1999 TSI: The Fourth Crisis

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
Josh Hill.

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.

TSI’s space was on the 2nd floor.

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.

My view.

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.

No to all of them.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
He doesn’t look Sicilian.

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.

1994 TSI: The Second Crisis

The I in TSI comes to stand for Incorporated. Continue reading

This entry requires quite a bit of background.

When we were still living in Detroit, Sue Comparetto founded TSI Tailored Systems as sole proprietor. I helped her occasionally in the early days, but for the most part she did it alone. She never had any employees or, as far as I know, a business plan. She inherited a handful of accounts from her former employer. At first she had an office in Highland Park, a small and dangerous city surrounded by Detroit. Then, when TSI somehow obtained an IBM 5120 computer, she set up shop in the spare room in our house in Detroit.

Having the computer in Detroit allowed me to learn BASIC. Having access to the programs and listings from AIS, the company that wrote most of the software that Sue supported, allowed me to learn how business programs could be structured. We were self-taught. I had taken exactly one college-level programming class at Michigan in 19661; Sue had none. Neither of us had ever taken an accounting or marketing class. In fact, neither of us had ever even sold or helped market anything.

The partnership’s logo as it appeared on the first set of ring binders.

When we moved back to Connecticut, Sue registered TSI as a partnership. We worked together, but we never really agreed on who was responsible for what. I considered myself much better at programming than Sue was. I therefore expected to do the bulk of the coding (including software for TSI to use) and for her to handle nearly everything else. The way I thought of this was: she does the phone stuff; I do the computer stuff.

The first additional task that I felt obliged to take over was marketing. In Detroit Sue had never needed to find new clients. She was given a bunch of them, and she hoped that IBM would provide her with additional leads. When we moved back to Connecticut, however, we lost the ties with the Detroit IBM office, and it was difficult to make new arrangements. We had only a few clients and lousy credentials.

I copied company names and addresses from the Yellow Pages.

We scrambled to get a few custom programming jobs. I did nearly all the design, coding, implementation, and training. I pulled together a mailing list from phone books at the library and wrote letters to businesses that I thought might be interested in systems designed for our clients. We never made a lot of money this way, but it did generate some business. Eventually, IBM also gave us some leads.

We hired a receptionist/bookkeeper, Debbie Priola, and a programmer, Denise Bessette. The former freed up time for Sue almost immediately. The latter consumed quite a bit of my time for a couple of months, but eventually she helped a lot. Unfortunately, she decided to return to college and cut back on her hours at TSI. More details about the early years of TSI can be read here.

Enjoyable but frustrating.

Both Sue and I found most of the decade of the eighties to be enjoyable but frustrating. The programming was fun and very challenging. Almost all of TSI’s customers appreciated our approach. However, we never came up with a good way of monetizing our efforts. The ad agency system, GrandAd, did better than the “anything for a buck” approach that we had been forced to use in the beginning. However, our market was effectively limited to agencies that were within driving distance and were too large for a PC system. In that reduced market, it was difficult to make enough sales to get by. Eventually there were so few reasonable prospects remaining that a change in strategy was essential.

I was convinced that our future lay in selling AdDept to large retail advertisers across the country. There was no real competition, and there seemed to be a good number of prospects.

What about “sell”?

I don’t think that Sue agreed with this change in focus. She had always favored local businesses over large corporations when purchasing something, and I am pretty sure that she also preferred dealing with smaller businesses over dealing with corporate executives. The fact that both of our first two AdDept clients declared bankruptcy and left us with tens of thousands of dollars of noncollectable invoices reinforced her attitude.


Sue had always been a night person. I was the opposite. I always was out of bed by 5AM or earlier. I usually became very sleepy around 9:30PM. I then took a shower and read a few pages of a book in bed. I was almost always asleep within a minute or two of turning off the lights. I stuck to this routine for decades, and I still do in 2021.

At some point in the eighties Sue developed a sleeping problem. She liked to watch late-night television, but she almost always dozed off in her chair. She slept very fitfully, waking up with a start and then falling back asleep. This went on for a long time—months, maybe years. Finally she went to a doctor. He prescribed a sleep study. It was not a surprise that it confirmed that she had sleep apnea. For reasons that I have never understood Sue was reluctant to purchase and then use the sleep machine. The models sold in those days were big, expensive, and ungainly. Even so, breathing well while sleeping is critical to good health.

