable for Flight B players, those with too many points to play in the “Gold Rush” events that were limited to less than 750 masterpoints. These people found themselves up against people with many thousands of points and years of experience. It was not generally a pleasant experience.

Over the next few years the committee produced a large number of suggestions for making the tournaments more attractive to B players and to everyone else. Many of them were implemented, and there is very little doubt that they had, for the most part, a profoundly positive effect on the tournaments. I took great pride in what we did as a group and what I personally implemented. This activity provided a purpose to my life at a time when I really needed one. It made me feel that I was using my time and skills to make life more enjoyable for people who shared one of my principal interests. Most of my contributions were cast aside in the post-Pandemic environment, and it saddened me greatly.

I found some materials about this committee. I have posted Ausra’s minutes of the meetings in Newton, MA, in January (here), Cromwell, CT, in February (here), and Nashua, NH, in September (here). I have also posted here the notes that Allan wrote up about the group’s first few ideas.

The version with a possible career in mining was the best.

While I was occupied with closing down TSI Sue had knee-replacement surgery on both legs. Afterwards she spent several days getting rehabilitated at Suffield House. I went to see her every evening. On one evening my friend Tom Corcoran joined us, and we played a game of Careers. Sue had to remind me of this event while I was in the process of writing this entry.

September.through December: For the last three months I ran what was left of TSI from my office at the house. I still received payments from newspapers almost right up to when I closed the books for good at the end of November.

I still had some communications with Tom Rathbun in December of 2014, but after that TSI has been nothing but a source of incredible memories. The process of closing it down was somewhat complicated, but I don’t remember making any serious mistakes.

1. Details of the installations at Dick’s Sporting Goods have been posted here.

2. I am not sure why these companies made the decisions. It is possible that the media buying services claimed that the fact that they represented several large advertisers would give them more clout in negotiating with newspapers. They may also have been able to claim more expertise in choosing between papers in the few markets that had more than one.

3. In theory it would have been possible for TSI to construct an interface that could be used by media buying services. We had written many interfaces to both send and receive records in other modules. However, the information that A^xN required from AdDept contained four different types of records: headers for ads, special instructions at the header level, individual ads, and special instructions for individual ads. Could we persuade the buying service to send records in that format? I considered it unlikely in the extreme even if we did not charge them for using the service. Even if they were persuaded, we would have had to devise foolproof ways of dealing with errors in their files. Moreover, the process of fixing errors would need to be very efficient. Time could be of the essence. It appeared to me to be a nightmarish situation.

4. I am pretty sure about the height because I remember being just barely able to kick my right foot up and rest my ankle on the top of one to stretch my quads before running.

5. Jan Bailey, Ginny Basch, and Sue were regular participants in an unsanctioned bridge game that was held on Thursday evenings in Somers.

2008-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Golf Galaxy

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Mike

Separate AdDept installation at Dick’s. Continue reading →

I have never been in a Golf Galaxy store (or experience or whatever it is considered). I know only three things about the chain: 1) The first store opened in 1997. 2) The entire chain was purchased by Dick’s Sporting Goods in 2006, but the administrative functions remained in Eden Prairie, MN. 3) In 2008 the offices in Minnesota were closed, and all the administrative functions—including the scheduling, purchasing, and financial aspects of advertising—were assumed by the employees in Coraopolis, PA.

TSI was asked by our contacts at Dick’s to create an environment on the AdDept installation¹ that had been installed for a few years at Dick’s headquarters.

It appears that I made at least two trips to Dick’s headquarters. The first was in August of 2008; the second was a three-day trip in November. I assume that I gathered the specs for the project on the first trip and implemented the second installation of the AdDept programs and files in in the test environment (Aeolus) in November.

Unfortunately the two sets of notes that I found are the same. I must have opened the file containing the first set of notes (in order to replicate the format), made all the changes to reflect what happened in November, and then mistakenly saved them under the old name. So, I will need to deduce what I learned at the first meeting.

Two instances of AdDept required three data libraries:one for tables that were needed by employees whether they were working on either Dick’s or Golf Galaxy, one for files that were strictly for Dick’s, and a library that was only for Golf Galaxy. The first thing that needed to be determined was which tables needed to be in the common library. For example, if the same calendar was used by both Dick’s and Golf Galaxy the season² table should reside in the common library. If the same vendors were used, only one vendor table must be moved to the common library. A decision needed to be made for each table.

