1998-2005 TSI: AdDept Client: Proffitt’s

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Mike

Proffitt’s was a chain of department stores based, for the period in which I was associated with the company, in Alcoa, TN. Proffitt’s was the first division in the entity Proffitt’s Inc. The corporation changed both its name and orientation in 1998. The new entity was called Saks Inc. TSI’s relationship with that corporation and the people in Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) has been described here.

Proffitt’s headquarters was four miles south of the airport. I usually stayed at the Hampton Inn at the top of the map. Although the town of Maryville was only about a mile away I seldom went there, and I never went to Knoxville.

I don’t think that I did a demo for Proffitt’s. Rather, the decision to use AdDept there was made by PMG based on the success of the installation at McRae’s that is described here. I definitely remember my first trip to the divisional headquarters. In April of 1998 I flew on Delta from Atlanta and arrived at McGhee Tyson Airport¹, which is also located in Alcoa. I rented a car and drove the short distance to Proffitt’s headquarters, which was in a strip mall that did not have a Proffitt’s store. The mall’s anchor store, if you could call it that, was a Burlington Coat Factory.

By the day that I arrived, the advertising department’s AS/400 was already installed in a closet. Next to it was the system console. There was already a premium on space there, and it got worse very quickly. On some occasions I was required to work in that closet. It was a strong contender for the worst work environment that I had to endure.

The connectivity was also installed and configured by someone else. Specifically, TSI had nothing to do with the selection of the emulation software for the Macs.

Proffitt’s advertising department was not very large. The primary reason for this was that much of the creative and production work had been outsourced to an ad agency in Chicago named Ambrosi. I wrote this about the agency’s practices in April of 2000:

Ambrosi has a minimum charge of $175 for materials. They sent an invoice to Proffitt’s with a line on it with a $175 charge for “eye shadow kit.” Proffitt’s paid it without questioning it. The bill was nearly $20,000 over the budget – for one catalog.

The people: My original contact was the production manager, Tom Henry. All that I remember about him is that he took me to lunch that first day in his Corvette that was not really a Corvette. He said that it was “a knock-off”. I should have asked him to elaborate on the subject, but I did not. I think that we ate at an extremely inexpensive pizza place where you just pointed at the slices that you wanted. I have forgotten the name of the place.

Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Tom Henry is on the left in the shirt with horizontal stripes. On the opposite side of the table are two other people from Proffitt’s: Tom Waltz at the far end and Cindy Karnoupakis in red and white. I think that Tom W. was the manager of the business office before Jim Pierce. Cindy may have been his assistant. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. I don’t remember the meeting, and I have no firm recollections of Tom W. and Cindy.

I did not work with him much after that day. He was in charge of the department’s computers. Therefore, he had me train some people who worked for him how to check the backups. Leaving this important role up to them was a mistake.

I wrote this about the situation in early 2000:

This installation got off to a very slow start. All the people involved in the project initially bailed out when the data entry started. Three people are now involved – Jeannie Gorman for ROP, Lucy Delk for other media, and Jim Pierce in the business office. Jim, although a very laid-back guy, has more or less taken the bull by the horns in the last few months. They are now using AdDept for closing – accruals and the prepaid to expense journal entry for all media.

Don Alexander² was the Senior VP of the department until July of 2000, but I do not remember dealing with him much. In fact, I remember very little about most of the people in the department until Marianne Jonas came from McRae’s to become the Advertising Director in August of 2000.

Jim Pierce handled the finances. His assistant was named Charlene. Christi Bullock worked with her. Jeannie Gorman scheduled and purchased newspaper advertising. Lucy Delk handled other media. I also took a photo that included a woman named Cindy. I don’t remember any of these people very well. I need to rely on the notes that I have discovered, and they do not begin until 1999. Furthermore, my research has been unable to determine anything about their subsequent lives.

Hardware issues: Most users of the AdDept system on AS/400’s experienced few if any problem with their hardware. If they did, they solved it themselves or got the IT department involved. My notes from Proffitt’s for 1999 and 2000 are replete with references to SNAFUs attributable to hardware. On July 13, 1999, I wrote “Evidently the power failure at Proffitt’s fried their fax modem.” This modem was used to send insertion orders automatically to the newspapers. If it was not working, Jeannie had to print the orders and send them one at a time via a fax machine.

The very next day I wrote the following about an incident handled by Jamie Lisella² at TSI’s office:

Jamie got frustrated with Proffitt’s. As usual they have no one who is both willing and able to do something, in this case switch the modem cables for IBM.

TSI also had an HP Laser Jet 5 in its office.

TSI even was called about very trivial printer issues. This note is dated exactly two months after the modem cable problem:

Their HP 5 printer wasn’t working. The Powersave feature was on. I think when they had a power failure it may have reverted to the factory settings. I turned it off and restarted it. I printed out five copies of my write-up of how to take care of this. Maybe someone will read it this time.

In April of 2000 much of my attention was dedicated to getting TSI’s insertion order project, A^xN, operational. I needed to document potential benefits vis-à-vis having the computer generate faxes.

I asked Jeannie Gorman to try to think of everything she hated about faxing insertion orders. She told me that she has to fax about one in ten by hand because they do not go through. While I was in the computer room I heard several busy signals.

The Disk Crash: In all of the time that TSI worked with IBM midrange systems, only one catastrophic disk failure² ever occurred. It happened at Proffitt’s in late November or early December of 2000, only a few months after Marianne Jonas had moved to Tennessee from Jackson, MS.

One problem with IBM midrange and mainframe computers was that they were so reliable that users sometimes took them for granted. When I set up the system for Proffitt’s I programmed backup jobs that ran every night. All files used by AdDept were saved to tape. A different tape was used every night. They were recycled weekly. So, if there was a failure on Thursday, they could restore from the Wednesday night tape. If, for some reason that tape could not be used, the Tuesday night tape could be used, and so on. Total system saves were done whenever a new version of the operating system or a new set of PTFs⁴ was installed.

The process could not be completely automated. Someone had to change the tape every day and check to make sure that the backup completed normally.

Every multi-user system must have some method to prevent one user from overriding what another user has just done. On the AS/400 this was done at the record level. So, if one person was working on an ad or an invoice, other users were prohibited from deleting or changing information about that ad or invoice while the first person had the record open for editing. When the user finished working on an item or closed the program, the locked record or records were released. This occasionally caused problems when someone called up a record in a program that allowed editing and left the program open.

IBM’s backup procedure was also affected by locked records. It could be set either to skip backing up the locked files altogether or to back up the previous version of the locked records (called “Save While Active”). The latter sounded like a good idea, but it ran the risk of leaving some files out of sync with others. Besides, the backup was only really useful if all the files on it were complete.

When the disk drive was reported faulty, IBM replaced it with a new one. At that point it was discovered that the backup tapes for every day of the previous week were incomplete. The last usable backup was from the system save tape from more than a month earlier. Evidently no one had been checking the backup logs.

When these facts were reported to TSI I ordered an “all hands on deck” response. The problem must have been discovered on a Friday. Jamie made a reservation for me to fly to Alcoa in time for business hours on Monday. Denise Bessette⁵ and I worked out a plan for getting as much of the data as possible back on the system while retaining the system’s integrity. We also devised ways of checking the consistency of the data and printing lists of records that should have matched but did not.

When I arrived at Proffitt’s Marianne escorted me to a conference room, closed the door, and screamed at me for a very long time. She said that it was irresponsible of me not to tell the people involved how to check the tapes. I explained that I had shown the people at Proffitt’s how to do this, and I had shown the two IT people whom she had designated how to perform this task at McRae’s. I also showed her the letter that I had sent to all of the divisions emphasizing how important it was to check the backup logs. It also explained the service that TSI offered for $150 per month whereby a TSI employee would sign on and check the logs every morning. Employees in the advertising department were notified if anything was amiss. Parisian was the only division that purchased this service.

Marianne was not persuaded or even mollified in the slightest by any of these facts, but she let me go on with my work to salvage as much as possible. The notes below include a lot of technical jargon, but at least they show how much effort I made to righten the ship. I have inserted footnotes to explain a few items.

