1991-1999 TSI: Addressing the Y2K Issue

Posted on October 24, 2021 by Mike

In 1999 people were predicting an end to civilization because of the imminent arrival of a new century. Art Bell interviewed a doomsayer almost every night. Key software programs were expected to crash a few seconds into the year 2000.

The calamity did not happen. A few systems probably had difficulties, but no major problems were reported at all. In the late nineties employees and contract workers at companies around the world ad devoted a great deal of time and money fixing or replacing software that would not work as designed in the year 2000. TSI was one of those companies.

The software programs that we had installed at clients and we used in TSI’s office often involved dates. For example, every business that does billing needs to know whether the clients are paying the bills within a reasonable time. This involves a comparison of the date of the invoice and the effective date of the report. The routine that makes the comparison must know the year for both dates. As long as both dates are in the same century, the familiar two-digit version of the year will suffice. However, if the invoice date is in 1999 and the report is run in 2000, the calculation must be adjusted.

This aspect of the problem was relatively simple to solve, but in large systems like the ones that we had installed there were thousands of references to dates. The challenge was to find all the situations that needed to be fixed and to implement the appropriate changes in a manner that minimized the inconvenience to the user.

From our perspective the problem was twofold: the way that dates were stored and the way that dates were collected—from data entry screens or from other files. As we entered the nineties we had three groups of clients: 1) System/23 (Datamaster) users, most of which had extensive custom code; 2) System/36 users, most of which were ad agencies that had a lot of common code, but a mixture of custom and standard programs were stored on separate media for each client; 3) a few AS/400 AdDept users; 4) TSI itself, which used a version of the ad agency system on the System/36.

I decided to inform all the Datamaster users well in advance that TSI did not intend to make their code Y2K-compliant. Most of them were not surprised; IBM no longer supported the hardware. However, the sole user at one customer, Regal Men’s Store, begged us to make their system work in 2000. I replied that it would probably be cheaper for them to buy a new system. As it turned out the company went out of business shortly after year end without purchasing a new system.

Fixing each ad agency system would have been a monstrous job of minimal benefit to anyone. By January 1, 2000, their hardware would have been obsolete for a dozen years. So, I sent a letter to each suggesting an upgrade to a small AS/400. Only a few of them took us up on the offer.

We did create a version of the ad agency software for the AS/400 that was Y2K-compliant. Our employees used it for administrative tasks for about twenty years. We had a great deal of trouble marketing it even to the ad agencies that love their GrandAd systems. Fortunately, by 1994 AdDept sales had really taken off, and we did not really care too much about the difficulties of marketing to ad agencies.

The AdDept system had to work perfectly, and the transition must be smooth. We had already promised a number of users that it would be Y2K-compliant. I intended to spend New Year’s Day 2000 watching bowl games, not dealing with Y2K catastrophes.

Why, you may ask, was there even an issue with data storage? That is, why were the dates stored in a format that caused the difficulties in calculations? The answer lies in Moore’s Law, the preposterous-sounding claim that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles roughly every two years. In point of fact, the astounding 41 percent growth rate applied to many aspects of computing—processor speed random-access memory, and the ability to locate and retrieve large amounts of data very quickly.

For TSI’s first handful of years in business the clients stored all of their data and their programs on diskettes with a capacity of only one megabyte¹. Those users crammed years worth of historical data on these thin slices of film. To put this into perspective, consider this photo of an eight-inch diskette:

Storing the simple photographic image shown above requires more than seven megabytes. So, storing a file of the size of this one image—something routinely done in 2021 by cameras, phones, watches, eyeglasses and countless other “smart” devices—would require (using the technology of the eighties) eight diskettes and perhaps an hour of computer time. Much of TSI’s systems were designed in this era in which both disk and memory were precious commodities. Good programmers were always conscious of the the physical limitations of storing and manipulating data. The prospect of a client’s system crashing because it ran out of space for its data was a nightmare to be avoided at all costs. Everything was therefore stored in the most efficient way possible. The idea of using two extra bytes to store the century occurred to almost no one in the early eighties.

I could think of several possible approaches to the storing of data to circumvent the problem of the new century. The four that we considered were:

Replace all of the YYMMDD numbers in every data file with eight-digit YYYYMMDD fields;
Keep the dates the way they were but add a new field to each record with the date in the YYYYMMDD format and use the latter for comparisons, calculations, and sorting;
Add a two-digit century field (filled in for existing data with 19);
Add a one-digit century field (filled in with a 0 for existing data).

Rejecting the first option was an easy call. All of TSI’s systems had hundreds of programs that read fields by their position in the record, not by the field name in the database. If the total width of the fields that preceded the field in question, was, for this example, 50, the program read the six-digit date field beginning at position 51. This was not the recommended method, but it had always worked better for us for reasons that are too wonky to describe here. The drawback was that whenever it was necessary to expand the size of a field, it was also necessary to change or at least check every line of code that read from or wrote to the file. This could be an imposing task for even one field. Since a very large number of files contained at least one date, almost every statement that read, wrote, or rewrote data would need to be checked. If it needed to be fixed—or even if it did not seem to need fixing—it needed to be tested thoroughly with data that contained dates in both centuries. We had no tools for the testing, and every situation was at least somewhat unique.

Attempting this for every date and season field was such a large and dangerous task that the only way that I would consider it was if, at the same time, we abandoned reading and writing by position and replaced it with reading by field name. I thought about it, but I decided that that approach would result in even more work and was only a little bit less dangerous.

I reckoned that the other three methods were roughly equal in difficulty and in the amount of time required for implementation. I eventually decided that the one-digit method would suffice.

There was one additional issue in the AdDept system. The first two digits of the three-digit identified the year. So, it was necessary to add a century field for every file that included the season number as well. The season was a key field² for many files. Fortunately, it did not seem to be necessary to add the century to the construction of any of those keys.

The other issue concerned data entry. Users of TSI software were accustomed to entering dates as a number in the form MMDDYY, the way that dates are commonly written in the United States. The programs validated what had been entered by converting the number into YYMMDD format and checking that each piece was legal. The check for the year normally involved checking to make sure that it was within ten years of the system date. So, every validation routine needed to be changed because the date entered and the system date could be in different centuries.

All of the work was to be done on the AS/400. The first step was to locate all of the files in both the AdDept database and the agency database, which we called ADB, and to add century fields that defaulted to 0 at the end of the files. At the same time, every program that wrote records to these files was found. A peculiarity of BASIC helped us find these programs. BASIC associates numbers with files in each program, and TSI consistently used the same numbers for files. Thus every instance of updating of the job file contained the phrase “WRITE #22”.

A single callable program was written to calculate the century. Its only input was the two-digit year. It was incredibly simple. It set the century to 1 if the year was less than 80 (the year that TSI moved to Connecticut); otherwise it set it to 0. In BASIC it required only two lines of code:
CENTURY=0
IF YR<80 THEN CENTURY=1

This approach will work flawlessly until the program confronts dates that are in the 2080’s. If anyone is still using code produced by TSI when that happens, someone will need to come up with a rule for setting CENTURY to 2. I don’t lose any sleep over this possibility. Yes, you could say that we just kicked the can down the road, but who is to say that roads and cans will even exist in 2079?

A much more time-consuming problem was correcting all of the programs that produced reports or screens in which data was sorted by one of the date or season fields. I set up an environment for the Y2K project that contained both programs and data. Whereas it seemed important to insert the century field into all the affected files as soon as possible, the reports and screens would work fine for a few years and could be addressed one at a time.