When that determination had been made, library lists had to be constructed for the two installations. The common library needed to be on the list for each store. The data library for Dick’s was already called TSIDATA. The common library was named TSIDATACOM. The library for Golf Galaxy was TSIDATAG.

If the two stores had been completely independent, it might have been feasible for them to be on separate partitions or separate machines. This was not the case. So, both Aeolus (the testing system) and Boreas (the production system) needed to contain all three libraries.

Before I did anything I needed assurance on the first day that my work would not accidentally get wiped out overnight by the automatic “refresh” that deleted program and data libraries on Aeolus and replaced them with copies of their counterparts on Boreas.

I asked Bob Pecina to make certain that the automatic refresh was turned off this week. He said that that had been taken care of, and if it was not, he would kill someone.

The next step was to create the new libraries in Aeolus and to move the tables that were needed for working on both stores to TSIDATACOM. Duplicates of all of the other tables and data files needed to be created in TSIDATAG.

The tool that is used for most of the programming tasks on the AS/400 was called the Program Development Manager or PDM. I needed to change several things that could only be done there.

I created a shortcut in the PDM named L9 to run CRTLFS on a physical file. I edited my library list to replace TSIDATA with TSIDATAG. I then used L9 to create logical files for all the files in TSIDATACOM and TSIDATAG.
I created a shortcut in the PDM named PA to grant *ALL object authority to *PUBLIC for all objects in TSIDATACOM and TSIDATAG.
I created a command named CHGTSIFT4L and changed the CH shortcut to use it. The old CH is now C7. I tested it on DIITEM (individual) and DADEPT (TSIDATACOM). Both seemed to work.

The PDM allowed selection of a large number of objects (programs, files, libraries, etc.) of the same type. Two-character shortcuts could be created to run a command on one of the objects. A function key in the PDM allowed the shortcut to be copied to all of the selected objects in a trice. So the new L9 command described above was used to create logical files (now commonly called “views”) for all of the physical files in the two new libraries. I only pressed Enter once. The shortcut PA was then used in the same way to allow all of the selected files to be used by anyone. The shortcut CH was used to make all the changes necessary when the description of a file had been changed, usually to add new fields.

A few programs (and all of the menus) needed to know whether the user was working on Dick’s or Golf Galaxy. I created a file in TSIDATAG that contained only one blank character and named it GOLFG. The programs and menus could determine in an instant whether this file existed in the library list. The screens would then know which name to display, and programs could determine which set of rules applied.

I expected that there might be a problem in calculating rates. My notes reported that “If they run the exact same size code on the same day on inserts in both TSIDATA and TSIDATAG, the quantities should be added together to get the CPM.” CPM stands for cost per thousand, which is the way rates were expressed for newspapers. So, every time that an insert was added, deleted, or changed in one library, the rate calculation had to check the other library to see if they were running an insert with the same size code there. The combined rate had to be used in both instances, and change records needed to be created in both libraries.

The AS/400 had a very handy object type called a data queue, which was indispensable to the functioning of A^xN. The Golf Galaxy environment needed access to it, but it was not possible to copy or move a data queue. However, it was possible to save the data queue into a “save file” and then restore the save file in TSIDATACOM. I did that for the data queue used by A^xN and then deleted the one in Dick’s library, TSIDATA.

Some other complicated changes were necessary to allow both Golf Galaxy and Dick’s to send insertion orders. In addition to the data queue described above the notes mentioned the following:

I changed the User field on the AXNFTP job description, which is now in TSIDATACOM, to TSIDICKS. This should be set to ADGRP before the final cutover.
I had to change the AXNFTP job description so that all of the items point to TSIDATACOM. The library list must be initialized with ADDEPT, TSIDATACOM, and TSIDATA (for DASPECS) in that order. We planned to move the fields needed from ASPECS to another specs file, but this has not been done yet. It gets the advertiser code from the item in the data queue.

I was eventually able to fax test insertion orders to TSI and to send them via A^xN without any difficulty.