Proffitt’s Recovery Journal
1. Sandy located all of the files missing from the save tape.
2. I used CHGJOB to bring all of the missing files up to speed.
3. I created records on the season file⁶for 001, 002, 011, and 012.
4. I deleted all logical files⁷ with 00 in them. These files were ones on the system save tape that were overridden by the ones on the nightly save tape.
5. I deleted all logical files whose source had been changed since 1/1/01. I then created them again.
6. I wrote a program named CRTPROFJCS to create DPJCSUM from DPJCSXMO. I ran it for 001, 002, 011, 012, and 021.
7. I created a logical file named DAACTSTAD2 to use in my program to create ads in 001 and following.
8. Dave Weeast left Jim a message that I should IPL⁸. I did so.
9. I used SQL to set the values of the latest projections in DPJCSUM to the sum of the open purchase orders plus the actual invoices for 001, 002, 011, 012, and 021. I did not change the original estimates. I tried to explain this to Marianne and to find out whether I should, but I couldn’t get her to understand what I was talking about.
10. I set up the user profile and the directory entry for Marianne, Ivy, and Phyllis Compton. These were the only people that had records in DAUSERS but no user profile.
11. I change the system value QINACTIV to 180. I also scheduled a job to end and start the interactive subsystem at 1 a.m. Bill⁹ said that we should do both of these things.
12. Marianne seemed to think that the store cost accounting would be worthless, but I still think that it is better than nothing for 002 and for the past.
13. Dave Weeast could not get the Mac network to come up. Daniel Moore¹⁰ came in at noon on Monday. Evidently it was never plugged back in. After he plugged it in it worked OK.
14. The HP network printer did not work. The IP address was wrong. I got the new one from Daniel and gave it to Dave Weeast. He changed the address, and it worked fine.
15. I changed DAACTSTAD2 to sort by expense class and month before ad number, so I could do a month at a time.
16. After a great many false starts I was able to get a program called CRTPROFADS to create the ROP ads for 011. It did not put in headlines. I set the columns and inches to 1 each. I set the ad type to 2 (B&W). I used defaults for everything else, borrowing the code from DM021 and DM041. I used storewide as the principal participant and assigned it 100% of the costs.
17. I wrote a query named ROPSEQ10 to extract the first pub on every ad. The results were stored in FEB01ROP, MAR01ROP, etc.
18. I wrote a program named RPFIXCI to calculate the column inches for each ad. It also deduced the ad type – black & white (2), one-color (6), or full color. I then changed the ad types in option 9 for the color ads and the size in option 1 for all ads.
19. I wrote a query named ACTST0011M to get the costs for each insertion in DAACTST. I wrote a second query named CHK0011M to compare this file with DMPSDET and report the discrepancies. I then fixed the obvious ones and kept the short list of the remaining ones.
20. I ran CRTPROFADS and RPFIXCI for February and March. I also did step 19 for both months. The March files and queries have 0012 instead of 0011.
21. The CPU attention light seems to be permanently on with SRC A6001730. Dave Weeast said that it is was OK.
22. Marianne complained about getting stuck in the “Cost” column in DM029 if she accidentally puts something there. I changed DM029S to accept blank, which is what they put in 90% of the time any way.
23. Jeannie did not put in a tape on Monday night, so we could not check the backup. She did put one in on Tuesday.
24. On Monday I worked in an office that had been turned into a shrine to Dale Earnhart. On Tuesday I worked in the closet in which they keep the AS/400. No kidding.
Issues
1. Marianne would like to be able to lock quantities in DM025.
2. I only got through March 2001. I ran CRTPROFAD3 but got no farther.

While I was at Proffitt’s I spent a little time researching what could have caused this problem. I was pretty sure that everyone turned off their terminals or PC’s before leaving every evening. I was quite certain that no one ever worked so late that their session would overlap the period scheduled for the backup. Moreover, there were only a few other scheduled jobs, and none of them locked records for important files.

Eventually I discovered that one person—a Mac user—did not close active AS/400 sessions before turning off the computer. The third-party emulation software running on the Macs, unlike the PC software that had been written by IBM, failed to notify the AS/400 that the session had ended abnormally. So, the job was still running, and records were locked. That user was Marianne herself.

When I left on Tuesday evening, I thought that the system was in pretty good shape. I left Marianne with a list of the ads that were still inconsistent and told her what needed to be done to fix them.

My recollection is that instead of proceeding as I suggested she decided to delete a large number of ads and have her employees key them in from scratch. That, of course, was her right.

Needless to say, TSI sent an invoice to Proffitt’s for the two days that I spent there. We did not bill them for any of the employees’ time. Marianne refused to pay the invoice. She insisted that the whole mess was TSI’s fault, and Proffitt’s would not pay.

The next time that I was in Alcoa I asked for a meeting with the man (whose name I do not recall) who replaced Don Alexander as Senior VP. I explained the situation to him. The invoice was promptly paid. I never mentioned anything about this to Marianne, and she never said anything to me. Our relationship thereafter was cordial but a little distant.

The Atmosphere:The trip to try to recover Proffitt’s files was no fun, but I went there a number of times, and I had quite a few memorable moments. I usually stayed at the Hampton Inn that was near the airport but not so near that the air traffic disturbed me. One night I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was the Guest of Honor. I received a basket of fruit and, I think, a bottle of wine.

My favorite place to eat was within walking distance of the Hampton Inn. Here is what I wrote about El Sazon¹¹ in September of 1999:

I treated myself to chicken chimichanga last night at El Sazon, a nice little family-run Mexican restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. It came with rice, beans, guacamole, pico de gallo, chips and salsa. I also ordered iced tea with a free refill. My bill was $8.34 with tax. Things are a little cheaper here.

I wonder what you can get for $8.34 today.

My favorite place in all of Tennessee was Springbrook Park, which was about halfway between the Hampton Inn and Proffitt’s. It contained a 1.4 mile dirt path that wound through some very interesting scenery. I vividly remember jogging there nearly every night while listening to opera arias on my CD player or Walkman. Here is how I described one of those experiences:

I had a delightful seven-mile run yesterday evening. It was close to 70 with a gentle breeze. I love running in Springbrook Park – through the woods, alongside the brook, around the fountain, across the wooden bridge, up towards the playground. A few dog walkers, a few amateur joggers who never seem to do more than one lap, a few strollers (mostly in pairs), a lady just sitting in the sun on one of the many wrought iron benches, and two adolescent girls using a jar to catch something in the stream and then — on the next lap — painting each others’ faces with mud divert my attention momentarily from Professor Greenberg’s¹² dissection of Verdi. The very end of the path is steeply uphill. On the last lap the tape had run out, and my calves started to cramp, but I liked the feeling. It meant that I was pressing just enough.

The atmosphere at the Proffitt’s building was also remarkable. The shrine to Dale Earnhardt had a serious competitor for most unusual workspace in the advertising department. One lady’s cubicle was filled to the brim with Warner Brothers cartoon characters—cutouts and stuffed versions of Bugs, Porky, Sylvester, and all the others.

In 1998 the University of Tennessee, located in nearby Knoxville, won the national championship in football. At the beginning of the 1999 season enthusiasm for the prospects of the Vols was at a feverish pitch, and Proffitt’s participated. Here is what I wrote about the most obvious manifestation.

Proffitt’s has put up a whiteboard across from the lunch room. Employees are encouraged to write their predictions for the Tennessee-Florida game. All day long yesterday people were standing around the board, which has also sprouted derogatory comments about various Southeast Conference schools.

After Marianne Jonas arrived, the atmosphere in the department became more serious. On the first occasion in which she invited me to Alcoa she did not let me rent a car. Instead she told me to stay at the Hilton at the airport. She personally drove to the airport and picked me up the next morning. I complained to her that my room was a very short distance from the end of the runway where the delivery service planes departed from between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. I got very little sleep because of the roar of their engines.

I needed to use cabs to get back and forth to the hotel for the rest of that trip, but thereafter she let me rent a car and stay at the much cheaper Hampton Inn.

Epilogue: In 2005 Saks Inc. sold the Proffitt’s and McRae’s stores to Belk¹³. The administrative offices in Alcoa were closed. Within a year all of those stores were converted to Belk stores or closed.

To the left is a photo of the Belk store in Foothills Mall in Maryville, TN. It was formerly a Proffitt’s.

1, McGhee Tyson Airport serves the greater Knoxville area. It is located south of the city in the town of Alcoa, which was named for its biggest employer, Alcoa Corporation.

2. My on and (mostly) off relationship with my sister Jamie is addressed in several blog entries. My relationship with the Lisella family is detailed here. The big crisis that developed shortly after her modem incident is described here.

3. Later versions of the AS/400 circumvented this problem using a technique called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) by which a set of disk drives could be recovered from redundant information on the remaining drives when one failed.

4. PTF is one of hundreds of three-letter abbreviations used by IBM. It stands for Program Temporary Fix. Every few months IBM would release a new set of PTFs for problems in the operating system or in IBM-provided programs.

5. More information about Denise can be found here and in many other blog entries.

6. The season file had two seasons per year. 001 was the spring season of 2000; 002 was the fall season of 2000. The two seasons that began with 01 were for 2001. Thus there was a mixture of past, present, and future on the file.

7. A “logical file” does not contain data. It contains pointers to data that may be sorted in a different order and may not include all of the records.