I evaluated this part of the project to involve mostly busy work—repetitive tasks with almost no important decisions and no creativity whatever. We had hired a college student to work with us for the summer. I thought that Harry Burt and I could set up the projects for him. Harry, who had experience as a college-level professor, could supervise him and check his work. This method did not work out at all, as is described here, and it used up some precious time.

I may have overreacted to this setback. I decided to make this a very high priority and to assign it to myself. One of the programmers surely could have done it as well as I did, but I did not want to assign it to any of them because I did not want anyone I was counting on to consider their job as drudgery.

So, for several months I spent every minute of time that I could find fixing and testing programs to handle the century fields correctly. A few cases were trickier than I expected, but the coding was completed, tested, and installed before any of our clients started planning for the spring season of 2000, the first occasion that would requir the code.

I am not certain about when this occurred, but at some point I received a letter from, as I remember it, someone in the legal department of Tandy Corporation. It said that the company had received a letter from someone named Bruce Dickens demanding that Tandy pay him a proportion of its gross income every year to license the software that handled the Y2K problem because it must have used the technique of “windowing”, for which he had been issued a patent by the U.S. patent office.

The letter, of which I cannot find a copy, contained a technical description of the term³ as described in the patent and asked me two questions: 1) Did the software that we installed at Tandy use this technique? 2) Would TSI indemnify Tandy Corporation in a lawsuit over its use?

I answered both questions truthfully: 1) “This does not sound like what we used.” 2) No.

Dickens sent demands for payment to all of the Fortune 500 Corporations. He said that if they did not agree, the percentage of income required for the license would be increased.

I have searched high and low to find out how this situation was resolved. I know that the U.S. Patent Office scheduled a review of the patent, but I could not find a report of the outcome. I also could not locate any information about whether any of the companies that he had extorted ever paid anything to him or the company that he reportedly founded, Dickens2000. I doubt it. I found no evidence that he actually sued any of them either.

If I had been asked directly whether any of our code calculated the century using the year, I would have changed the code listed above to remove the IF statement and simply set CENTURY=1 in all cases and then answered “No”. A few months into 2000 employees of the companies that used the AdDept system no longer entered twentieth-century dates on new items, and the programs only used the code to assign a season when new items had been entered.

We did not charge any of our clients for the Y2K fix. A few people told me later that this was a mistake. Since our customers depended upon AdDept, and there was absolutely no alternative system available, we probably could have gotten away with charging them. The companies may have even set aside funds for this purpose. However, all of the AdDept users had software maintenance contracts, and I considered it our duty to keep their systems operational.

1. A bit is a binary storage unit; it has only two possible values: off or on. A byte contains eight bits, which is enough to store any kind of character—a letter, number or symbol. A megabyte is one million bytes, which is enough to store approximately eighteen Agatha Christie novels. However, it is not close to enough to store even one photograph. Videos require vastly more storage.

2. A key is a set of fields that uniquely identifies a record. A well-known key is the social security number. The VIN number on a car is also a key. A zip code is not a key because neighboring residences have the same zip code.

3. The most readable and yet comprehensive description of the windowing technique that I have seen is posted here. The application for the patent, which was granted to McDonell-Douglas in 1998 (long after everyone had decided on the approach to use), was (deliberately?) designed to appear much more elaborate than the two lines of code that we used.

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.

1999 TSI: The Fourth Crisis

Posted on May 25, 2021 by Mike

Jamie Lisella at TSI. Continue reading →

TSI’s fourth major crisis involved my sister Jamie¹. In 1985 Jamie married Joseph Lisella Jr. in Chicago, and they moved to Simsbury, CT. Jamie already had two daughters, Cadie (eight years old) and Kelly (a couple of years younger) from her first marriage. The Lisellas had three children: Gina was born in 1988, Anne in 1989, and Joey (Joseph III) in 1991. My relationship with the Lisella family is described here.

This is the only photo I could find of Jamie from the nineties.

Jamie’s LinkedIn page indicates that she worked at TSI from 1993 to 1999. My recollection of those years is spotty², and TSI’s records from those days are not at hand. So, I have tried to construct a timeline to goad my memory. In 1993 Joey was only two years old. I seriously doubt that Jamie spent many hours per week working for us before September of 1996, when Joey entered the first grade. I honestly do not remember too much about what her role was before that time, and Sue could not remember either.

To tell the truth, this is rather embarrassing. I have never tried to spend time envisioning what other people’s lives were like. Before I started researching this entry it never occurred to me that it was awfully strange for Jamie to be working while she had three children who were that young. I don’t remember her ever talking about baby sitters, but we did not actually communicate much.

In fact, neither Sue nor I could even remember hiring Jamie. There was no interview or anything like that. I seem to remember that she started by coming in to the office to help with the cleaning³.I had little or no interaction with Jamie at work for those first few years.

Doug, Harry, Denise, and a little bit of Sandy.

The three year period of 1996-1999 was the busiest that TSI ever experienced. Denise Bessette, whom I had made a principal and named Vice President of Product Development (as described here), and Harry Burt did the bulk of the programming. Steve Shaw was also working with us for part of that time as a programmer. Sandy Sant’Angelo’s role was to answer the support line, document problems or questions, and direct them to the best person to handle them. She also did a little programming. All of these people are described here.

I spent a great deal of time working on the Y2K issue. I also flew around the country doing demos for prospects and gathering information for specifications from them. I also wrote up the very detailed proposals that we presented to prospects, installed all the new systems, and did almost all the training.

Denise also handled the payroll. I think that we had already started using Paychex during this period.

Doug Pease was in charge of marketing, which, in that period mostly entailed making sure that warm prospects stayed warm, and, once they committed, assuring that all the correct hardware was ordered and installed. He also accompanied me on the sales trips that culminated in demos.

Linda Fieldhouse had been hired to do the books and to help with sales and marketing. I am not sure when she left TSI, but it must have been at that point that Jamie assumed some or all of Linda’s responsibilities. As I mentioned, I am not sure what Jamie had previously been doing. She might have been “helping Sue get organized”. A lot of people auditioned for that difficult role over the years.

In 1999 Jamie was definitely handling accounts payable, billing (including breaking down the long-distance phone charges), posting cash, and closing the books at the end of the month. Most of these had been automated for years, and none was difficult or time-consuming. She also booked the travel arrangements either directly or through our travel agent. We were looking for new office space in 1999, and she spent time on that as well. Her other responsibility was to answer the main phone line, which was used by vendors and prospects as well as the people from the marketing group at Saks Inc.

I often felt like this guy, but I never wore a red tie.

A remarkable thing happened in early 1999. TSI was getting overwhelmed with programming requests. This problem could not be solved by simply hiring more people.⁴ I had ample experience with trying to address the problem of too much work. For the first six months (at least) each new programmer was counterproductive. More time was spent in training, checking, and correcting. There was no pool of “plug and play” workers who could be inserted into to a project. At least I did not know of one. We could not raid our competitors. We were the only company designing and selling administrative systems for large retail advertising departments.

We took two steps to address the problem.

I had to tell Doug not to try to sell any more systems. He could market hardware and the like, but the programmers could not take on any more tasks for at least the rest of the year. He took the imminently sensible step of resigning to seek another position. Much more about Doug’s career at TSI can be found here.
Despite the risk, we also decided to try to hire another programmer. We approached Josh Hill⁵ from Saks Inc. He was an intelligent guy. Josh did not know how to program in BASIC, but he did know as much about how our customers used the AdDept system as anyone did. I have always thought that it was easier to teach someone programming than to teach the intricacies of administering retail advertising.