I don’t have any record of subsequent trips. In fact, I spent much of the third day on the November trip addressing issues in the Dick’s environment.

Evidently we were able to implement the “cutover” remotely. I don’t recall much about the event. The split environment setup worked well for at least five or six years.

1. The details of the first AdDept installation at Dick’s headquarters is chronicled here.

2. Many retailers divided their calendar into two seasons called spring and fall. The spring season began in February; the fall season began in August. Dick’s and Golf Galaxy did not do this. They both used a standard calendar, and their common “season” table reflected this.

2004-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Dick’s

Posted on December 12, 2022 by Mike

Chain of sporting goods stores in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Dick’s Sporting Goods is as old as I am. It started as small store in Binghamton, NY, that sold fishing equipment. In 1994 it was moved to the Pittsburgh area. In 2022 it had over 850 stores with over 50,000 employees.

TSI and Dick’s had a very long courtship. I am sure that I made several trips to Dick’s before we signed the contract. The first time that I visited the company it was still in its previous building, which was much smaller than the complex that it constructed in Coraopolis, PA.

We never gave up on selling them a system even though many of AdDept’s features would never be of much use to them. I knew that Dick’s IT department was committed to the AS/400 architecture. Therefore, the cost to them would not include the cost of additional hardware, which was often a deal-breaker.

I remember one sales trip in which I was asked to talk about the way that our system handled co-op—ads that feature a single vendor who has agreed to pay a portion of the expenses. I was pretty sure that no one would buy the AdDept system just to handle co-op, but I always tried to do what they asked. I have read through pages and pages of notes about the project of installing AdDept at Dick’s, but I found no subsequent mention of co-op

TSI and Dick’s formally tied the knot in a contract dated March 4, 2003. It was signed by Eileen Gabriel¹, who was Dick’s CIO at the time and me. I still have a pdf file of the document. Most of our contracts were far simpler than this one. Their lawyers obviously added quite a bit of language to the one that we submitted. Neither side ever had any difficulty about it during the more than eleven years that it was in force.

At the time that we negotiated the contract I did not understand (or, for that matter have much interest in) why Dick’s, which up until 2003 had always been in the “kicking the tires” column of prospective AdDept users, suddenly was rarin’ to go. I subsequently discovered two factors that probably contributed to the change in attitude: 1) The company went public in 2002. That probably provided a good deal of cash. 2) By then the advertising department had hired several employees who were familiar with what TSI and AdDept could accomplish². There probably were other favorable conditions that were not evident to me.

Planning for the AdDept system: Dick’s already had several large AS/400’s that were used for other aspects of its business. On one of them were PeopleSoft³ applications designed for the accounting and human resources departments. One of TSI’s major challenges would be to implement an interface between AdDept and PeopleSoft’s A/P and G/L systems. When employees in the advertising department entered expense invoices into the AdDept system they would automatically be sent to the PeopleSoft system for payment and posting to the General Ledger.

I found a document created by Paul Marshalek⁴, the first project manager for the AdDept installation. It provided the agenda for a one-day “discovery session” that was held in the Final Four room on April 16, 2004, almost exactly one year after the contract was signed. The scheduled attendees were Krista Fullen⁵ and Adam Sembrat⁶ from advertising, Don Steward⁷ from IT, Joe Oliver⁸ and Jeff Jones⁹ from finance, Paul, and myself.

The agenda includes a dozen items. During my preparation for this entry one caught my attention. I remember spending a lot of time at Dick’s on various aspects of print media from insertion orders (sent via A^xN¹⁰ from the beginning) to payment of bills to allocation of costs to stores. I did not remember much about broadcast. At the time they used an advertising agency called Empower MediaMarketing¹¹ based in Cincinnati. I could not find any evidence that we ever implemented an interface by which the buys from the agency were uploaded to AdDept. TSI provided this for most AdDept users, but it usually required custom programming or at least some fine-tuning.

Getting the AdDept system operational: It was made very clear to me that TSI’s client was the IT department, and the people in advertising and accounting were the IT department’s clients. So, the IT department made all the calls in this installation. In some ways this made things more difficult for me. I was never sure whether the advertising department was satisfied with our progress. On the other hand, we heard very few complaints, probably because everything that the advertising department really wanted was installed in phase 1, as described below.