8. Dave Weeast was in charge of all AS/400’s for Proffitt’s Inc. More information about him can be found here. IPL, which stands for Initial Program Load, is IBM-speak for rebooting the system.

9. I am not sure who Bill is, maybe Bill Giardina, who worked in IT at McRae’s. That installation is described here.

10. I don’t remember Daniel Moore.

11. El sazon means “the seasonings”.

12. Robert Greenberg made a series of recordings for The Teaching Company (which subsequently changed its name to The Great Courses). They analyzed various aspects of classical music and opera. Sue Comparetto and I also attended a few lectures that he gave in association with performances by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra.

13. The advertising department at Belk was in a huge complex in Charlotte, NC. It used AdDept to manage its advertising. The details are posted here.

2000 TSI: AxN: System Design

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Mike

TSI as a nexus between advertisers and newspapers. Continue reading →

The term insertion order was used in advertising to describe a list of detailed information about ads that advertisers provided to newspapers or magazines so that the publication could reserve the space. The design of A^xN, TSI’s clearinghouse on the Internet for insertion orders, only really congealed when I had finished reading Bob Cancilla’s outstanding book about using the AS/400 for e-business, IBM’s word for commercial transactions that used the Internet. The process of determining what TSI wanted to do and how we learned how to do it has been described here.

The Internet servers on the AS/400 in TSI’s office were used in the project. The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server was used to receive transmissions of data files containing insertion orders generated by the AS/400’s at our client. The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server sent computer-generated emails to both advertisers and newspapers. The HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) server allowed the posting of web pages on TSI’s website, TSI-TSI.com.

TSI’s AS/400 was connected to the Internet through a T-1 line leased from AT&T. The backup line was a cable connection to Cox. It was seldom, if ever, needed. I can recall no problems with the connection.

AdDept changes: AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for the advertising departments of large retailers, included programs for producing the original insertion orders used to schedule advertising at newspapers and for producing change orders and cancellations. The users at each installation had slightly different methods of selecting the items from the media schedule to be ordered (usually once per week for ROP and once per month for inserts) and different formats for printing or faxing the orders. However, all installations used the same programs for updating the data files with the ordering information.

Newspapers were ordinarily designated on AdDept’s pub table with two “variations”—one for ROP (“run of press”—the pages printed by the newspaper) and one for inserts (the preprinted flyers and coupons inserted with the pages printed by the newspaper). Some needed additional variations for things like the Sunday supplement or the television guide. The pub table contained a field that designated how insertion orders would be delivered. The choices—as designated by a one-character field on the pub table—were faxing or just printing. A new option was added for delivery through TSI’s website on the Internet using A^xN. When a paper agreed to a trial subscription for A^xN, the field was changed for each of its versions. If the paper stopped using A^xN, it was set back to its previous value.

The configuration on each client’s AS/400 was modified so that the FTP server was automatically started every time the system initiated the Initial Program Load (IPL). “IPL” was IBM-speak for booting or rebooting. Most of TSI’s AdDept clients IPLed once a week.

The sections of the insertion programs that updated the data files were augmented. If the pub was using the Internet for insertion orders, new code was executed for each order as a whole and for each item on the order. This code created a file for the order and wrote records on the file for the header (A^xN‘s code for the pub, range of dates, type of order, whether it was a new order, revision, or cancellation, and a few additional items), detail (individual ads), and special instructions that could be for individual ads or the whole order. As records were written, they were logged on a file.

When the user closed the insertion order program, a routine was called to use FTP to send a copy of the file to a designated library¹ on TSI’s server. The original files remained on the advertiser’s system for a while until the system administrator ran the cleanup program.

FTP clients can actually do a lot more than send and receive files, but the configuration of TSI’s server prohibited most of those features.

Processing the orders: The configuration for TSI’s AS/400 was also changed so that the FTP, SMTP, and HTTP servers started during each IPL. Another program that we wrote to monitor the library containing orders also was started at IPL. In the twelve years that this process was active we had zero failures.

The monitoring program examined the contents of the library designated to receive the files. If the library was empty, the program went to sleep for a minute or two. If it found anything in the library, It copied the files to a separate library. For each file that it found it started a batch job to process the file. It then deleted the files from the receiving library and went back to sleep.

The processing programs evaluated each file to make sure that it could read all the records and that none of the fields in any contained invalid information. Since all of this information had been generated by AdDept programs run on the advertising departments’ AS/400s², problems almost never occurred. If any anomalies were discovered, an email was sent to me, Denise Bessette, and a programmer.

After validating the data the program created database files for new orders or updated the records of existing orders. Time-stamped log entries were written for all of these operations.

After the permanent database files were updated, an email was sent to the rep at the newspaper and the coordinator at the advertising department. It simply told them that the insertion order had been posted on TSI-TSI.com and provided a link to the website.

The processing programs were written in BASIC and IBM’s Control Language (CL). The former were used to validate the received file and to update the data files. The latter were used for system-oriented tasks such as sending emails and copying files.

I don’t remember the details of how it worked, but I think that there was also a program that monitored the number of FTP transactions in a period of time. Two of three times the system was the target of half-hearted attacks on the FTP server. We were easily able to repel them.

Setup for the interactive programs: The reps at the newspapers and the coordinators at the advertisers were expected to be able to access TSI’s AS/400 through the Internet using a browser. Therefore, it was necessary to change the system’s configuration on our AS/400 so that the HTTP³ server for the website was always started as part of the IPL. At the same time a second local HTTP server for development and testing by TSI programmers (primarily me) was also configured.

Security was provided by the AS/400’s HTTP server. The scripts for all A^xN pages on TSI’s website (TSI-TSI.com) were placed in a library that was password-protected. The pages that described the company and its products and services were open to the public. Static pages were written in HTML, the language of the web. The scripts for interactive pages were written in Net.Data, the only scripting language that IBM supported on the AS/400 at the time.

The AS/400 had the ability to set up interactive sessions for users who logged in to the HTTP server. If we had implemented this feature, the system could have timed-out users who had entered their credentials and left the connection open. Implementing this would have complicated the development enormously. We decided not to do it until it became necessary. Like all other developers in that era, we were in a hurry to launch the product on the Internet. Since we never encountered any security issues, we never did.

I take it back. Actually there was one security issue. The reps and coordinators tended to store their credentials in their browsers so that they would be filled in automatically on the security screen. When there was turnover, or someone got a new computer or software update, the passwords and user ID’s were sometimes lost. The support people at TSI did not have the capability of retrieving passwords, but they could assign new ones. After each new one was assigned, it was given over the phone to the user. To insure that this solved the problem, the TSI employee stayed on the line while the user signed on. The user was then advised to change the password and, if necessary, talked through that process.

I am sure that both the newspapers and advertisers were happy that we did not automate this process. We only needed to deal with it a handful of times per month. If we had succeeded at convincing more advertisers to use A^xN, we might have needed to automate it.

The interactive programs for newspapers: In the course of research for this entry I discovered the pdf file for the very comprehensive AxN: Handbook for Newspaper Users and posted it here. I had created this twenty-two-page document using PageMaker software in the early 2000’s before we had the first live implementation of the product/service.

The handbook included samples of all the screens and reports. This document was sent to every newspaper when it agreed to participate in the trial period. We provided no training, but no one had much trouble learning to use the system. I must say that I think that I did a superb job. TSI received amazingly few support calls.

The document is more or less self-explanatory. There are just a few things that are worth noting.

The A^xN programs used “frames”⁴. Every interactive screen had three sections that consistently take up the same amount of space on the screen. The “Display” section was always the top area with the light blue background. The “Buttons” area was at the bottom and had a steel blue background. The third frame was “Empty”; that is, it had no space on the screen reserved for it. For each page there was a master script that loads the scripts for the three frames.

When a user clicked on a button, the empty frame was loaded with the appropriate script and executed. So, for example, if the “Confirm” button was clicked on after an order had been selected, the script in the empty frame would check to see if anything was in the “Confirmed by” box. If not it would highlight that field and display an error message without reloading the page. If the field contained characters, the script called a sequence of CL and BASIC programs to mark the order as confirmed and send an email to the coordinator at the advertiser.

The buttons available varied by page. However the Buttons section always contained a Home button (the one that looks like a house) and a Help button (question mark). The former returned the user to the site’s home page. The latter produced a page that explained all of the fields and buttons on the original page.

The interactive programs for advertisers: I also found the pdf file for the twenty-eight page A^xN: Handbook for AdDept Users: It explained how to use both the AdDept programs to send new orders, changes, and cancellations and the A^xN web pages to make sure that all newspaper reps have confirmed the orders. I posted the handbook here.

Advertisers who made changes to the schedule after an order was sent were expected to make the changes in AdDept and to send revision orders.