We arranged for Josh to fly up to Connecticut one weekend in July. He spent a day or two with Denise, who previously did not know him very well. Denise had him take a programming aptitude test. He did not do very well. Denise took the test herself and scored more than twice as high as Josh did. Denise decided to make him an offer, but he turned it down.

At about this same time Jamie approached me with the suggestion that I move out of my house in Enfield and share an apartment with her in East Windsor. I scoffed at this idea. I wasn’t even considering moving out. Even if I did, my first consideration would be my two beloved cats, Rocky and Woodrow. I would also never again live with a smoker. Evidently Jamie was serious about this, and she was insulted that I had dismissed it out of hand. She told me, “I would be a good roommate.”

When Doug resigned from TSI, I told Jamie that she could have his job if she wanted it. I also informed her that he resigned because I told him not to sell any more software systems for the rest of the year, at least. I am not sure that she absolutely rejected the idea of replacing Doug, but she did not accept it either. I got the impression that this did not fit in with her plans. We proceeded with the status quo ante.

By this time Jamie had found a new office for TSI in East Windsor. We all liked it. I had signed the lease, and we were in the process of designing the interior.

Meanwhile, Steve VeZain, Josh’s boss at Saks Inc., had concocted a huge project that he wanted to discuss with us in person. He and Josh flew up to Connecticut to present it. Denise and I met with them and then took them to dinner. The project was a monstrosity. It involved combining the data from all the divisions—without them knowing about it—onto a separate computer in Birmingham so that Steve’s group could do more analysis. We tried to discourage him, but he was adamant that he want us to spec it out and quote it. We agreed to do that much. Steve and Josh must have stayed the night at a hotel and departed at some point the next day.

Shortly thereafter Jamie came into the office on a Saturday. She accosted me at my desk and let me have it with both barrels for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have been yelled at a few times, but this outburst was unexpected and extremely intense.

I did not interrupt her much, and I listened very carefully. I went into debate mode⁵. When she had departed, I immediately made a list of all of the points that she had made. I was quite confident that I had produced a comprehensive list of the items, one of which was that I should tell Denise how she felt.

I don’t claim to remember everything twenty-two years later, but here are the most critical things:

The only positive thing that Jamie had to say was that I had correctly handled the situation with Sue (described here).
Although her complaints touched on everyone except Harry, the main focus was on Denise.
Jamie did not like Denise’s attitude, which was all-business whenever she was at the office. I could understand how Jamie might think that Denise considered herself superior.
Jamie did not understand why I had reacted in the way that I did to Denise’s acceptance of a job offer from another company (details here). I must admit that I surprised myself by the intensity of my reaction.
Jamie was especially upset that she had not been invited to the dine with Steve and Josh. To be honest, it had never occurred to me to invite her. The four of us had worked all day on this project. It seemed natural to continue the talk. I was the president of the company, and Denise would be in charge of marshaling the forces to complete the project, if it came to that. If Jamie had taken over Doug’s job, I might have thought of her. As it was, she was an administrative person with a few other responsibilities. Who invites administrative employees to dine with clients?

I sent an email to Denise telling her that we needed to meet about Jamie before office hours on Monday. Denise came in an hour early. She mostly just listened while I told her all the details. I emphasized that if I had to choose between Jamie and her, I did not consider it a close decision. However, my objective in talking to Jamie was to try to keep her from quitting. Denise and I made a list of things that might make Jamie’s job more palatable. The plan was for me to ask her out to lunch on Monday to talk about it. Denise would not be there, but I assured her that I would never double-cross her.

In those days I did not have an office. My desk was in the computer room. The door to the other section of the office was always open. The doors to Denise’s office were glass. It was not possible to have a really private conversation there.

When Jamie came in for work on Monday, I asked her in private to go to lunch with me to discuss the issues that she had raised. She said, “Lunch? I don’t eat lunch.”

My suggestion was, at least at the time, the way that people in business arranged for a discussion out of the office. I thought that everyone in business knew this. I interpreted her rejection as unwillingness to talk about this with me. Maybe Jamie did not mean that; maybe she had a religious objection to having lunch in a restaurant. If so, should she not have proposed an alternative?

Jamie was also let me know that she was very upset to learn that I had discussed the situation with Denise. When I reminded her that she had told me to tell Denise what she had said, she just gave me the stink eye.

From that moment on the atmosphere in the office was intolerably toxic. Denise avoided dealing with Jamie altogether. A little while later Jamie gave me a letter that said that the circumstances had forced her and Cadie to resign.

That action left us with four programmers, no administrative people, and no marketing people. I could handle the administrative tasks, but I definitely did not want to do them for any longer than necessary. There were many other things that needed my attention. It took us a while to find a good fit for our administrative area, but we eventually did, as is explained here.

I was already prepared for TSI to do no marketing for the next year or so. So, once Eileen took the job, I figured that we were all set for a while.

Within a few weeks two events took me by surprise:

Jamie came over to our house in Enfield and talked to me in the yard. She told me that her husband Joe was “a monster”. She intended to leave him. She was especially furious about something that I did not understand concerning stock in McDonald’s, Joe’s employer at the time. Of course, I asked about the kids. Specifically, I inquired what I could do to help. She said that she wanted her old job back. This shocked me. I told her that that was no longer possible. She did not yell at me; maybe she realized that it was a lost cause.
I learned from Steve VeZain that Jamie had made plans to go to Birmingham, AL, to work for Saks Inc. as the liaison with TSI. He wanted to know if I was OK with that. I told him that we would try to work with anyone.

Many things about the situation made no sense to me. To begin with, I knew Joe Lisella pretty well. He was a Sicilian, and I supposed that some cultural baggage was evident there. He was certainly devoted to his family, and he had a consuming interest in sports. In no way did he seem like a monster to me. Jamie may have seen another side, but how could it take fourteen years and three kids to appear?

Furthermore, if he was a monster, how could she leave him alone with five kids, only three of whom were his relatives? She told me that she hoped to send for them “eventually”. I said that I would pay for air fare for them, and I definitely meant it.

One Saturday or Sunday I was, as usual, alone in the office; I don’t recall what I was working on. Suddenly a thought popped into my head and broke my concentration: “This must have all been about Josh!”

That idea seemed to make everything fit. I knew that Jamie had spent a lot of time on the phone with Josh. We billed Saks Inc. for all of our telephone charges to Birmingham. So, this did not raise a red flag at the time.

Josh had come up to Connecticut to interview with Denise for the programming job. It did not work out. I felt certain that Plan A for Jamie was for Josh to move to New England. In her mind Denise had scuttled this plan by making an insufficient offer. Given Josh’s performance on the aptitude test, I was surprised that Denise had made an offer at all.

Jamie probably thought that Denise also prevented her from attending the meal with Steve and Josh. In fact, she had nothing to do with it. I invited the other three people; I never considered inviting Jamie, and I am almost positive that no one objected.

Later, Joe Lisella informed me that he had discovered a trove of conspiratorial emails between Josh and Jamie. He wanted me to read them. I refused; I told him that I had already figured that angle out. He wanted me to testify in the divorce hearing (or whatever it is called). I said that I couldn’t. I did offer to write a letter listing the facts as I knew them. He was satisfied with that.