Dick’s insisted on having two separate AdDept environments, one for testing of new code and one for production. Both of them were named after Greek gods of wind. Aeolus, the developmental system, was named after the keeper of the winds. Boreas, the production system was named after the personification of the north wind. TSI employees had no credentials for signing on to Boreas and no way to reach it from our office in East Windsor.

Aeolus and Boreas actually resided on the same AS/400, but they were in different partitions designed to make accidental intermixing of the two environments impossible. If separate boxes had been purchased, separate licensing agreements would be required for the operating system and IBM system-level programs. This would have made the installation of upgrades a much more difficult and time-consuming process for the IT department.

This installation involved a large number of interfaces and a great deal of custom programming. When we delivered a new batch of program changes—both routine updates and code specifically for Dick’s—we had to install the new code in Aeolus, implement the required changes to the database, and test them there. Advertising employees would then be required to sign on to Aeolus and make sure that both the new and previously installed AdDept programs worked. If the changes were not ones that they requested, it was difficult to get them to take this seriously.

During the testing and approval period a process that “refreshed” the AdDept system in Aeolus with the programs and data from Boreas needed to be suspended. If the timing of the suspension was not perfect, then all of the changes that we had installed during that period could be wiped out. A few times this happened to us, and it was quite upsetting.

When all of the advertising department asserted that the changes were good to go, the Aeolus system was refreshed, and TSI needed to install the changes again. The people in advertising would spot check what we had done. During this second period the AdDept system on Boreas was frozen. When the advertising people validated the changes, the Boreas system was refreshed with the new code and the transformed data on Aeolus. Only at that point could work resume. The primary purpose of all this was, I suspect, to eliminate the possibility that IT people might be blamed for deleterious outcomes.

This approach was much less efficient than our usual method of delivering code. I routinely installed new code to four or five other AdDept installations every weekend. Most of the time the users did not even know that I had done anything. There were occasional problems, but never anything that we could not address in an hour or so.

I don’t blame Dick’s for insisting that we follow their protocols, but we had had great success at over thirty installations with the approach that we had developed, and we would never have been able accomplish so much if we had been tied to Dick’s approach in all of them.

Inevitably, despite all of the precautions, some bugs slipped through the testing process—both TSI’s and the advertising department’s. Dick’s had a method that allowed us to make emergency changes to address them, but I don’t remember the details of how it worked. We only needed it once or twice.

If there was a problem or a request for new code, the users had to go through the IT department. The people who served as TSI’s primary point of contact—the liaisons—were people who worked in the IT department as project managers.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the enforced separation of the users from the developers was that Dick’s insisted that I do all the training after the initial installation in one of their training rooms. I did not like this at all. Often the people who showed up at these training classes were not the people who would be using the programs that we were installing. Sometimes I did not know what roles were played by some of the people. I did the best that I could under the circumstances.

At other installations—even the ones with AS/400s owned and operated by the IT department—I was allowed direct access to the users. I had a thorough understanding of the administration of retail advertising, a claim that could be made by none of our liaisons. Many times I could address their issues on the spot and direct them to programs or techniques that they were previously unfamiliar with.

I am certain that the installation would have proceeded more rapidly and with fewer problems if the IT people had allowed us to use our time-tested methods, but the idea was absolutely anathema to them. The IT department owned the AS/400’s, and they insisted upon their right of ownership. Bypassing this interference from the IT department was the primary reason that we always preferred for the advertising departments to have their own smaller systems that could eventually communicate with the systems running the other aspects of the business.

Our main contact at Dick’s during the installation and for some time afterwards was John Nelko¹², an IT employee whose specialty was the workings of the AS/400’s operating system, OS/400. Under his supervision I installed AdDept on Aeolus and built all the files that they would need to use. I also installed IBM’s BASIC compiler and interpreter. That product was no longer supported by IBM, but TSI was authorized to sell and install it. Most of the other IBM software—SQL, query, FTP, faxing, etc.—that would be needed was already on the box.

On that very first day John and I got the faxing to work. I also was able to send an insertion order through A^xN to TSI’s server. That required that FTP over the Internet was working. It also required that Dick’s be set up on TSI’s system as a valid sender.