Daily tasks: Every morning a program searched for unconfirmed orders. Lists were prepared for both newspapers and advertisers. Each newspaper rep and advertising coordinator was emailed a list of the orders that pertained to them. A master list was also printed at TSI. An employee made a “courtesy” telephone call to warn reps each newspaper with unconfirmed orders that they were within a few days of publication.

Billing: In theory both the advertisers and the newspapers were billed for the use of the A^xN service. In almost all cases the advertisers had been using the AS/400 to fax orders to the papers. They had been paying TSI a monthly fee to maintain this software. When they started using A^xN we charged the same amount for support and dropped the faxing charge. So, there was a net-zero effect for the advertisers.

TSI’s computer programs required changes to accommodate the newspapers as clients. The main change was to convert the three-digit⁵ client number field from numeric to character. The existing clients maintained their numbers, but the newspaper clients were assigned alphabetical designations sorted by state.

A separate billing program was written to create invoices for the newspapers. Most were billed quarterly; a few preferred to be billed monthly.

A^xN was extremely reliable and was very popular with both newspapers and advertisers. Support calls were rare. I vaguely recollect one instance in which a newspaper failed to run an ad or ran it incorrectly. I was able to document exactly what the system had done with timestamps, and neither side thought that A^xN had contributed to the problem.

I definitely wrote all of the Net.Data scripts. Someone else at TSI may have written a few of the BASIC and CL programs used for A^xN, but I did the bulk of that coding as well.

1. A “library” in the AS/400’s “native environment” was roughly equivalent to a “folder” or “directory” on a PC. However, libraries on the AS/400 could not be nested. That is, there was no such thing as a sub-library. More details about the AS/400’s design principles can be read here. The AS/400 also supported being used as a server for some other operating systems, but TSI did not use that feature.

2. The header record for the order contained a field that identified the format used for the files. Since no one except AdDept users was ever convinced to use A^xN, no code for processing orders in a different format was ever written.

3. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP servers were able to serve pages to a browser using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and a few other formats.

4. I really liked the use of frames, but for some reason it was disparaged by supposedly sophisticated developers, and eventually frames were no longer supported by browsers. Instead a complicated use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) was necessary to produce a similar effect. A^xN was still using frames when TSI closed in 2014. I have never been able to duplicate the effect of the empty frame with CSS.

5. The worst design mistake that I ever made was using a three-digit number for clients. None of our agency clients ever needed a larger field, and the client file on TSI’s system still had many unused client numbers when we began marketing A^xN. I decided that it would require less effort to change the type of the client number field from numbers to characters than to expand the size of the field.

1988 TSI: The First Crisis

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Mike

Many factors forced a tough decision. Continue reading →

In retrospect it does not seem like that great of a crisis. However, I have a very strong recollection that Wednesday, August 17, 1988, my fortieth birthday, was one of the worst days of my life.

I intended to to go the office and work all day, but the employees pretty much insisted that I take the day off. I was alone in our new house in Enfield. Well, Rocky and Jake were around somewhere, but cats are seldom sociable during the middle of the day. I don’t remember what Sue was doing.

I also don’t remember what I did all morning. I probably either went for a run of four or five miles—the heat did not bother me in those days—or tended to my vegetable garden.

I fixed myself something for lunch. I always ate early. Then, as usual, I lay down for a nap. I may have dozed off for a few minutes. When I arose from the bed, a crushing wave of melancholy swept over me.

I must have had a book to read; I always did. However; I did not feel like reading.Instead, for the first and only time in my adult life, I got down on my hands and knees in the yard that faced Hamilton Court and picked weeds.

I had been told by our neighbor, whose name was Fred, that both the previous resident of our house and the one before him were professional landscapers. They left us a beautiful lawn of bluegrass on the sides that faced the two streets and zoysia grass in the back. There were almost no weeds when we moved in, and, despite four months of neglect, there were still only a few patches.

While I attacked the invaders into our greensward, I took stock of my situation as I entered my fifth decade on the planet. There were undeniable positives:

I was healthy. Sue was reasonably healthy. She had recently quit smoking, and that was very difficult for her.
Sue and I had a nice new house.
We had two nice pets.
TSI had a real office that was smoke-free.
We were in the process of negotiating a big contract with a client that everyone had heard of—Macy’s. The wooing of Macy’s and the subsequent installation there are described here.
For the first time ever TSI had a salesman who was aggressive and appeared to be competent.

On the other hand, the mortgage meant that our nut at home was higher than ever, and our payroll was considerably higher than ever. IBM’s announcement of the AS/400 (described here) was very troubling. There was no provision whatever for the types of customers that we had been chasing for the last seven years. The new systems were considerably more expensive and less powerful for the models at the low end. I did not see how we could sell them to small ad agencies. The other software vendors could offer much cheaper systems. The alternative was to try to find larger agencies around the country with the budgets to buy more expensive systems. This was, from a marketing perspective, a new business.

Eventually we faced facts and leased an AS/400 model B10.

I could see more unavoidable expenses on the horizon, too. We would almost certainly need to buy an AS/400 for development and support of the Macy’s installation.

We faced a lot of difficult work in the upcoming months. We would need to do the work to assure that our system for advertising agencies worked on the new system. At some point we would need to address the Y2K issue that was beginning to raise its ugly head in the press. Our date functions would not work in the year 2000, which really meant 1998 or 1999.

We did not really have the programming staff to meet these challenges. I could not depend on Sue to help. Denise Bessette was excellent, but she only worked part-time. Sandy Sant’Angelo could help a little, but she could not handle anything difficult. There was no getting around it; the bulk of the work was going to burden my undersized shoulders.

I could not see how the current arrangement could possibly work. Unless we received several surprise phone calls in the next few months, we must depend upon getting a second and third user of the new system that we planned to develop for Macy’s. I did not think that I could possibly get that system as then envisioned to the point where it was reasonable to market it before the company (i.e., Sue and I—the only partners) ran out of money.

I think that at this point I need to address what I call The Curse.

In nearly every respect my parents provided me with an exemplary upbringing. They somehow got me the medical care that I needed to overcome what could have been a debilitating birth defect. I did not have many medical issues thereafter, but they ably and promptly addressed my dental and vision issues. They paid for an excellent education. We had food, clothing, and shelter in a very safe environment. They let me follow my own interests. They let me play tackle football for two years, although I am positive that my mother thought that it was foolish. They did not even make me take dancing lessons after I threw a tantrum about it.

There was one thing, however. I remember distinctly them telling me on several occasions, separately and jointly, “Mike, we don’t care what you decide to do. We just want you to be the best at it.” Not “the best that you can be”, just “the best”. There is no “absolute superlative” in English. Unless a group is specified, it means “better than everyone”. In 1988 the world’s population was around five billion. In any endeavor only one of the five billion is the best.

So, by the standards that they had set for me, at age forty (40!) I was an abject failure. I had never been the best at anything in high school. If you took the worst quarterly grade average that everyone had, mine was the highest, but that counted for nothing. The goal was not consistency, it was supremacy. I was not the best at anything in college either. OK, I was the best debater at the University of Michigan, but I was not even good enough to compete in the National Debate Tournament. After that I was a horrible soldier. I was nowhere near to being the best actuary, if that even means anything. I was not the best debate coach, and, in the end, I could not see any path for pursuing that goal.

I was a really good programmer, but nobody considered me the best at any aspect. In fact, in the area that we had concentrated—ad agencies—we had apparently reached a dead end.

I did not articulate this line of reasoning even to myself as my pile of weeds grew, but it must have burned in my subconscious: At age forty this was probably my last chance to be the best at anything. But how?

From somewhere it popped into my brain that I had to fire TSI’s salesman, Michael Symolon, whose career at TSI is described here. The company had no choice¹. We had to sacrifice marketing in order to get the new product ready. The income from the software maintenance contracts and the big Macy’s check might be enough to cover the payroll without Michael’s salary until I could get the product in good enough shape to sell to other retailers. It just had to. It would take a Herculean effort to accomplish all this, but I resolved to do it.

I felt horrible about this decision. I hated firing people. I only needed to do it a few times in thirty-five years in business. All of those occasions were awful, but this one was the worst. I felt that it was more my fault than Michael’s that we were in this position.

I told Sue my decision that evening. She agreed. I talked with Michael a few days later. I assured him that we would pay him his commission on the Macy’s project as soon as everything was completed. He seemed to take it fairly well.

One of the last things that Michael did was to schedule meetings for me in Chicago and South Bend, IN. In Chicago I was allowed to explain the AdDept system that we were about to install at Macy’s to IBM reps who specialized in retail. I knew that quite a few large retailers—Sears, Walgreens, Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field’s, and Carson Pirie Scott, to name a few—were based in Chicago. I thought that they would be very interested in being able to sell a new application and a (newly announced) AS/400 to a previously unautomated department. I am not sure why, but the reception to my presentation was disappointing. They did not even ask me many questions.