In 2001 I received a phone call from a guy at Computer Sciences Corporation. Jamie had applied for a job there and given me as a reference. The man on the phone said that the job involved software support. He wanted to know if I thought that she could do it. I began with a disclaimer that she was my sister. He knew that. I then said that I was not really in a position to make a judgment because that was not what Jamie did at TSI. He tried to get more out of me, but that was my final statement. According to her LinkedIn page, she worked at CSC for two years as a “Technical Analyst II”.

After she left Connecticut for Birmingham, I talked on the phone with Jamie at work a few times. I saw her at the Saks Inc. office at least once. She said hello, but not much else. I sent her birthday presents for a couple of years. I called her when their dad died in 2011, and I tried to convince her to come to the funeral. I even said that I would pay the air fare for her and any or all of her kids. She wouldn’t do it because “it would be hypocritical because he hated me so much.”

We haven’t communicated directly since then.

1. I think that in 2021 Jamie still resides in Birmingham, AL. I am not sure what she is doing there. Her Facebook page is here.

2. I have located most of my emails and other documents from 1999 on.

3. One of my emails from 1999 indicates that Jamie was originally hired by Sue to help clean up the office. The motivation for this was to help her pay off money that Sue loaned her. At the time TSI was a partnership, not a corporation. So, Sue and I were responsible for all financial transactions.

4. A pretty good analogy is that you can’t produce a baby in one month by hiring eight additional women.

5. Josh Hill was still in Birmingham in 2021. His LinkedIn page is here.

6. I don’t mean that I argued with her. On the contrary, I did not argue with her at all. I listened to her as carefully as I did to speeches during my eight years of debating and six years of judging debates. I was very good at this.

1988-2014 TSI: The Programmers

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Mike

Supporters and coders. Continue reading →

TSI’s first, last, and best programmer was Denise Bessette. For three decades she was one of the most important people in my life. More details about her relationships with TSI, me, and the rest of the crew can be found here.

During the years that Denise worked only part-time most of the programming burden fell on my extremely narrow shoulders. By 1987 it had become too much. We needed to hire a full-time programmer. I placed ads in the Hartford Courant and the Journal-Inquirer. It was not a good time to be hiring. The state’s unemployment rate was heading toward a record low of 2.8 percent, and the demand for programmers far exceeded the supply. I understood that a small firm like TSI would be at a disadvantage when competing with giants like the insurance companies. Besides, our office was in a converted barn, and we were not able to offer any benefits to speak of.

Sandy in the kitchen in TSI’s East Windsor Office.

A few people responded to our ad. The only one that I had any interest in hiring was Sandy Sant’Angelo, whose name was Sandy Scarfe when she started at TSI. She had taken a few programming classes. She worked for the Springfield (MA) Public Library system. A major part of her job there was helping to set up the new computerized system for keeping track of the books. This was not very close to anything that we did, but at this point my choices were to hire her or start the recruiting process over. I chose the former.

Sandy turned out not to be a great coder, but she had other traits that I valued highly. She learned how to use the computer systems rather quickly, and if a project was well-defined, and I provided her with a somewhat similar program to use as a model, she was eventually able to save me a little time. What I liked the most about her were her dependability and her attitude.

Harry Burt, Lucia Hagan, Chris Bessette, Sandy, and Denise at the summer outing in Old Saybrook.

Unfortunately, the great bulk of our work in the nineties was quite complicated, and it became more and more difficult for me to find appropriate projects for her. One thing that I had noticed was that she was good at talking to the users at our clients’ installations. She had a cheerful demeanor, and she was pretty good at getting to the bottom of problems.

At the time TSI’s office had two telephone lines¹, a generic number that we published in our promotional materials and a support line that we provided to our clients. I decided that Sandy’s primary responsibility should be answering calls on the support line. If they were simple questions, she could deal with them immediately. Otherwise, she recorded them. At first we kept track of the problems on paper, but soon we devised a simple system for recording them in a database available to all the programmers.

Denise, Sue, me, Sandy, Lucia, and Harry. Chris or a restaurant employee must have taken this photo.

This system worked pretty well. The key question that we asked was whether the problem was holding up the client’s work. If it was, the problem was automatically escalated. In nearly all cases these problems were addressed the same day.

I did not often work closely with Sandy. Actually, no one did. Her telephone voice sounded fine on the other end, but for some reason it really carried inside the office. I had to move her desk away from the programmers’ area.

Although I had hired Sandy, when Denise took over application development, she became the boss of all of the programmers. After a few years, Denise, who knew Sandy’s limitations, decided to eliminate her position. The meeting in which she was the terminated was very hard for me to witness. Sandy broke down and cried. I understood that Denise had made a business decision, but I doubt that I could have done it. By then I thought of Sandy as part of the TSI family. Nevertheless, I never considered overruling Denise’s decision.

Sandy, me, and Harry at the door to the TSI office in East Windsor after a blizzard.

I don’t have a lot of vivid memories of Sandy. She got married after she came to work with us, and she seemed happy. Her attendance record over the years was nearly spotless. She also attended all of TSI’s summer outings and Christmas parties.

I only recall her expressing a strong opinion about one thing. She loved the Harry Potter books. Her endorsement, however, was not sufficient to prompt me to dip my literary beak there.

Sandy was the person who alerted the rest of the office about the attacks on 9/11/2001. Everyone else in the office was shocked at this, but I had spent more time in airports than the rest of them put together. The airport security by that time was unbelievably lax. I had concocted in my mind at least three ways of sneaking a gun aboard a plane. It was also no surprise to me that plenty of people in the world who despised the United States for its arrogant and interventionist foreign policy and its unquestioning endorsement of anything done or said by Israel.

I find it personally embarrassing that I know so little about Sandy, a person with whom I worked for more than a decade. I just let her live her life as she wanted to and expected her to come in every morning. I can never remember her asking for anything.

After assigning Sandy to answering support calls, I reckoned that we needed another programmer. The Internet was still in its infancy, and so the process again involved expensive want ads in the local papers. Before finding someone who fit the bill I hired two different people, neither of whose names I remember.

The first was a woman in her twenties or maybe early thirties who already had programmed in BASIC at another company. I hired her. I was pretty excited about the prospect of working with her. It seemed likely that she might be able to get up to speed in record time. On the first day she appeared in the office at 8:30, TSI’s starting time. I immediately put everything aside to help her understand how we programmed and to go over some of the peculiarities of the hardware and operating systems.

If I had a sick pet, I would also ask permission to go home, but I don’t think that I would quit my job.

At some point she must have received a phone call. It only lasted a couple of minutes; I thought nothing of it. However, just before lunch she told me, “I’m sorry, but this won’t work. My dog is sick, and I need to be with him.” I don’t remember what I replied, maybe nothing.

I immediately initiated another job search. This time I hired a guy in his twenties who claimed to have done some programming for a previous employer. I spent a couple of weeks training him, and he seemed to be making little or no progress. I began to doubt that he had ever written a program, or at least one that did approximately what was required.

I have only a vague recollection of what he looked like or anything about his personality. I do remember that he was into the martial arts and worked out. He was in very good shape.

I probably would have worked with him for another week or two before deciding, but we had a twinax connectivity problem. As is explained here, the individual terminals and PC’s were connected to the server via twinax cabling. Each station was dependent upon the cabling, pigtails, and settings of the other devices on the line. Some of our cables were very long. We ordered these custom-made from a company in New Britain. They were expensive. Moreover, the company needed a little time to make them, and it was located forty or so miles from TSI’s office.