TSI was assigned a user ID on Aeolus called TSIDICKS. I was told that the password was set to expire every sixty days. John worked with Denise Bessette in our office to get the SDLC communication working over the telephone lines. In the beginning that was how we accessed the system from TSI’s office.

There was a little time left over in that first visit for extensive training. My notes reported:

We got through the season table, expense classes, ad types, markets, pubs, rates, and print rates in the first training session. Everyone seemed comfortable with everything. In the second training class we went through the more difficult tables pretty thoroughly and entered a couple of ads.
The pub-store master table for inserts was not set up correctly by the program which¹³ I wrote to create the table. I fixed it. I used the Saks programs as the basis for DM220RDX and DM230RDX. Adam wants to show the costs on insertion orders. Most of the programs do not do this. I added a column for the Skid Color to the insertion order. I did this all during a long meeting which everyone in advertising attended on Wednesday afternoon.

I remember that the names of the insertion order programs for ROP and inserts began with DM220 and DM230 respectively. The “Skid Color” refers to the color of the tag that was attached to a “skid” (a pallet with no bottom deckboards) on which the inserts were stacked and packaged for delivery. Each version of an insert was assigned a different color.

These were my last few comments on that momentous trip:

Amanda Sembrat, then known as Amanda Greener.

We had a good luncheon meeting about the rest of the project. Steve Manning, the Budgeting Director, attended. They are considering whether to use AdDept to create real purchase orders for all advertising expenses.
I almost made the mistake of going to a Mexican restaurant on Cinco di Mayo.
I showed Krista how to respond to errors. At this point both Adam and Amanda were involved in other things.
I think that Adam overstepped his authority last time when he decreed that we did not need the broadcast interface. Helen said that we may need to revisit this. We had better be careful with Adam. He sounds like he has more authority than he really does.
Request #1 was approved.
They certainly want me to return for the first insertion order run. They may want me sooner than that.

The fact that Dick’s ran so many inserts in so many markets caused some unique challenges that were also mentioned in the notes:

Adam says that about 15 papers have separate rates for flexis, which are also called minis. We need to come up with some way of handling this.
Most of their events start on Sunday. If the paper does not publish on Sunday, they want it to default to Saturday, Monday, Friday (before), Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (after) in that order. I set things up to work this way, I think, but I was not able to test every possibility. For Thursday drops, they want it to default to Wednesday, Friday, Saturday.
They want to use the holiday quantities for Thanksgiving. Is there a good way to do this?
They have some “events” which involve sponsorships with sports teams. The costs are spread over several months. I am thinking that we might use Stage’s amortizing programs for this.

The second trip June 14, 2004: Dick’s was one of the few clients for which a one-day trip was at least somewhat reasonable. USAir had many direct flights between Bradley and Pittsburgh. Because Dick’s was so close to the airport, I could easily get to the office at the same time as the employees.

I did encounter one major problem: I discovered that it was not trivially easy to meet with people in the advertising department.

I got there about 9 a.m., but I had to wait about 30 minutes as they tried to figure out what to do with me. Advertising is in the new building, but the reception desk is in the old building. Eventually they managed to contact Adam, and he showed me into the building.

Here is what happened once I got to the advertising area:

I spent most of the morning making sure that all papers were correctly designated as F for faxing or T for AxN. I called Lucia¹⁵ to make sure that we were in agreement concerning every paper.
I met with Adam, Helen, Paul, and Steve about where we stand and what is on the agenda. Steve said that they need to keep track of actuals versus budgets. It took me a while to figure out that he means by category on each book. Right before he left he gave me a list of the categories which they currently use. They also decided that advertising should meet with Jane Walker and the accounting people to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
I helped Adam set up a pub group for all of his insert papers. He also needs one of his main papers. I think that he now knows how to do this.
We put on an ad and printed insertion orders. Adam noticed that only the first 12 characters of the fax number appeared. I fixed this.
The sequence number for the NJS market was incorrect. Adam fixed it.
We discovered that there were no rates for 6-page tabs. They sometimes run 12-page minis (same as flexis) which ordinarily use these rates. I wrote a little program to help Adam key these rates in fast.
I was able to establish an FTP session on TSI270.
Amanda¹⁶, who is engaged to Adam, said that she had looked over the quote for the run list. It looked good to her. They would like to have it by 6/28, although, of course, they have not approved it yet.