I rented a car to drive to South Bend for a demo of the GrandAd system the next day. I am not sure when this occurred, but my credit card was declined somewhere, maybe at the hotel in which I stayed in South Bend. I had to make a very depressing and stressful call back to the office to arrange payment.

We (or perhaps the IBM office) had done a mailing to all of the ad agencies in the area. Five or six had reported that they planned to attend. As usual, I loaded our software and demo data onto the System/36 at the IBM office. Only three people attended the presentation. They all sat together, paid little attention, and took no notes. After my presentation I talked with them for a few minutes. They were all from the same agency. They already had a UNIX-based system running a product called Ad-Aid. I asked them whether they liked it; they were noncommittal.

As I made the long drive back to Chicago that evening I mulled over what had happened. The more that I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the ladies in the audience were spies sent to learn the strengths and weaknesses of our system. This would ordinarily have made me angry; on that day it just depressed me.

For the next three and a half years I worked a large number of hours per week for fifty-two weeks of the year. We sent out a couple of sets of letters to advertising directors at large retailers across the country, and we received just enough positive responses to get by.

The second installation of AdDept (described here) was even more difficult than the first. Hecht’s, the third installation (described here), was a genuine turning point, but it wasn’t really until 1993 that we could consider investing in another genuine salesman—five years of scraping by with only one break, our short cruise of Greece and Turkey in 1992, as described here.

I think that I made the right decision. I cannot envision what life would have been like if I had chosen otherwise

1. Yes, we could have tried to borrow some money. However, we had no assets to use as collateral. The prospect of going down a path that might well have ended in bankruptcy seemed unthinkable to me. The idea of begging for money from relatives never occurred to me.

1999-2014 TSI: Administrative Employees in East Windsor

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Mike

From Nadine to Ashley. Continue reading →

The resignation from TSI by my sister Jamie Lisella in the summer of 1999 (as explained here) left the company with neither an administrative employee nor a marketing director during a critical period. We were in the process of moving to a new location that Jamie had found, we had a huge backlog of programming jobs, and Denise Bessette (introduced here) and I were establishing a new working relationship (explained here) and trying to figure out how to adapt to the new world of the Internet.

Prior to this time I never had hired an administrative person. In each of the cases in this entry I wrote a help-wanted ad and ran it in the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer. I kept a record of the responses in a spreadsheet. I interviewed a few of the respondents and then picked one or started over.

In 1990 the one whom I liked best was named Michele Stewart. At the end of August I called her on the telephone and offered her the job. She told me that she was probably going to accept another job because my description of our post sounded complicated. She was most concerned about the sales tax aspect. Perhaps I did not explain that computer programs provided all the numbers. The administrative person’s role was just to see that the forms were filled out, and the payments were made on time.

So, I ended up hiring Nadine Holmes, my second choice. Se was single and in her twenties. She took longer than expected to catch on to how TSI did things, but she had a good attitude. I wrote this on October 18:

Nadine came into my office at 4PM with a very solemn look on her face. She announced that she had to tell me that she could no longer work for my company. I sighed, leaned back in my chair, and folded my hands. Then she said, “The time goes by too fast here.” She has shown remarkable progress in the last few days. She is still a little sloppy, and her spelling needs work, but she definitely is a keeper.

By February of 2000 we had moved into our new office at 7B Pasco Drive in Enfield. The first month or so was hectic because of address changes and other transition issues, but then things slowed down. A few problems began to appear.

I had lunch with Nadine Thursday. I don’t know if I got through to her, but at least I think she has a little better idea of what the company is about. She told me that it is hard for her to get used to the idea that she is the low man on the totem pole and always will be as long as she works here. I told her that we planned to hire someone to help with marketing and that when we start marketing again, we will have plenty for her to do.

The next week I sent this e-mail to Denise:

I told Nadine that I want her to become an expert at Word and Excel. My real objective is for her to become reasonably competent at them. It may be useful for her to go through some of the exercises in the book that Harry¹ had. I was hoping that we would have received the book to use as the basis for a mailing, but it didn’t come yet. If you can think of anything for her to do, by all means ask her to do it. I told her that I think of you as my alter-ego.

My recollection is that this was reasonably successful. She could maintain a spreadsheet if I told her precisely what to do. However, other problems arose. I wrote this on December 27.

I discovered before anyone came in that Nadine forgot to pay the sales tax in December. I was so angry about this that I was almost out of control. I got less than four hours of sleep on Monday evening. I needed to rest for a few minutes on Tuesday morning before everyone came in, but this made me so upset that I couldn’t do it. You will be happy to know that even though I had my boots on, I did not take it out on the furniture (but it was tempting). I didn’t yell at anyone either, but I was very grumpy.

The “boots” reference was about an occasion at our Enfield office on which I kicked a dent in one of our steel filing cabinets. By the middle of January I decided that Nadine was not the solution to TSI’s administrative needs. I explained my attitude to Denise.

I think that I found a good metaphor for Monday’s conversation. In addition to the part about a new direction, I plan to emphasize to Nadine that I want to hire someone who is “on the same wavelength” that I am on (or we are). If she wants more specifics, I will have a list of things that I asked her to do, but that she didn’t do or didn’t do until I hounded her about them. You can contribute to the list if you want.

I hired a woman named Paula to replace Nadine. I don’t remember her last name. She seemed to be more than intelligent enough to handle the job. The other big factor in her favor was that she lived in East Windsor almost within walking distance of the office.

On the other hand, she had at least one young child. Paula lasted less than a week. She called in sick while I was on a business trip. Denise was furious about this. I fired her, but I did not feel good about it.

She explained that she is having a lot of problems with her husband. She said that she was hoping that the job would either provide a solution to the problems or the wherewithal to let her stand on her own two feet if it came to that. This is about what I expected. I don’t know if I am happy that she told me or not. I have not been dwelling on this subject, but I still find myself waking up worrying about her.

I really liked working with Lucia Hagan (pronounced (LOO shuh HAY gun), who started in the spring of 2001. She was, in my opinion both a very nice person and a superlative employee. Her tenure coincided with a period that required the most administrative changes. TSI was in the process of setting up a system to manage the hundreds of newspapers that were beginning to subscribe to A^xN. Accounts receivable and billing records had to be set up, and, for the first time ever, we needed to keep track of contracts.

Here are some of my memories of Lucia’s time at TSI.

Lucia had a tattoo on one of her calves. I had never interacted for any length of time with anyone with a tattoo. Hers seemed out of place to me, but I guess that I should not have been surprised. She lived and grew up in Stafford, a town built around auto racing.
Lucia was into NASCAR. She was especially a fan of Jeff Gordon, who drove #24 for Team Penske. She was upset when Penske “gave all of Gordon’s best cars to the kid”, meaning Jimmy Johnson.
Lucia was amused that I napped in the computer room early in the morning and on weekends. She bought me a pillow and a University of Michigan pillow case that I am still using in 2023.
Her husband Rick worked at Leonard’s Auto Parts in West Stafford². She once remarked, “It’s not a real job.”
Every year Lucia and Rick went overboard on decorations of their house in Stafford for Halloween. On two occasions I drove out to see their house just before Halloween.
Lucia had no children.
She was working at the time that we terminated Sandy Sant’Angelo’s (introduced here) employment at TSI. She asked to move to the space by the window that Sandy had occupied. I had been oblivious to the fact that she did not like sitting so close to the bathrooms. Presumably Nadine did not like it either. Needless to say, I concurred.

I never had any problems with Lucia’s work or her attitude, but I was dimly aware that something was amiss in her relationship with Denise. I arrived in my office at TSI early one morning after having returned from a multi-day trip. I was surprised that Lucia came to my office at about 7:30 and explained that she was not coming in to work. It took me a minute to realize that she meant that she was resigning immediately. I asked her what the problem was, but she did not want to talk about it. She was adamant that she could not work at TSI any longer.

I never did find out what had actually happened.

At the end of that year TSI sent Lucia a check for her share of the profit-sharing distribution, but she never cashed it. Over the years I have thought about Lucia many times when I drove on Route 190 through Stafford.

The choice to replace Lucia was easy. Eileen Sheehan-Willet (LinkedIn page here) stood out from the other applicants. She had previous experience in a small business, and she had an extremely positive demeanor. She did not catch on to new tasks as quickly as Lucia had, but each time she kept her nose to the grindstone until she had mastered every detail.

Here are some of my recollections of my second-favorite administrative helper.