It was an “all hands on deck” situation until we got the situation resolved. Everyone was checking connections. I asked the new programmer to connect one of the cables to one of the devices. I showed him how their were two holes on the “pigtail” and two pins on the end of the cable. The pins, of course, fitted into the holes. Once the connection was made, a cap on the end of the cable could be turned so that it was impossible for the cable to come loose. I honestly thought that it was impossible for anything to go wrong. I had done this many times, and nothing had ever gone amiss.

Those two pins are not supposed to lie flat next to each other.

We spent an hour or so trying to get the line to work, but we had no success. I eventually examined the connection that this new fellow had made. The pigtail was tightly attached to the cable. I unfastened it and looked inside the head of the cable. Both pins were bent at a 90° angle, one to the right and one to the left. They resembled a pair of arms stubbornly crossed on someone’s chest. I would have bet that no one was strong enough to do this. To this day I had no idea how he accomplished this feat.

I was so angry that I had to retreat into Denise’s office for a few minutes so that no one could see me. I decided on the spot to fire him, but I waited until the end of the day to do it.

I thought at first that we would need to order another custom cable. However, we found a spare cable, and with a few adjustments to our wiring scheme, we were able to get the connectivity resumed within a half hour.

Casual Corner’s headquarters as viewed from South Rd. The pond was usually full of geese.

Twice when I advertised for a programmer, I received applications that I could not believe. One was from the lady who was IT director at Casual Corner³, a large retail chain. Their home office was in Enfield. My customary jogging route took me right past their complex. The IT department even had an AS/400! Casual Corner did not advertise much, but with and “in” we might even get an AdDept installation out of it. I tried to contact her, but she never scheduled an interview.

The other guy was retired. He had been an IT director at a large company. He came in and talked with me. He said that he would work cheap. He just wanted to write code. I don’t know whether he would have been a good programmer or not, but my primary interest was elsewhere. At the time we were just beginning to try to work with IT departments, and the process always left me frustrated. I thought that having this guy on TSI’s team might help me learn how managers of IT departments made decisions.

It was a close call, but I decided not to make him an offer.

I think that Steve might be setting up TSI’s F10.

Instead I hired a much younger guy, Steve Shaw. He had been an RPG programmer at Riverside Park⁴ in Agawam, MA. He picked up BASIC pretty quickly, and I was able to give him reasonably challenging projects. I really liked working with him. When he started his coding was a little sloppy, but the quality improved quickly. When I told him this, he seemed slightly insulted.

While he was working at TSI Steve acquired a multi-unit property in Massachusetts. I could not understand why he wanted to be a part-time landlord. To each his own.

Steve was something of a daredevil. He purchased a jet ski while he worked for us. At some point he disclosed that he had been in a motor cycle accident in which he lost a number of teeth. I wrote a little song to cheer him up. My sister Jamie and I performed it for him in the office. It was a smash hit.

I found a copy of the lyrics:

Home, brain, nerve, heart (teeth not in photo).

On corn cobs I’d be gnawin’.
I could graze upon your law-n.
It is my firm belief.
My dentitions would be so neat.
I’d devour piles of roast beef,
If I only had some teeth.
Oh, I could eat a pie.
I’d chew up all the steaks that you could buy.
I’d masticate on pork chops bye the bye.
If you object,
I’ll bite your thigh.
From ear to ear I’d be grinnin’.
Young girls’ hearts I’d be winnin’.
I’d steal them like a thief.
I would floss away my tartar,
and stop actin’ like a martyr,
If I only had some teeth.
Music by Harold Arlen; Words by Mike Wavada

TSI’s Christmas party with the Edward Owen Company at the Nutmeg House: Jamie Lisella, Steve, Doug Pease, Ken Owen, Denise, Sandy, someone, me, someone else.

Steve only worked with us for about four years. I appreciated that he might see it as a dead-end job. However, the work was, I think, potentially very exciting. We were solving problems that no one had addressed before for large corporations that everyone has heard of. I tried to talk him into staying, but there was no way for me to argue that he could ever climb the corporate ladder at TSI. We did not have a ladder.

The next programming hire was Harry Burt², who was almost exactly my age, forty-something. He had a degree in math, and he had programmed in BASIC. He had been a vice president at a bank in Simsbury (I think) that had had closed under fairly suspicious circumstances that did not involve Harry. I hired him and terminated the job search at the end of my interview with him.

Harry mostly did programming projects for us. However, I also assigned him to monitor the work of Fred Pease in the huge Y2K project, which is described here. Fred was a college student who had never had a job before. The plan was for him to work part-time at TSI for the summer. He wanted to set his own schedule. By his own omission he tended to stay up late playing video games. Sometimes he stayed up all night.

That much was OK, but Fred constantly changed his schedule without telling Harry or anyone else. Harry had to ask him every morning how long he was going to work. He usually said “Until 11:30” or “Until 12:30”. The last straw was when he said “Until something-thirty”.

Fred’s work was also slipshod. I decided that I needed to take the project more seriously. If I was going to need to check every program anyway, I decided to do it all myself. Frankly, I did not want to assign such a tedious and unrewarding task to any of my good programmers. I did not want risk losing them. I took it on as a sort of penance; I should have seen it coming back in the eighties.

Sandy and Harry are on the left. Myself (hat), Denise and Chris are on the right. This photo is from our cruise on the Connecticut River.

Harry (who was NOT hairy—I thought of the Fuzzy Wuzzy rhyme whenever I saw or heard his name) was a great fit for TSI for at least a decade. After a couple of years I began to worry that Harry might realize that there was no path for advancement at TSI and decide to look for work elsewhere. After all, he was definitely overqualified for his job.

I decided to give Harry a small percentage commission on our software sales every month. I think that this was probably a good idea. He could see that he was profiting from our delivery of new software.

While he worked for us he also taught college-level math classes in the evenings. At some point in the twenty-first century Harry quit in order to become a full-time teacher . He told Denise, who was his boss, that he was having trouble dealing with the pressure at TSI. The environment did not seem pressure-packed to me, but from my office — even with the door open — I could not hear any conversations.

I liked Harry a lot. For a time we were the only two males in the office, and it was very nice having someone with whom I could discuss a football game. Also, since we were almost exactly the same age, we had many of the same cultural landmarks.

Harry is between Doug Pease and Denise. A little bit of Sandy is visible on the right. I think that this was the day of our Christmas dinner after the trip to Hawaii.

Harry’s best friend was Vinny, his barber. Harry often told amusing stories about Vinnie or recited humorous quotes. I devoted a fair amount of effort to buying appropriate (and usually light-hearted) Christmas cards for the employees. One year I actually found one that featured a barber named Vinny.

Harry had a 24/7 tan. I assume that he went to a tanning studio. He did not seem like the kind of person who would do that, but you never know. One of my proudest achievements was to compare tans with him on my return from Hawaii. For the first and only time, my arm was darker than his.

Denise recruited and hired all of the new programmers who worked in our office in the twenty-first century. By this time we were using Monster.com for hiring. It was cheaper and better than newspaper ads, but it was still a time-consuming practice that tied up TSI’s most productive employee.

Brian Rollet was the first person that Denise hired. I remembered that he started while I was in Hawaii for the sales/vacation in December of 1975 (described here). I brought everyone back souvenirs for the employees. For Brian, whom I had never met yet, I purchased a hula-dancing bobble-head doll.

Brian was an Army vet. In fact, he was Airborne. Had I been doing the hiring, this would have given me pause in two different areas. 1) Why would anyone with a marketable skill like programming ability volunteer for three years in the Army? 2) Why would anyone jump out of a perfectly good airplane?