They were unable to print. The printer which they formerly used is no longer near them. I called John Nelko. He eventually identified the printer. I need to send him a memo telling him which user profiles need to be changed to use the new printer, which is called Ad_Dept.
I think that DM022 should use the text description from the book size file rather than the dimensions for the size on screen #M22A.
We could not fax because the modem was not available. I will send an e-mail to John to try to reserve the modem one day this week. Adam wanted to wait until Friday, but I told him that I would be out of town on Friday.

The rest of the story: An AdDept Progress Report dated October 15, 2004, and prepared by (I think) Paul Marshalek identified phase 1 of the installation as “print media”, which for Dick’s was primarily in the form of newspaper inserts. Phase 2 was much more detailed. It had the following sections:

Pub-store allocations, which included implementation of an interface with the system that Dick’s used for sales analysis.
Other media: broadcast, magazines, and billboards (which everyone in advertising called “outdoor” even if the signs were in a building).
Another interface to “refresh” AdDept’s vendor table so that its data was consistent with PeopleSoft’s.
Expense invoices, which in AdDept were divided into media (which were entered against the schedule) and non-media (which were entered by job categories or sub-accounts). This project included the expense payables interface.
Media accruals that created the journal entry for the G/L in PeopleSoft. The document notes that the file containing the journal entry for August 2004 was delivered to Jane Walker¹⁴ in the IT department.
Cost accounting, which in their case meant advertising costs (including overhead) in all media per store.
Non-media closing, which included accruals from purchase orders and prepaids.

This list, which resulted from the four-day trip that I made in October of 2004, included some really big programming jobs, but I am pretty sure that they were all eventually implemented.

I met several new people on that trip:

Carol Mazza was a media manager who worked for Helen Burkholder. Krista and Erika Crawford worked for her.
Linda Weiss was tasked with entering broadcast invoices. She reported to Steve Manning.
Dave Derry was an internal auditor.
Todd Schultz worked in Expense Payables.
Jeff March, who worked at Galyans, a company that Dick’s had recently acquired, was scheduled to start work the next Monday as broadcast manager.
Rick Kohout provided me with files that I used to implement the sales interface.¹⁷

Most of my time on the October 2004 visit was spent with Krista. I checked over what she had done for ROP and inserts and helped her set up other types of ads. At the time Dick’s was rapidly expanding. New stores were provided with pre-opening and grand opening advertising support. These ads had their own separate G/L accounts, and we had to devise a way of handling them.

My next trip was in April of 2005. I gave a talk to eleven people to explain how AdDept does accounting. The tone of my notes indicates my frustration. Accounting for advertising is complicated. I could not explain it very well in a few minutes in a classroom setting.

I learned that Jeff Jones accrued to plan. Here is what I reported about the reconciliation process:

Jeff explained that he made his “accrual entry.” He actually closes to plan. He takes the planned expenses, subtracts out the invoices paid, and spreads the difference to markets in a spreadsheet.
We got the February accrual to match. This is not really much of an accomplishment. We just matched one AdDept report to another after eliminating all possible sources of error. We got the March accrual to match within .5%. We ran the report by ad so that Jeff could compare it with the list which he used for his accrual.

Accrual to plan is a bogus concept. The whole idea of accruing is to make the expenses and income occur in the appropriate month so that one can isolate problem areas as soon as they develop. Accruing to plan disguises difficulties because the actuals are forced to match budgets. However, it was not my job to explain this.

I came up with a list of eleven things that needed to be changed in the production system. At other installations I would have just fixed them myself, but I was not allowed to touch anything. Denise and I had to come up with ways to circumvent this restriction in each case.

I also listed six or seven small changes that they requested.

I returned to Dick’s on May 31 for one day to look at their pub-store allocation records. I discovered that because someone skipped the step of creating these records, the allocations of costs to stores for 2005 have all been wrong.

I also helped them address the issue of paying bills for ads that ran in 2004. I came up with a Mickey Mouse method that at least got the accounting right at the G/L level.