I suspect strongly that this long period in which she was not getting enough oxygen when she slept impaired her performance at work and elsewhere. She regularly came in to the office late—very late. She was late for appointments. She missed appointments all together. The books were never closed on time. She repeatedly put off providing the accountant with tax information, even though the company’s operation was not a bit complicated. There were many other issues, but the worst thing, from my perspective, was that she made employees call the people with whom she had appointments in order to make excuses for her.

To the best of my knowledge none of the people whom I listed relapsed even once.

In 1987 or 1988 Sue gave up smoking. At almost exactly the same time, Denise did, too. So did Patti Corcoran, Sue’s best friend, and, halfway across the country, my dad. This was like a dream come true for me. I had never taken a puff, but for years I had worked in smoky offices and had taken Excedrin for headaches. When TSI’s office was declared smoke-free, my headaches went away forthwith, and they never returned.

Sue, in contrast, had a very difficult time quitting. She put on quite a bit of weight, which amplified the sleep apnea problem. She was also more irritable at work and at home.

I must mention one other factor: Sue never throws anything away. Okay, if it has mold on it, or it is starting to stink, she will discard it. Otherwise she stuffs things for which she has no immediate use in bags or boxes.

When I first met Sue, she was renting one room in the basement of someone’s house. It was not cluttered at all. She seemed to have no possessions except a water bed, a record player, and a few albums. By the early nineties we had a house of our own with two rooms that had no assigned function, a garage, an attic, and a full basement. All of them soon became full of junk. Both of our cars had to park outside because the garage was wall-to-wall miscellany.

TSI’s headquarters in Enfield was nearly as bad. Sue’s very large office was the worst. Strewn about were boxes and paper sacks full of correspondence and memorabilia. Her desk was always completely covered, and post-it notes were everywhere.

In the rest of the office stood several file cabinets. Of course, every business must retain records, and one never knew when the company might get audited. It was also critically important to maintain good records about contacts with clients and prospects, and our business, in particular, needed up-to-date listings of programs, which we had by the thousands. So, we had a lot of important paperwork.

No more mainframe announcements, please.

However, in TSI’s office could be found many other things, which by any measure were totally useless. One day I undertook to throw away the announcements that we constantly received from IBM about its products. These documents formed a stack about four feet high. 90 percent of these missives were about mainframe products. There was absolutely no chance that we would ever work with any of these machines. Even the remaining ones (all of which I intended to keep) were seldom of any value because the information might have been contradicted by a subsequent notice.

Sue asked me what I was doing, and I told her. She immediately got very upset and even started to cry. She just could not stand for anyone to make the decision to discard anything that she considered hers. I realized at that moment this was a reflection of a very serious problem. I put all the notices back in the file cabinet.2


1994 was a good year for J2P2, too.

1994: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

The business was finally taking off. Our new salesman, Doug Pease, was demonstrating that he was ideal for the job. The nationwide retail recession had ended. The retail conglomerates with money (or credit) were gobbling up smaller chains, and in most cases this worked to our advantage. We were approaching a position in which we need not ever worry about competition. Most of us were working very hard, but we were getting new clients, and it was exciting.

The problem was Sue. She was hardly involved in any of this at all. Her behavior was becoming really unprofessional. Doug complained about her often. She kept hiring assistants, and they kept quitting. I could not find out where we stood financially because our books were so out of date.

On a couple of occasions I was stretched so thin that I asked Sue to take trips to clients for me. I did not think that technical expertise would be involved. I just needed someone to find out what the users needed. The first one was to Macy’s East in New York. Sue never told me what happened, but the people at Macy’s told me years later that they had made voodoo dolls representing her and stuck pins in them.

The other trip was to Foley’s in Houston. Sue flew all the way there and then realized that she had brought no cash. Her credit cards had all been canceled by the issuers. Fortunately, she had a checkbook, and Beverly Ingraham, the Advertising Director at Foley’s, cashed a check for her.

In May of 1994 Sue and I took a very important road trip to Pittsburgh. We met with Blattner/Brunner, an ad agency (described here), and Kaufmann’s, a chain of department stores (described here). Both of these sessions went quite well. When we returned to Enfield, I was required to spend a lot of time working on the proposal for Kaufmann’s. It was the most complicated and difficult one that I had ever done, and if I did not do a good job of analyzing and estimating the difficulty of each element, we could suffer for this for years.

So, I asked Sue to follow up on Blattner/Brunner while I was working on Kaufmann’s. Sue had been there for the session in Pittsburgh. There was no one else I could turn to. She completely fumbled the ball. I was quite angry, but I knew that it would do no good to nag her about it.

On the other hand, I appreciated the fact that she was the founder of the company. These opportunities never would have happened if she had not started the ball rolling back in Detroit.