He also had a pretty long commute. He lived in Ware or Belchertown — one of those towns near the Mass Pike. There is no way to get to East Windsor from that area without driving through Springfield.

Denise was most upset about one of Brian’s most unprofessional traits — dozing off in the afternoon. She asked me what I would recommend. I told her that the obvious solution was caffeine. Who ever heard of a programmer anywhere who did not consume immense amounts of caffeine at work?

Brian, Harry, Denise, and Sandy at Mystic Seaport.

My second choice was to advise Brian to work something out with Harry, who was in the adjoining cubicle. If I were in Brian’s situation, I would have asked Harry to throw an eraser at me whenever he saw me nodding off. That would have worked, wouldn’t it?

When Denise called him on the carpet about it, Brian’s solution was to eat only salads at lunch. That might have helped a little, but Denise finally had to let him go. I don’t think that she was too satisfied with what he produced while he was awake anyway.

She confided to me that she would never again hire anyone who had been in the military.

Denise’s second hire, Michael Davis, worked out much better. He got up to speed very rapidly, and Denise really enjoyed working with him, and she definitely got to depend on him. Unfortunately, he did not stay at TSI very long. He moved to Pittsburgh, where he had family or a girlfriend or something.

The good news was that he liked the work at TSI well enough to work for us remotely for a period after he moved away. So, the transition was not too difficult. Of course, he could not answer the support line from Pittsburgh.

My most vivid memory of Michael was on our summer outing at (I think) Rocky Neck State Park. He took me out on his small sailboat. People from Kansas do not often get opportunities like this. Of course, he did all the sailing. My only job was to duck my head down by my knees when he decided to swing the sail around.

I remember that after Michael had been at TSI for a year or so he decided to buy a new car. Well, not a NEW car, but a NEWER car. He chose a Volkswagen; I don’t remember the model. The few times that I shopped for a car I never considered buying a used one. I would be too afraid that I was just buying someone else’s problems. Nevertheless, Michael seemed satisfied with his purchase.

I don’t remember much about Sean Finnegan⁷. In fact, I had to ask Denise about him. He worked for TSI for two months in 2010. He was apparently a pretty good programmer, but he had difficulty talking with clients on support calls.

Jason Dean⁸ lived in the Springfield area. Before coming to TSI he had worked in Friendly’s IT department. He joined us in October 2007 and was still employed when we closed down the company in 2014.

Denise got along with Jason nearly as well as she did with Michael. She was very satisfied with his attitude and performance.

I did not really get to know Jason too well until Denise started working remotely in 2013. One thing that I quickly learned was that he was a terrific bowler. He had bowled at least three 300 games, which blew my mind. He had quite a few bowling balls. He told me that getting the ball to spin correctly depended on both the surface of the ball and the surface of the lane. So, different balls were needed depending on the condition of the lanes..

I was very surprised to learn that Jason’s bowling balls had only two holes. He did not have a hole for his thumb.

Jason knew my bridge friends Bob and Shirley Derrah from bowling in Springfield.

Jason and his wife were, in my opinion, fanatical about coupons, Groupons, and all other ways of obtaining discounts. They were always shopping for bargains. They switched their cell service from Verizon to T-Mobile to save on phone charges. However, the T-Mobile phones got no signal in their apartment. They got their money back, but it was a big hassle.

Jason had a son when he started working at TSI. His second son was born quite prematurely, and it was touch-and-go for a while, but he pulled through and was quite healthy the last that I knew. The family also had three rescue cats who were too eccentric for my tastes.

In his middle school in Springfield Jason had twice been a spelling champion. He was the only other person whom I have ever met who competed in the national spelling bee.

Jason and his family loved Disney World. They spent every vacation there, and they always stayed in the same Disney hotel. They monitored the situation very closely and always made reservations on the first day that the discounted fares were offered.

Jason had an older brother who lived at home with his parents. He spent most of his time in the basement playing Worlds of Warcraft. Although he had never worked, Jason insisted that he was a brilliant guy. He urged Denise to consider hiring him. I don’t remember the details, but he never came to the office. I am not sure that he could drive.

Jason actually contacted the Dr. Phil show to try to get them do do an intervention to help his brother get out of his shell. His parents vetoed the idea.

Jason and his parents were very conservative. He could not believe that Obama had defeated Romney in 2012. He told me that he suspected that there had been voting fraud, but he readily admitted that he had no evidence.

1. By the time that we moved the office to East Windsor, CT, in 1999 TSI had eight phone lines.

2. In 2021 Harry Burt is teaching math at Naugatuck Community College. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Casual Corner closed all of its stores in 2005. Since then the headquarter building in Enfieldhas been used by Brooks Brothers, which also is now in bankruptcy.

4. Riverside Park was acquired by Premier Parks in 1996, a couple of years after Steve started at TSI. The name was changed to Six Flags New England.

5. Steve Shaw sent me emails a couple of times. In the one in February of 2000 he reported that he was working at the Phoenix, and they had sent him to classes on Websphere and Java. However, we never got together. Because he has such a common name, It was difficult to locate him, but I finally found his LinkedIn page. You can see it here.

6. I think that Brian Rollet lives in the Ware, MA, area in 2021.

7. Sean Finnegan’s LinkeIn page is here.

8. Since TSI closed in 2014 Jason Dean has worked at ESPN as Application Support Analyst III. His LinkedIn page is here.

1998 TSI: The Third Crisis

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Mike

Keeping Denise in the fold. Continue reading →

My recollection of many of the events portrayed below was fuzzy. I was not even certain of the year (1998) or the time of year (autumn) until I found a dated document. Lacking a good way of pinning down the details, I needed to guess at or be vague about some things.

Background: For me the period from 1995 through 1999 was the busiest, most exciting, and most stressful of any that I spent working for TSI. It was also the most potentially terrifying period. Our marketing director, Doug Pease_¹, had hit the mother lode and put us in a position to dominate the market on which I had decided to focus our attention back in the late eighties.

Most large retailers, especially department stores, were organized into divisions, and each division was responsible for its own advertising. So, when a large retail organization decided to name AdDept as the preferred system for advertising, we would usually install a system at each division. In 1998 the May Company,² which at the time had seven department store divisions, had already endorsed AdDept. Doug had also negotiated installations for the three divisions of the Tandy Corporation³ and he convinced the people at Proffitt’s⁴ Marketing Group (PMG) to purchase systems for six of their divisions. In addition to these, Doug had also made headway at several other potential clients such as Elde- Beerman, Gottschalks, and Macy’s West.

In short, TSI’s business was finally booming. The challenge was no longer whether the company could generate enough income to meet the next payroll. The question—and it was a very serious one—was whether we could meet our commitments to all of these new installations, almost all of which required significant custom programming.

There were a few other issues as well. The twenty-first century was approaching. AdDept had been made Y2K-compliant from the outset. We also had produced a version of the GrandAd system for the AS/400 that would work in the twenty-first century. We needed to convert all of the software that we used in TSI’s office as well. These undertakings were labor-intensive and required extensive testing. The details of those efforts are described here.

The company therefore faced tremendous challenges in providing the software and support for commitments that I had already made and for the prospective contracts that were almost certainly imminent. Furthermore, the person who had at that point done most of the AdDept programming, myself, would undoubtedly be devoting much less time to coding in the next few years.

I would be doing all the installations and on-site training. I also accompanied Doug on many sales trips. I gathered all of the requirements for new code and wrote the design documents and programming requests. I wrote all the marketing materials and anything else that needed to be written, as well. I also ran the business and extinguished the most serious fires. Last but not least, I did the great majority of the research on new hardware offerings and new software techniques. I still did quite a bit of coding, but I now relied on the programmers for most of it.