The notes from my only visit in 2006 are very sketchy. There were a couple of new people whom I do not remember, and someone in advertising asked us to quote a massive database of zip codes to help with ordering insert distributions. Some—but by no means all—newspapers allow specifications of zip codes for insert distribution. Both AdDept and A^xN handled this by special instructions.

I remember quoting creating this database, but I don’t think that we ever did it. The notes make no mention of any other media or any accounting issues.

I made one four-day visit in 2007. I met a lot of new people. Included in that group were Carl Abel and Bob Pecina,¹⁸ who would be our primary contact for the rest of our relationship.

Among other things I learned that the advertising department had begun using AdDept for billboards and magazines.

They expressed considerable interest in copying all ads from one year to another for planning purposes. This was an important but very complicated task for any retailer. TSI had software to do this. If everything was set up perfectly, or at least nearly so, it could save a lot of time and make for more accurate planning. If anything important about the process was ignored, it could make a gigantic mess.

I knew that it would be a nightmare at Dick’s for more reasons than I could name. I am pretty sure that nothing ever came of this.

I learned that their change reports were essentially useless because they included ads that were created in order to estimate costs under a specific scenario and then deleted. There were a lot of these ads. I think that we put in a Y/N field on the selection screens for change reports to allow them to be excluded.

The last major project that we did for Dicks was to create a separate installation for Golf Galaxy, a retail chain that Dick’s had acquired in 2006. The administrative functions were not moved to Coraopolis until 2008. I decided to create a separate blog entry for the Golf Galaxy project. It can be viewed here.

Mike Krall.

When reading my notes for the two trips that I took in 2008 I discovered that I also spent time with Mike Krall¹⁹, a young guy who had been assigned the daunting task of managing the “cost accounting” programs that showed in summary and in detail how expenses were attributable to stores using rules that Dick’s created. The reports depended upon all aspects of the data—media and production costs, sales, store allocations, etc.—being accurate.

Here are some of the notes from the time that I spent with him:

I spent most of the day on Wednesday with Mike Krall. He runs the month end programs in AdDept, but he did not really know what he was doing. He had a detailed set of instructions to follow.
I made some queries in ADVMOQRY for Mike Krall to provide him with net indirect expense (INDNETEXP) and net production expenses for ads in prior months (PRIORMOEXP). I explained that these would only get the data from Dicks. If he wants Golf Galaxy, he should make copies and change the libraries from TSIDATA to TSIDATAG.
Does DX112 expense the indirects? Mike Krall said that he does not create a journal entry for indirects.

The white areas are buildings. The main entrance was in the middle of the top set. The bottom building and most of the parking (grey) areas did not exist when I visited last.

The atmosphere at Dick’s headquarters: Working at Dick’s was unlike anything that I experienced at any other retailer. For the most part the administrative departments of the department store chains that dominated the list of AdDept clients were located on the highest floors of large downtown stores. The ambience in the lower floors was designed to generate excitement. The upper floors were at best boring and sometimes even dingy. Even the offices of retailers that housed their administrative functions elsewhere were mundane.

The gigantic lobby at Dick’s headquarters.

Arrival at Dick’s was not an overwhelmingly pleasant experience. Despite the massive size of the complex—and it is much larger in 2022 than it was in my last visit of 2008—the offices in Coraopolis were not trivially easy to find within the industrial park. The parking was not a bit convenient. In those days there was only one lot, and by the time that I arrived with my rental car only spots that were a long way from the main entrance were available.

I don’t think that I was ever in this room.

From the front door one entered a huge waiting area. No one without an employee badge could get past it without being escorted. My memory may be faulty, but I don’t recall that they ever gave me a temporary badge.

Incidentally, it would not have been a good idea to arrive early to try to claim a better parking space. I would not have been allowed past the lobby until the person or people with whom I was meeting were there.

Surrounding the lobby were eight or ten conference rooms. Each was named after famous sporting events—Super Bowl, the Masters, World Series, etc. They were extremely elegant. A few of our early meetings were held in one of them.

Dick’s also had a very nice cafeteria, which was called the Court Street Café. I am pretty sure that I ate there every day—except the time that lunch was delivered to our meeting—on every visit. It’s a good thing, too. There were no restaurant in or near the industrial park in which the headquarters resided.