Eileen had a green thumb. She nursed the neglected plants in our office back to health.
I met Eileen’s husband’s a few times, but I don’t remember his name. My most vivid memory is of the extremely overcast day on which I forgot to extinguish my Saturn’s headlights before eating lunch and enjoying my postprandial nap in the park near the Connecticut River. Eileen called him. He picked me up in his truck. When we arrived he charged the battery with a stand-alone unit. It took only a minute or two.
I don’t think that Eileen had any children.
While working at TSI Eileen was diagnosed with cancer in one of her legs. She was the only employee who ever filed a claim on the disability policy that the company maintained for two decades. I worried about her subsequent use of the stairway that was the only entry to or exit from TSI’s office, but she had no trouble with it when she returned to work. It was a very nice feeling that she could recover from such a serious issue.

After a few years Eileen and her husband decided to move to New Hampshire. I seem to recall that it had something to do with his job. She gave us several weeks notice, and so there was time for her to train her replacement.

The person whom I hired to replace Eileen was named Debbie Hlobik. She had a son who gave her some problems and a daughter. Eileen warned me that, although Debbie was certainly capable of doing the job, she worried about her attitude. This assessment turned out to be prescient. Debbie was married and had a son whose behavior gave her a lot of problems. I am not sure what she wanted to do with her life, but she eventually made it quite clear that it did not involve TSI. I finally had to fire her. When I did, she said that I had nothing to be sorry about. She immediately applied for unemployment benefits.

Perhaps the strangest few weeks in the history of the company was after I had hired Chrissy Ralph or maybe it was Chrissy Poloski to replace Debby. Chrissy seemed fine in the interview and for the first few weeks. At some point she either got married or divorced (I don’t remember which) and changed her name. After that her behavior became erratic. One day she left at lunch time and never returned. She had written and signed a letter detailing her resignation and left it on her desk next to her PC. I also found several unpaid bills in her desk drawer, including sales tax bills for a few states. TSI had to pay fines on a few of them.

Then, unbelievably, she filed for unemployment benefits and claimed that I had fired her. Denise and I contested the filing, and the state arranged for a hearing of the case. Chrissy did not appear, and her claim was terminated forthwith.

The hiring of our last administrative person, Ashley Elliott, in 2010 put an end to our losing streak. Although I spent several years working with her, I have a hard time coming up with any anecdotes at all. She certainly did a good gob. She seemed to be rather friendly with Jason Dean, TSI’s programmer during her tenure at TSI. They were both more than a generation younger than I was.

She was still employed with TSI when the company shut down in 2014 (described here). Here is the letter of recommendation that I wrote for her.

To Whom It May Concern:
I am the president of TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., a small company that has designed, implemented, installed, and supported computer software for thirty-five years. Ashley Elliott has served as our administrative person since April 26, 2010. Before that she worked for a temporary employment agency and was assigned to our account for three months. We were so pleased with her work and her attitude that we offered her permanent employment. This was the only time in the long history of the company that we have done that.
Ashley’s job at TSI involved many diverse tasks. Essentially she was responsible for almost everything except for development and support of the software. She managed both the Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable systems and used our home-grown computer systems to generate invoices, statements, and numerous reports. She was very good at interacting with both customers and vendors. She managed the cash flow in Excel, filed sales and use taxes online in many states, and did most of the work required for closing the books every month. She also was responsible for routine purchasing and other aspects of managing the office.
Ashley did very good work for TSI. It takes a special type of person to be able to execute such a large number of small tasks, some menial and some challenging, and Ashley adapted very well. My partner and I have been very impressed with her attitude and her ability to get along with everyone in the office. We came to depend upon Ashley, and she did not disappoint us. She made the trains run.
Ashley’s termination had nothing to do with her work, which was of consistently high quality. Business conditions necessitated that we close the company rather abruptly.
I wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend Ashley for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about her work at TSI. I can be reached at Mike@Wavada.org or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 860 763-3694 (home).

Of all of the blog entries that I have written this one was the most frustrating to write. I worked with these people for a total of thirteen years, but I had trouble remembering any details. Furthermore, aside from my experience with Nadine, I found little in the way of notes. I recently discovered some spreadsheets dated in 2006 (Eileen?) and 2009 (Ashley?) concerning recruitment of administrative assistants. I am at a loss to explain the fact that none of the names on the list seem even vaguely familiar. There was one person named Paula. She may have been the same as the short-term employee described above, but the last name and the year did not seem right.

I also searched on the Internet for information about the women who handled the administrative functions to determine what they had done since leaving TSI. I found almost nothing about any of them.

I have had a few email exchanges with Lucia and Eileen, but otherwise no communication. It puzzles me how I could have worked fairly closely with these people for such a long time, but until I tried to put this page together, I hardly gave them a thought.

1. This was a reference to Harry Burt, a programmer at TSI who was introduced here.

2. Leonard’s was in business long after Lucia left TSI. I drove by it many times on the way to and from bridge tournaments. At some point it became Carquest Auto Parts. On my last drive past it in August of 2023 I noticed that the store appeared to be out of business. Its website was no longer working, and the Facebook page indicated that the owner had retired.

3. Debbie died in 2019 at the age of 60. Her obituary is posted here.

1990-1995 TSI: AdDept: The Installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.

Posted on June 12, 2021 by Mike

She knows there’s no success like failure, and failure is no success at all.—Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” Continue reading →

In the early years of the marketing of TSI’s GrandAd system for advertising agencies I distinctly remember being disappointed that the second installation (at Potter Hazlehurst) was even more difficult than the first. This tendency was definitely repeated with the system for retail advertising departments, AdDept (design described here). The second installation, which was began in the spring of 1990, was much more problematic than the first.

I had never heard of P.A. Bergner & Co. I now know that the chain’s original store was in Peoria, IL. After it acquired the Boston Store chain in 1985, the company moved its headquarters to the upper floors of the Boston Store in downtown Milwaukee. In 1989 the company also acquired the Carson Pirie Scott stores. The corporate management of all of these stores, including all aspects of advertising, was handled in Milwaukee.

I was not yet familiar enough with the nature and history of American department stores to understand the importance of the timing of that last acquisition. Bergner’s advertising department was presumably given a budget to acquire a computer system to enable it to handle the absorption of the Carson’s stores. The money probably had to be spent in 1990. Any portion that was not spent vanished. Little or nothing for future years was budgeted. I came to understand these things later. I wish that the situation had been spelled out to me.

Moreover, Sue and I continually tried to portray TSI as a strong stable organization that was especially good at big projects. That was true a few years later, but in 1990 the company consisted of:

Me,
Sue Comparetto (who basically wrote checks, closed the books, and did presidential stuff),
Sandy Sant’Angelo, who could do simple programming, of which there was still quite a lot,
Kate Behart, who helped with marketing and served as day-to-day contact with some clients,
Denise Bessette, who worked only part time, all of which was devoted to projects for Macy’s East,
One or two administrative people.

The only way that the whole Bergner’s project could be implemented on time was for me to do almost all the programming work myself. The closest that I came to admitting this to Bergner’s was when I told them that Sue was terrible about time. Anything with a deadline had to come through me. Dan Stroman was quite taken aback when I said this. I was also pretty shocked when I had discovered this, but there was no sense in denying it.

Maybe I should try to grow a big white mustache.

Several IBM reps were involved in the sale of the AS/400 for the AdDept system to Bergner’s. The one whom I remember best was Sue Mueller. One of our last meetings took place shortly after the trip that Sue Comparetto and I took to England (described here). Sue brought to Milwaukee a copy of the magazine. When Sue Mueller saw my picture on the cover, she literally did not believe that it was a photo of me.

My recollection is that IBM sold Bergner’s a model B30 of the AS/400, the same machine that Macy’s was using. I think that it also had the faxing software and the modem that it required, and it definitely included OfficeVision/400, the word processing software.

Our primary contract person at Bergner’s during the negotiations was Dan Stroman¹, who was either the advertising director or the production manager. He arranged for me to meet with the individual managers—production, ROP, direct mail, and business office. Either I did not do a very good job of collecting the requirements from them, or they did not do a good job of describing what they needed.

We tried to emphasize to Dan the importance of having one person designated as the liaison between TSI and the users. At first he wanted the liaison to be a person from the IT department. However, everyone agreed that the person whom the IT department assigned to the project, Kee-Huat Chua, would never have worked for many reasons. So, the job was given to Sheree Marlow Wicklund², who at the time was the manager of the merchandise loan room.

I don’t think that in 1990 TSI yet owned the tools to produce detailed design documents. If we did, we certainly did not use them for that purpose in this installation. I merely described in the proposal what we planned to do.

The project was focused on quite a few things that required significant design changes.