Fortunately, I had a team of all-stars to help. Sandy Sant’Angelo handled the support line, which during the late nineties was nearly always busy. She was quite good at documenting problems and making the customers feel comfortable. The programmers were Steve Shaw, Harry Burt, and Denise Bessette. Steve and Harry were both good programmers, and they were both familiar and comfortable with TSI’s programming standards. However, they had little knowledge of details of the AdDept system or the way that retail advertisers worked and thought. Early in 1998 Steve Shaw surprised me by leaving TSI to take a programming job at the Phoenix Life in Hartford.

Denise was extremely dependable. She was also very meticulous in her work habits and thoroughly familiar with both TSI’s standards and most of the basics of advertising. She told me that she did not want to travel, however. Therefore, I could not use her for any of the trips that I made to clients.

The Known Problem: I always tried to keep the employees—especially the programmers—happy. The work at TSI environment was, I think, generally positive. The company had very few rules. There was no dress code at all, although I expected the employees to spruce up a little when customers came to our office for training. I wrote up a short document that listed what we expected of employees. My door was literally always open.

TSI paid the programmers pretty well, and by the mid-1990’s we had implemented good programs of health and disability insurance and a 401K with matching contributions. Although I felt a great deal of stress during this period, I tried to avoid putting pressure on the coders.

I understood that there was one problem that was inherent to TSI and other small businesses: there was little or no room for advancement. I could reward people for good work, and I could try to make their work challenging and enjoyable. However, it they were ambitious and wanted to climb the corporate ladder, there was not much that I could do. I suspect that this is why Steve quit. Similarly, if they were interested in a position with more responsibility, my options were likewise limited.

I tolerated—and even encouraged—a certain amount of creativity, but after Sue left the office (described here) in 1994. I made all the important decisions. It wasn’t that I liked exercising power. I just reckoned that none of the programmers were interested in managing the business. I would have been happy just to code all day.

As good as the staff was, our upcoming workload was so massive that there was very little room for error. I knew, for example, that Sue and I could not consider another big trip until all the installations were stable, which might take years. I also understood that I had to keep the entire programming team intact if possible. As I have explained in other blog entries, I figured that every time that a programmer quit I lost at least six months of my own productivity between the time spent looking for a replacement, training him or her, and correcting all the mistakes. Furthermore, there was never a good time to look for coders, but 1997—just months before Y2K raised its ugly head—was one of the worst.

Harry and Steve were good programmers, but I knew very well that the key member of the team for the next few years was Denise. Losing her would be a catastrophe that I did not want to contemplate. I probably should have worried more than I did.

TSI’s Telephone System: Each desk at TSI had a unit like the one shown at the left. The company had many phone lines, but no one, not even Doug or I, had a direct line. TSI had two phone numbers that outsiders knew about. One line was dedicated to customers reporting problems or asking questions. That line was answered by Sandy.

The other number was in the phone book and on our letterhead and business cards. We disclosed it to prospects, vendors, and a few others. That line was answered by the administrative person.

There were also two rollover lines. If a caller called either the main number or the support number, and that line was busy, the phone would still ring, but someone at TSI would need to press the flashing button for a rollover line to answer it.

TSI relied on this phone system until the business shut down in 2014. Doug and a few others pressed me to get a more modern system in which each person had her/his own line. A couple of times I priced out these options, but I could see no advantage that was worth spending thousands of dollars. Besides, I liked our phones. In my assessment, they had one overarching advantage. They made it much more difficult for employees to initiate or receive calls from the outside. There was also a fairly strong incentive to keep non-business calls short.

Harry and Denise dressed up for a TSI Christmas party.

Denise Bessette: Denise was the first programmer that Sue and I hired in 1984. The details are posted here. She worked full-time for a couple of years and then part-time for quite a few years while she finished her undergraduate degree at Smith College and then earned a masters degree at Trinity College. In 1993 she became a full-time employee again. We let her use Sue’s office, which was better than her previous location, but it was still less than optimal because Sue never removed all of her junk after she stopped coming to the office in 1994. We also gave Denise a substantial raise. I tried to keep her in the loop on what direction the company was going, but I did not set up any kind of a formal process for doing so. I should have, but I didn’t. My excuse was that I was away on trips a lot, and when I was in the office I was exceptionally busy.

I should emphasize that, even though we had worked together for many years, Denise and I did not have much of a personal relationship. She invited Sue and me to her house in Stafford, CT, for supper once in the eighties. We never reciprocated, presumably because our house was always a mess. I doubt that in all of those years Denise and I had talked about anything besides work more than a handful of times.

During the time that Denise had worked at TSI she had occasionally received phone calls from her husband, her mother, or one of her sisters. She might have received one or two calls from other people. In the fall of 1998, however, even I, who would ordinarily pay little or no attention to such a thing, noticed that she was receiving numerous phone calls from a “friend” named Jackie.

Herberger’s: My most vivid memories of this period were when I was in St. Cloud, MN, the home base for Herberger’s a chain of eleven department stores, 1300 miles away from TSI’s office. At the time I was installing TSI’s AdDept system on a small AS/400 in the advertising department there. A more detailed description of the installation is posted here.

The offices were on an upper floor of this store.

I only visited Herberger’s a few times. The occasion that I remember the most clearly was certainly not my first trip there. It might have been the second or third. I remember that it was rather cold, but the weather did not approach the frigid levels for which nearby Frostbite Falls is famous.

In those days the only way to reach St. Cloud was through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Northwest Airlines sponsored a shuttle service to the St. Cloud Regional Airport⁵. I can’t remember whether on this occasion I took that flight or rented a car and drove. I am pretty sure that I stayed at a hotel that was within easy walking distance of Herberger’s headquarters, which was on St. Cloud’s main drag, St. Gernaine St. I am pretty sure that I stayed two nights and then flew back to Connecticut on the third evening.

The main thing that I remember about my first day there was that I called the office several times to see if everything was all right. This was beyond unusual for me. On most trips, unless I needed help about some problem that I had encountered, I seldom called more than once. I have always hated talking on the phone, even if it was to people I liked. I liked all of TSI’s employees.

I don’t think that I spoke with Denise on any of those calls. However, I got the distinct impression that something was amiss. Although there was nothing particular that provoked alarm, the feeling of impending dread almost nearly overwhelmed me. I desperately wanted to get back to TSI’s office to discover the details so that I could deal with the situation. Of course, this was not possible. I had made a commitment to get the system up and running at Herberger’s, and I could not abandon the project because of a nebulous feeling.

After my first day at Herberger’s I ate supper by myself as usual. I don’t remember where I dined or what I did afterwards. I might have taken a walk. I might have read a book. I might have watched television. I do remember worrying.

I always got very tired after dinner. Every night I took a shower around 9:30 or 10:00 and then went to bed. I sat in bed for a few minutes reading a book. I almost never got through more than one chapter before the letters would begin to swim around on the page. I would then turn out the lights. Normally I was sound asleep within a few seconds.

St. Cloud in 1997 had newer cars, but otherwise it looked just like this.

Not this night. For a few hours I emulated Bobby Lewis—“Tossin’ and turnin'”⁶. I decided to make myself physically tired. There were not many choices available for nocturnal exercise. I dressed and put on my coat and hat. I then walked around St. Cloud for at least an hour. I did not go far. I just walked up and down the streets. None of the buildings seemed to have more than three stories. The only other thing that I remember noticing was a Maytag or Whirlpool store that sold appliances. I had thought that these stores—mainstays of my youth—had gone the way of the dodo, but they evidently still persisted in St. Cloud in 1998.