I remember feeling quite short on one of my first visits there. I was at least six feet tall, but almost everyone I met was quite a bit taller. Later I heard about a volleyball tournament held somewhere inside the facility during the lunch break or maybe right after work. They already had an indoor basketball court when I visited. Now they have that (with a track around it), tennis courts, and a huge workout room.

Epilogue: Alone among TSI’s clients, Dick’s still seemed to be thriving in 2022. They even have a store in Enfield next to Costco. A very large percentage of the people with whom I worked in the early twenty-first centuries are still employed there in Coraopolis.

A decision made by Dick’s in late 2013 was the cause of the decision to close down TSI. At the time the income from maintenance fees was not enough to keep the company running. The income from custom programming had also dwindled, and there were no real prospects for sales of new AdDept systems.

We therefore depended on the steady stream of checks from the newspapers that subscribed to the A^xN service. Because several of our other largest A^xN users had outsourced the buying of their newspaper space to third parties, Dick’s many newspapers accounted for a large percentage of the remaining income. I knew immediately that the decision by Dick’s management to let an advertising agency order its newspaper space was the death knell for TSI. The details are described here.

The people at Dick’s were quite surprised by TSI’s decision. Someone called us and told us that they still wanted to use AdDept. They evidently thought that we had misinterpreted their communication about the agency. We had to explain that the A^xN contracts generated a considerable amount of income for us.

Denise Bessette may have made a private arrangement to provide some support for the AdDept system at Dick’s. I was 65 years old when we made the decision to close, and I was not interested in such a venture.

1. I am not sure that I ever met Eileen. If I did, I don’t remember the occasion. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. Two people who may have played significant roles behind the scene were Helen Burkholder, an executive in Dick’s advertising department, and Bill Dandy, her boss. I did not spend a lot of time with either of them in this installation, but they were both certainly influential.

I had worked closely with Helen when she was a media manager at Kaufmann’s. The blog entry about the Kaufmann’s installation is posted here. I am not sure what Bill Dandy’s title was. I met him when he took over that job at Michael’s in Irving, TX. That very profitable installation has been chronicled here. Helen’s LinkedIn page is here. Bill’s can be viewed here.

3. In December 2014 PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle. I am not sure what effect this had on Dick’s. It did not seem to affect the design of the interface.

4. Paul worked in the IT department, not advertising. His LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

5. Krista Gianantonio (née Fullen) was our day-to-day contact in advertising. Her LinkedIn page is here. She was familiar with AdDept and TSI from her previous jobs at Hecht’s (described here) and Kaufmann’s (described here).

6. Adam Sembrat’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

7. I don’t remember Don Steward at all. I don’t think that we had any subsequent dealings with him. He might have been Paul’s boss. His LinkedIn page is here.

8. I don’t remember Joe Oliver. His LinkedIn page is here.

9. Jeff Jones actually worked with the financial side of AdDept. His LinkedIn page is here.

10. Dick’s had stores all over the country, and they advertised in hundreds of newspapers. The fact that the advertising department was excited about electronic delivery of insertion orders gave a big boost to TSI’s efforts to expand the use of the A^xN product.

11. In 2022 the company is just called Empower. Its Wikipedia page can be found here.

12. John Nelko’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

13. When researching the notes I definitely realized that I had not yet learned when to use “that” and when to use “which”. This “which” should be a “that”. So should the “which” in the last sentence.

14. Like many of the other people listed in this entry Jane Walker is still employed at Dick’s in 2022. Her LinkedIn page is here.

15. Lucia Hagan was the administrative person at TSI during this period. Her history at TSI is described here.

16. My notes say that Amanda Greener was not actually employed by Dick’s; she actually worked for Dick’s printer. She evidently married Adam. Her LinkedIn page is here.

17. I have only the vaguest recollections of any of these people, but I found LinkedIn pages for several of them: Carol Mazza’s is here. Todd Schultz’s is here. Jeff March’s is here. Rick Kohout’s is here.

18. Bob Pecina’s LinkedIn page is here.

19. Mike Krall left Dick’s in 2011. His LinkedIn page is here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Author Archives: Mike

2022 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

1993-1999 TSI: AdDept Client: Home Quarters/Hechinger

2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing

2008-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Golf Galaxy

2004-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Dick’s