The day finally came when I just could not take it any more. I told her to go home and not to come in to work any more. There was no argument and no tears. She told me that I was making a big mistake and just left.

No one else thought that it was a mistake.


Within a day or so I approached Sue with the following arrangement: TSI Tailored Systems Inc. would be registered as a Chapter C corporation.

I would be president and have 55 percent of the stock, and Sue would would be treasurer with 45 percent. We would hire a new accountant to handle the corporation, and the bookkeeper would report to me. It would be my responsibility to make sure that the books were closed on time, and the taxes were paid on time. I would also do our personal taxes. We would fund the corporation with the difference between our accounts receivable and our accounts payable. If it needed cash (as it did a few times), I would loan as much as necessary to the corporation at a reasonable interest rate.

Sue was not happy about it, but she agreed to this. She did not even argue about the salary amounts that I set.

Amazon sells these.

Our new accountant’s name was Sal Rossitto2. He guided us through the transition. He advised us to set up an Limited Liability Company3, but I insisted on a true corporate entity that issued stock to its owners.

Setting up the new corporation was fairly straightforward. We had to open a new bank account. I found it to be a fairly simple matter to close the books every month within a day or two of the end of the month. We also set up a 401K with matching funds, a profit-sharing plan, and a good health and disability insurance plan from Anthem. None of this was difficult.

I am not sure who took over handling of the payroll after Sue left. TSI eventually hired Paychex to do it. Denise collected the time cards from the employees and submitted the requisite forms to Paychex.

Our accountants loved our Nov. fiscal year. They could work on our taxes in a less busy season.

I made one very good decision. We set our fiscal year to run from December 1 through November 30. We paid bonuses and made contributions in November. This gave all the employees the entire month of December to spend or save for tax purposes.

Dissolving TSI was a much more complicated task. Sue and Sal met often over the course of several months to unravel issues in the partnership’s books. I remember, among other things, some kind of ugly situation with regard to sales tax in California regarding the way that the installation at Gottschalks occurred. At the end of this process Sal confided to me that he now understood why I wanted to set up a real corporation.

The new logo as it appeared on invoices and letterhead.

We also ordered new letterhead. Ken Owen worked with me on the logo. I eliminated the stripes and the lean of TSI. The color around the TSI was pure blue. The colors to the left of that block went from a very light blue gradually darker almost to pure blue. The effect worked better on the computer screen than it did when printed.

For me the most important thing was to reestablish blue as the company’s color. It started with a light blue as shown at the top of the page, but over the years it had somehow evolved into something that was more green than blue. I hated it.

The next few years were boom years for TSI. I worked my tail off, and my travel schedule was a killer. I didn’t care. We had finally turned the corner, and the future looked very bright.


Life at home, however, was very difficult. Sue was obviously unhappy. She probably thought that I intended to dump her. I still loved her; I just did not want to work with her any more. I was quite sure that the company would do better without her.

displayed no interest in finding a job. This surprised me. She had had quite a few jobs since I met her. She really liked a few of them. She could summon up a great deal of enthusiasm about new projects, and she loved meeting new people. I could think of several occupations that she would fit very well.

Instead, she leased some space in an old office building in a questionable part of downtown Springfield, MA. She then fixed it up and rented it out to dance teachers who needed a place to give lessons. I don’t know how much of our money she lost on this venture. I am not sure that she even kept records of it. She certainly didn’t ask my opinion about it.

On weekends we still drove to Wethersfield to visit our old friends, the Corcorans, regularly. That helped quite a bit.

At one point Sue awarded herself a vacation. She drove to New Orleans to see a guy that she knew from high school who was into social dancing. She stopped at some other places along the way. I never asked her about what happened on this trip. When she returned she did not offer any details.

Eventually things got a little better. After the trip to Hawaii (described here) in December 1995 the situation became more tolerable for both of. At least we had some money to spend and save for the first time ever in our relationship.


1. The course that I took as a freshman at U-M taught a programming language that was unknown outside of Ann Arbor. It was called MAD, which stood for Michigan Algorithm Decoder. We wrote our programs on 80-column punch cards.

2. Perhaps you are wondering why I gave in without an argument. It was because I recognized quite early in our relationship that Sue was expert at playing the “Why don’t you …? Yes, but …” game described by Eric Berne in his best-selling book Games People Play. A pretty good write-up of the “game” is posted here. This is also the reason that I did not press her about the sleep apnea.

2. Sal Rossitto died in 2002. His obituary is here.

3. The purpose of an LLC is to protect the “members” from being personally responsible for debts and obligations undertaken by the company, but it is not as completely separated as a true corporation.