Bergner’s stores had four or five logos (the name on the store’s signs). So, a table for logos had to be created, and separate versions of each ad were needed for each version of an ad.
On some pages of some direct mail catalogs and newspaper inserts the merchandise varied by market. That is, one “block” on a page might show items from one department in one market and different ones in others. Bergner’s called these “swing pages”. Providing a way to handle them meant, among other things, that the entire approach to measuring books needed to be rethought.
Bergner’s wanted to use the system to “traffic” production jobs. We proposed to do this by defining lists of steps, which we called “production schedules” and “timetables”—date relationships to the release date (the date that the materials were delivered to the printer or the newspaper). This approach worked well for setting up the original schedule, but the traffic coordinators did not like to use it, and I never did figure out how we could make it more useful for them. Sheree was certainly of little help.
Macy’s newspaper coordinators ordered their space reservations by phone. Joyce Nelson³, the newspaper manager at Bergner’s, sent a schedule to each paper once per week with all the ads, positioning requests, and other notes for every ad to be run in that paper over the next week. She wanted the system to fax them all. I was very happy to add this feature.
Bergner’s employees wanted to be able to record comments in many places. These requests were often difficult to accommodate. I devised a trick to handle some of them. IBM’s office-vision software had the ability to run programs within documents and to display the output sent to an output queue within the document instead! The parameters for the program could even be included in the document. So, a form letter could be created for sending detailed information about an ad to a group of people. The text surrounding the report could be changed every time. I especially liked this approach because I was fairly certain that it could not be replicated on any other system.

I was signed on to our B10 all day every day.

By the time that the software was delivered, TSI had a small AS/400 in its office, and we quickly established peer-to-peer communication with Bergner’s system. This allowed us to sign on to their system from TSI’s office and to send programs directly from our AS/400 to theirs over the phone lines. I worked all day on programs in TSI’s office and installed the ones that I deemed to be working early in the morning. This was feasible because our office was an hour ahead of theirs.

I communicated with Sheree via the AS/400’s messaging system, which supported both plain text and word processing documents. Kate communicated with Sheree by telephone. I expected Sheree to interact with the users and managers personally. Instead they had weekly meetings that all the managers attended. They appear to have been mostly gripe sessions. Sheree took notes and sent me a list of the issues reported. She did not send one document per area; all areas were included on one document.

I liked the idea that we received a written record of the issues, but my responses expressed my exasperation at some of them. Often users were still complaining about things that I was positive had been fixed. In other cases they had changed their minds about decisions that they had previously made and we had implemented. I responded to all of the issues that Sheree had sent in one document. I did not anticipate that Sheree would share all of my responses with all of the managers. I guess that I should have anticipated that possibility, but I had not worked at a large company for seventeen years, and the meetings at Macy’s were usually limited to one area at a time.

At any rate, I ended up on several shit lists because I responded negatively in print to some managers’ comments, and all of the other managers got to read. It never occurred to Sheree that if I had wanted everyone to read my answers, I could easily have sent the document with the responses to each of them.

Privately I was outraged that Sheree had violated what I considered to be a special relationship between the developer and the liaison. I expected her to be a strong advocate for the system when working with the users and an equally strong advocate for the users when speaking with us. She evidently considered herself more of a project manager whose responsibility was to organize and keep everyone informed. She did this. However, for such a complex system with such a compressed timeline, this was just not enough.

I talked with Dan about the situation, and I pleaded for a different liaison. He said that it was out of his hands. Ouch.

The installation at Bergner’s should have been a great success story. Some of the areas—notably the newspaper and loan room areas—were working very well in record time. The other areas proceeded much more slowly. I felt extremely frustrated by the incredibly inefficient process upon which Bergner’s insisted.

Nevertheless, by the time of my visit in December of 1990 the ill will had dissipated to the point that they invited me to the department’s Christmas party. I could hardly believe it. A live band was playing. There was a mosh pit! The young people who worked in the creative and production areas were going crazy. The old fogeys with whom I dealt were much more subdued.

That evening Joyce Nelson asked me to give her a demonstration of my technique of throwing playing cards. She produced a deck of bridge cards, which are not as easy to throw as poker cards. However, I was sure that I could spin one at least twenty yards. Unfortunately, the ceiling was too low. To get a card to go a long way, its flight must describe a loop. I could not possibly throw a card at high velocity without it crashing into the ceiling or floor after a few yards. I had to demur, and I never got another chance to display my prowess.

I located in our basement a few pages of memos written by me or Sheree about the installation. Kate had written notes in the margins. At a distance of thirty years (!) I could not understand the details of what was being discussed, but it was evident that I was trying to juggle a large number of balls at once. However, the use of the test system and the attitude of some managers made it seem like the balls were all coated with fly paper.

At some point in 1991 Bergner’s agreed that we had met the terms of the contract, which, by the way, was TSI’s simple version with only a few amendments. They made the last payment and also indicated that they also wanted to prepay TSI’s software maintenance for, I think it was, a year. They asked us to send them an invoice for this, but they wanted the description to be something like “Miscellaneous programming projects”.

The proverbial wolf was at TSI’s door again, and we had never turned down a check. So we did what they asked.

Bergner’s also approved quite a few enhancements that TSI had quoted. These projects were not covered by the original contract. So, I was still very busy with writing and installing all of the new code.

We used part of the money to hire Tom Moran to help with marketing. His role at TSI is discussed here. Perhaps I should have hired a programmer instead. I was more confident in my ability to produce an abundance of good code than my skill at closing sales. Also, I could not afford to devote the time necessary to train a programmer.

Bankruptcy: By August of 1991 Bergner’s had not sent TSI any checks in several months. We learned that the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. My recollection is that they owed us more than $10,000. We had no experience with this; none of our previous clients had ever done this.

Dan told me on the phone that Bergner’s would not be allowed to pay any invoice that was received prior to the default date and was still open. I realized immediately that they must have suspected that this was coming. That “miscellaneous” check was done that way so that we would be obliged to provide support for programming projects that they never paid for.

I wrote them a letter that said that we intended to apply the money from the miscellaneous check to the projects that we had delivered but they had not paid for, and we would begin to bill them for software maintenance. The Senior VP of advertising, Ed Carroll³, was furious at me personally. Dan Stroman called me about the situation. He said that I didn’t know who our friends were.⁴ Well, he might have been a friend, but I don’t think that many people at Bergner’s qualified for that distinction. I told him that our legal advisers (Me, Myself, and I) said that money given on deposit like that could be applied to open invoices. Dan did not respond to that. Instead, he asked if he wanted us to continue as a customer. I told him that I wanted them to become a paying customer.

I don’t remember the details of the rest of this episode. We continued to support the users at Bergner’s. They asked for a few more projects. We felt compelled to bill them at higher rates to try to make up for the money that we had lost.

I learned later that much of the retail advertising community considered Ed Carroll a sleazeball. What his advertising department did with that invoice was probably illegal or at least against company policy. He resented that what I proposed would make him look bad.

Test Environment: I found a letter dated May 13, 1992 that Kee-Huat Chua sent to TSI. It began with these two sentence fragments.

As you are aware of PAB’s intention to set up separate program environments for the AS/400 system. What it entails: one environment for intensive testing by users and one environment for developer/programmer to perform units [sic] test on the program module(s).

It then describes electronic forms that we needed to fill out before we made changes to the system. After we sent the form to him, he would copy the entire production library and the entire data library to the test environment. When this would happen is not designated in the letter. It could not be done if anyone was using the system. So, presumably it would be done at night.

After the libraries were duplicated, we would be allowed to sign on and implement the changes. We were also supposed to test them and send him a memo documenting that we tested them.

I guess that the users would then test them, but the letter does not mention it. It also does not mention how the changes will get into the production environment.

However, it does emphasize (in bold print, capital letters, and underlines), “NO COMPILING OF PROGRAMS ALLOWED DURING OFFICE HOURS UNLESS UNDER SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES; when making program modification.” Those special circumstances are not described.

Kee also included a list or reasons why this approach would be good for “TSI/Programmer:”

– To better perform & concentrate on their development.
– Less interruption and delay for development tasks.
– Secure production application: AdDept.

Although I considered this additional requirement a breach of our contract, I did not feel that I could refuse outright. I was sure that no matter what the missing details were, it would slow down our delivery of projects that they had requested by 50 percent or more. It also pretty much excluded them from ever getting new releases of our software.

This time Dan called me. I told him that we could have done it using test libraries from the beginning, but the project would have been hopelessly behind schedule if we had. He replied that he thought that that was what I would say.

I didn’t say this to Dan, but I also knew that this approach guaranteed that we would be doing a lot of extra work for which we would not be compensated. I cannot imagine who would really benefit from this. The alleged benefits for Bergner’s were equally bogus:

– To stabilize the “live”/production system both in the short run and the long run.
– To adhere with PAB’s standard of implementing computer systems established by Management Information Systems
– To encourage more users involvement with the implementation of the application.

I was mostly thankful that they did not come up with the idea of inserting this guy from the IT department between us and their system while we were still working on the base system specified in the contract.

I made lots of mistakes, but I also fixed problems very rapidly.