I eventually drifted back to the hotel and tried to sleep. I probably dozed off for a while before it was time to prepare for work. I remember that I ironed my shirt while I listened to Vivaldi on my CD player through my Bose headphones.

I was running on fumes that day. I chain-drank black coffee to try to remain alert. I took notes on all of the things that the Herberger’s employees said that they needed AdDept to do. I knew very well that Steve VeZain at PMG had already made it clear to me that no custom code would be provided for Herberger’s. Steve said that they needed to adapt to the system that worked for everyone else. I called in to TSI’s office several times on that second day, as well.

I flew back to Connecticut that night in an even worse mood than the foul outlook that these exhausting trips usually produced. On the one hand I was frustrated because the AdDept system did not work the way that the Herberger’s employees wanted it to, and there was nothing much that I could do to help them. They had no clout with PMG. They were, after all, by far the smallest division, and they were on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line. On the other hand I was also very apprehensive about what I would find out when I went into the office the next day.

The Denouement: On my first day back in the office Denise confided that she had been offered a job as IT director at a fairly small company that used an AS/400. I am not sure whether she would have any employees under her or not. Truth to tell, I did not care much what kind of job it was. My sole objective was to take whatever steps were necessary to persuade her to stay at TSI. I also learned that Jackie, as I expected, was a corporate headhunter for an employment agency.

I tried to talk Denise out of accepting the job. I emphasized how important I thought that she was to TSI. She asserted that she was mostly looking for something new. She had been doing mostly the same job for thirteen years.The best that I could get out of her was that she would think about it overnight.

Denise usually arrived at TSI’s office at about 9:00⁷. The morning following our conversation I went outside to meet her in the parking lot. I was extremely nervous when her car finally pulled into the lot. She got out and immediately informed me that she had decided to accept the other job.

I cannot say that I was surprised, but I was still crushed. I couldn’t face going back into the office. So I went and sat in my car and moped. I felt as bad or at least nearly as bad as when Bill Davey and I just missed qualifying for the National Debate Tournament in 1970 (described here) or when Sue abandoned me to go to Alaska in 1973 (described here). No situation in the intervening twenty-three years came close to evoking this feeling.

I had no idea how to deal with this situation. We had mountains of work. I was in no position to take on more of it myself, and I could only squeeze a little more out of Harry. I had made commitments to several clients. I could not select one or two to work on and dismiss the others. They all had deadlines, and they had given us deposits or were long-time clients that I was not prepared to disappoint.

Sitting in the car was not helping. I drove to the Enfield Square Mall, parked my Saturn, went inside, and walked around. At that time there were some benches inside. I rested on one of them every so often. Eventually a plan coalesced in my mind. It seemed like a good idea; I just wish that I had thought of it earlier so that it would not appear that I was being extorted.

That evening I discussed my idea with Sue. I honestly thought that it would be as difficult to persuade her to agree as it would be to convince Denise. I was wrong. She understood the important role that Denise played, and she agreed in principle with everything that I proposed. She also knew that I was miserable.

I located the original written proposal that I presented to Denise. It was somewhat different from what I remembered. Here is what it said:

Denise as Principal:

Denise will have 25% share⁸ in TSI. The three principals will have monthly meetings to go over the results of the previous month vis-à-vis the business plan and discuss other issues. The 25% share will entitled her to a presumptive bonus of 25% of the profits after employee bonuses and SARSEP contributions. Denise will give up her commissions.
Denise will be given a budget of $125,000 for fiscal 1999. She will have six objectives:
1. Do what it takes to bring our staff up to strength.
2. Work with Doug to come up with a profitable and sustainable business plan for current products: fee schedules for programming and support, etc. The deadline for this is April 1, 1999.
3. Come up with a concrete plan for TSI’s next software (or whatever) product. The plan should include recommendations about whether it should be done inside of TSI-AdDept or in another milieu. The deadline for this is September 1, 1999. TSI will pay for necessary travel. Mike has several frequent flier round-trips to use.
4. Come up with suggestions to ease tension and make work fun for everyone. This involves removing the “Wag the Dog” orientation we now have.
5. Implement remote dial-in support and a LAN (TSI will pay for the hardware).
6. Get someone AS/400 certified or figure a way around it.
Suggestion: Use part of the budget to hire Steve back in a new position. I would like to get five man-days of programming/support from the two of you, but this won’t work if there is not a firm system in place to guarantee freedom from support calls. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to work from some other location (which requires remote dial-in support).

I met privately with Denise on the following day. She was stunned by the offer and very impressed. However, she had already made a commitment to the other company. Moreover, there was another employee at the other company whose fate was somehow linked to Denise getting hired. I don’t remember the details. In any event Denise accepted my offer, I got our lawyers to make it legal, and she called the other company and Jackie. Neither was pleased.

This the first page of TSI’s revised stockholders agreement.

When I spoke with Denise, I made it clear that the monthly meetings would actually include Sue only if Sue insisted on attending, which I doubted would happen often. When we actually distributed annual bonuses, we gave Sue a minimal one and split the profits 50-50. The “concrete plan” became A^xN. I do not recognize the “Wag the Dog” reference, but within a year the company moved into a new office in East Windsor with a remarkably different atmosphere (as described here). The “someone” who became AS/400-certified⁹ was myself (as described here). Denise did not hire Steve Shaw back. Instead she hired Brian Rollet, who was something of a disappointment to her.

Denise and I worked together amicably and productively for another sixteen years. If she had not agreed to my plan, those years would have been been much less pleasant for me. I don’t know if I could have achieved half of what we accomplished together.

1. Much more about Doug Pease can be read here and in many of the blog entries about clients that he persuaded to purchase AdDept in the nineties.

2. TSI’s involvement with the May Company at the corporate level is posted here.

3. TSI’s dealings with Tandy Corporation are detailed here.

4. In the nineties Proffitt’s Inc. purchased all of those chains and turned them into divisions. After it purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, which already used AdDept, it changed its name to Saks Inc. TSI’s relationship with this company is described here. Separate blogs describe the individual divisions.

5. In 2021 this shuttle is no longer in operation. The only commercial flights from STC are on Allegiant Airlines. There are only two potential destinations—Fort Meyers/Punta Gorda and Phoenix/Mesa. Residents who want to fly anywhere else must somehow get to Minneapolis. Northwest Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and was acquired by Delta in 2008.

6. You can listen to the number 1 single on the Billboard chart for all of 1961 here.

7. Denise asked for this allowance when her son was young. It gave her time to get him off to school or wherever else he was headed. She also had a fairly long drive to Enfield and even longer to East Windsor. She often stayed late.

8. When TSI incorporated in 1994, Sue was given 45 percent of the stock, and I got 55 percent. The revised agreement left me with 40, Sue with 35, and Denise with 25.

9. IBM had implemented a new requirement for business partners. Not only did the software need to be certified, but also someone at each company must be certified by passing a test that was sales-oriented and a test that was more technical. I took both of these tests, as is described here.

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Tag Archives: Burt, Harry

1991-1999 TSI: Addressing the Y2K Issue

1999-2014 TSI: Administrative Employees in East Windsor

1999 TSI: The Fourth Crisis

1988-2014 TSI: The Programmers

1998 TSI: The Third Crisis