This was a good example of why it always took IT departments ages to develop and install new software and why so many companies ended up outsourcing the IT department itself. My shoot-from-the-hip approach admittedly required some pain and frustration for a short period of time. However, it had worked extremely well in the ad agency environment, and it would also eventually prove effective in many other retail advertising departments.

Documentation and Ease of Use: Macy’s East’s long and involved contract did not require TSI to provide written documentation of how the programs worked. Although they demanded a commission for any AdDept systems sold in the first year after it was signed, they considered the whole project a custom job.

I no longer possess a copy of our contract with Bergner’s, and so I cannot check on whether it specified anything about documentation or not. I doubt it. Producing a user’s handbook that covered every eventuality of every aspect of the system would have been an overwhelming undertaking that got worse with every program change or new module. Instead, I made a conscientious effort to try to make the system fairly easy to use.

The layout of all of the screens was consistent.
- The top three lines of data entry screens described the purpose. The screen number was in the upper right corner.
- If a new item was being created, the word “New” was also in the upper right corner, and it blinked.
- If the item already existed, the user ID, date, and time of the creation and last change were displayed.
- All binary fields required the entry of Y or N. The 5250 standards used by all of the terminals and PC’s did not support check boxes.
- The options for all fields that would have had radio buttons on a GUI (graphical user interface)⁵ were listed on the screen.
- Two function keys were available at all fields that were verified against the database. F2 produced a detailed description of the field. F4 called a program that allowed the user to list and from the existing entries. Exiting these programs returned the user to the original screen with the cursor position maintained.
- All dates were entered in the form MMDDYY.
- All fields were verified when the Enter key was pressed. Any entries that were not valid were highlighted, and the cursor was positioned there.
The format for all reports was as consistent as possible. The report number was almost always in the upper right corner.
A list of the names of the most important tables and their key fields was provided for querying purposes. The names of the fields was consistent from table to table.

The biggest gripes were the lack of a user handbook and that the system was not “intuitive”. I considered trying to write a handbook, but I could not figure out a way to do it. Furthermore, I could not even start on it until all the programming required in the contract had been completed.

In all honest, I have never seen a system that was intuitive. The text-based user interface, which the only thing IBM provided at the time, probably seemed difficult to people who had never learned the keyboard.

I thought of a few ways to provide better documentation later, and we provided them to both new and existing clients. By then, however, Bergner’s had decided to try to find a different system.

Camex Interface: We were not the only software developers who felt Bergner’s wrath. When the AdDept installation began, Bergner’s produced its ads using Camex software on very expensive workstations from Sun Microsystems. Macy’s East did, too. Both of them wanted Camex to work with us for a two-way interface between the two systems. The story of how this project never got off the ground is recounted here.

Epilogue: The story of the installation has at least four epilogues:

I think that after the bankruptcy brouhaha Bergner’s hired Gary Beberman, who had done a fantastic job as our liaison at Macy’s East, to help them. He called me about it. I told him that they had a good system installed, but we did not get along with some of the people there. I told him about the restrictive process that IT had set up for me to use. He was sympathetic, but he had no advice about how to turn around. He also warned me not to use Bergner’s as a reference account.
Bergner’s advertising department tried unsuccessfully to replace AdDept for years, maybe even decades. I went back there for something some time in (I think) 1992. Joyce told me that they now had two systems, a pretty one and an ugly one. She said that she preferred the ugly one that worked.
Bergner’s emerged from bankruptcy in 1993. They paid us pennies on the dollar. In 1998 the company, then known as Carson’s, was acquired by Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc. All of the other Saks Inc. divisions used AdDept. Carson’s was merged with Younkers and Herberger’s, which both had successfully used AdDept. The resulting entity was called the “northern division”. Saks Inc. sold the division to the Bon-Ton in 2005, which closed down all 267 stores in 2018. During that entire disastrous sequence of events Ed Carroll ran the advertising department in Bergner’s. Carson’s, the northern division of Saks Inc., and the entire Bon-Ton.
Some time early in the 2000’s I unexpectedly ran into Ed and Sheree (?!) at Saks Inc. in Birmingham, AL. Steve VeZain, who was in charge of the corporate marketing group, had asked me to come there for some other reason. Sheree was cordial to me, but when Ed saw me he barked, “What are you doing here?” More about this event is documented here. I never saw Dan Stroman again. I have no idea what happened to him.

Miscellaneous: Here are a few things that I remember about the installation:

Dan and his wife had Sue and me over for supper on evening. She was a big University of Wisconsin fan. I remember her saying “How could you not love Bucky Badger?” I thought that Bucky Badger was ridiculous then. I have subsequently learned to hate him. The Stromans’ house was on a large pond. Dan had a boat. I don’t know why, but he revealed to me that he had had a vasectomy.
Bergner’s insisted that I stay at the Mark Plaza Hotel when I was in Milwaukee. It had a doorman. He held the door for me even though I always had a free hand. I guess that that was his job, but it annoyed me. I have always hated it when people offered an unsolicited service and then expected a tip.
One evening I tried to get some work done in TSI’s office, where I had “passed through” to Bergner’s system. After a while I became too drowsy to be productive. So, I intended to end my remote session. Unfortunately I keyed in PWRDWNSYS on a command line rather than ENDPASTHR. I accidentally shut down their system! I had to call the IT support line in Milwaukee and talk someone through starting it up again from the system console.
The German food in Milwaukee was unbeatable.
One day Dan Stroman, a guy from production whose name I don’t remember, and I went to lunch at a Thai place. I didn’t think much of it.
I had fun jogging down by Lake Michigan in the evenings.

Failure: This entry has made me think about the nature of failure.

For about thirty-five years I designed, wrote, implemented, documented, and supported software systems. In the fifteen-year period that we actively marketed AdDept, we had thirty-five installations. Of all of those, the only one that I would characterize as a failure was the one at P.A. Bergner & Co.

I probably made mistakes. I tried to work on everything at once. I wanted to provide each stakeholder in the department with something to show that we were making progress.

Perhaps I should have insisted on doing one media at a time. Would Bergner’s have accepted that strategy? Who can say? They put a lot of pressure on us to get the entire project delivered. They seemed to have underestimated how much new programming they wanted. I am certain that I never said that we had already written software that was not actually working, but we were definitely trying to be optimistic. We desperately wanted the job. Maybe some statements that we made got misinterpreted.

I often took the “one area at a time” approach in other installations. We usually started with ROP and quickly achieved successful faxing of insertion orders and printing of schedules. That served as a confidence booster. If we had achieved important objectives quickly, perhaps no one would have suggested that wretched test environment. That approach would probably have also eliminated the weekly committee meetings. If my reports had been to one manager at a time, I would have been more careful in my comments.

In some future installations I designed one-time programs to help with the initial loading of tables by reading in user-supplied spreadsheet files. It did not occur to me to try this at Bergner’s, and no one suggested it. I am not sure that they actually had any files that I could have used.

I learned my lesson. In all subsequent AdDept presentations, I emphasized what I called “our dirty little secret”, to whit, the biggest factor in determining the success of an installation was the person who acted as liaison. I also took pains to specify what precisely the liaison’s responsibility and traits should be.

I also recognized that I should never have put in writing anything even slightly derogatory about a third party. Thereafter I always assumed that everyone would read every word that I wrote.

I learned one other lesson from this experience. I needed to investigate prospective clients more closely. From then on I asked prospective clients why they had decided to pursue automation of their advertising department at this point in time.

I can’t be too hard on myself, however. I don’t know of anyone else who managed to automate two advertising departments of large retailers. Over the years I installed thirty-five AdDept systems.

1. I never saw Dan Stroman again. I have no idea what happened to him. I suspect that he must fallen out of Ed’s favor. He may have been blamed for selecting TSI to design and implement the administrative system and for the collapse of the Camex interface project.

2. Sheree (pronounced like Sherry) Wicklund now goes by Sheree Marlow. Her LinkedIn page is here.

3. Joyce Nelson worked for the company until 2004. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Ed Carroll, one of the very few people in my life who really hated me, died in 2016. His obituary is here.

5. IBM did not provide OS/400 with a real GUI until more than a decade later, and even then what they suggested was slow, resource-intensive, and lame compared to what people were accustomed to on PC’s and Macs. TSI’s screens maintained the same format throughout the history of the company because we never found a way to convert the hundreds of screens that we had to produce something that was reasonably attractive. The approach that came closest was to write everything over in a language that used CGI for HTML files. That was how AxN worked.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Bessette, Denise

1998-2005 TSI: AdDept Client: Proffitt’s

2000 TSI: AxN: System Design

1988 TSI: The First Crisis

1999-2014 TSI: Administrative Employees in East Windsor

1990-1995 TSI: AdDept: The Installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.