2005-2010 TSI: For Sale?

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Mike

A long, bitter, expensive exercise. Continue reading →

Documentation: I found a folder that contained a large number of documents concerning the attempt to sell the company. Some of them were in legalese, and some were very long. In most cases when they were germane to the story, I have included links to pdf files posted on Wavada.org.

I did not find any emails or notes about meetings. I have therefore needed to rely on my memory, which never had infallibility attributed to it at the First Vatican Council or anywhere else.

The plan: I had often thought about selling TSI, but I could never visualize how it could happen. In 2005 my partner Denise Bessette (introduced here) mentioned in one of our private meetings that she was interested in trying something different, perhaps in academia. We decided to investigate the possibility of selling the business. We were by no means desperate to do so. We were both earning six-figure salaries in those days. So, we were not going to forgo them unless the money was good. Also, we had a substantial backlog of profitable approved projects, and a new product, A^xN, that was doing better than we had expected.

We agreed on two primary criteria for any sale. Denise would not be an employee of the new company after she sold her shares. Since I could not imagine why anyone would want TSI without both of us, the second criterion was that my role in the company after the purchase would be temporary.

From the outset I was skeptical of the likelihood of selling the company under those circumstances. It seemed to me that unless there were some demonstrable synergy between either AdDept or A^xN and a prospective buyer’s product or service, I could not see the value of what would be left of TSI after both criteria were imposed.

I had informed my wife Sue, the other share-owner of TSI, that we were planning to explore selling it. When I told her that we hoped to get over $1 million for it, she was all for the idea.

Retaining a broker: Somehow we determined that it was necessary to engage a business broker to help us find a buyer. The fact that we had experienced very little success working with third parties other than IBM contributed to my pessimism. Nevertheless, I composed a very long letter that we sent to a few brokers who specialized in businesses like ours, or at least they did not specialize in much larger companies or vastly different industries. I do not remember where we obtained a list of appropriate brokers.

I have posted here a copy of the one that we sent to Steve Pope in March of 2007. He was not the first person to whom we mailed the letter. Here is a list of the brokers that we mailed to:

The first letter was sent to William Gunville², the president of Successions, Inc., in East Weymouth, MA, on March 31, 2006. I found no evidence that he or anyone at his company responded.
The second letter, sent on the same day, went to Kerry Dustin³ of the Falls River Group in Naples, FL. There is no indication that he responded either, but the file does have TSI’s financial statement dated April 8 in three different formats.
On April 28 I mailed four letters. The first went to Merfeld and Schine, Inc., in Boston⁴. We must have had some subsequent communication with them. I have a copy of a blank agreement that someone at the company evidently sent to me in August.
I do not remember ever conversing with Matthew Lerner of Newport Acquisition Services⁵ of Columbia, MD.
No one from the Catalyst Group⁶ in Boston responded to the letter.
The last of the April letters went to the Corum Goup, Ltd.⁷ in the state of Washington. I remember one telephone call that might have been with someone from Corum. The gist of it was that even though we might have found a niche that provided the principals with comfortable incomes, that did not mean that anyone would be interested in buying the company. The man on the phone said that this was quite common. This, of course, confirmed what I had previously thought. This same person also said that the most likely company to be interested in purchasing us would be a competitor. The fact that we had no real competition was therefore a disadvantage!
On May 2 I sent a letter to Bob Capozzi of VR Business Brokers⁸ of Milford, CT. If he responded, I have no record of it. He might have told us that we were too small for his company. Several brokers told us that.
On March 31 of 2009 I mailed the same letter to Robert Meyers of Marshall Business Brokers in Bloomfield, CT. By that time we had worked with Steve Pope for two years. We must have felt that we could do better.

Of all the firms that we contacted Steve Pope was the only person who thought that he could help us sell the business. We met with him a couple of times and talked to him over the telephone quite often.

We signed an agreement with him that cost us $1,000 per month for two painful years. I have posted a copy of it here. Note that our asking price was $1.5 million.

Both Denise and I found Steve to be pretty easy to work with, and he provided us with a great deal of useful information. We did not know what we were doing when we started this process.

At the time his last name seemed an unbelievable coincidence. For the previous three years I had been researching the history of the papacy (detailed here) in hopes of getting my ideas about the popes published.

The valuation: Steve insisted that we hire an outsider to undertake a professional valuation of TSI. He recommended a man named George Abraham⁹ and provided us with a write-up of his credentials and approach, which I have posted here.

We had to put together materials for him. Almost all of the information came from our general ledger. This cost us several thousand dollars and, in my opinion, was worse than worthless. It was obvious to me that he had just run information from our G/L through a software program that basically took the retained earnings and added the value of the fixed assets. Our fixed assets were minimal, and, as a closely held company, we had distributed nearly all of our profits at the end of every year. So, he concluded that our company was worth very little.

We considered the value of our company to be in its client list, the relationships that we had established with the clients, the strength of our staff, and the fact that the clients were totally dependent on us. None of this appeared in the valuation. When I complained about this, Mr. Abraham said that all of that was considered “good will”. He could increase it, but the first thing that any prospective buyer did with a valuation was to discard or at least disparage the portion that was attributable to good will.

I felt as helpless in this situation as I did when I had to fill out a “Request for Proposal” form designed by a consultant to use to assess potential software solutions. Those forms seldom allowed me to highlight the parts of our system that would help the prospective client the most. In the same way the valuation was going to be the first thing that a prospective buyer would see, and it did not allow us to highlight what was good about TSI.

Nibbles: TSI rented box #241 at the post office in Warehouse Point for communication that we might receive from Steve or from anyone else involved in the project. I went there every couple of days, take the junk mail out of it, and throw it in the recycle bin. I very seldom brought anything back to the office.¹⁰

I remember that a couple of times over the next few years Steve tried to connect us with people who might be interested, but nothing came of any of these exchanges.

I found four documents in which I answered questions about TSI’s approach. The first was a letter that I sent to Steve on January 31, 2008, about the alleged obsolescence of the AS/400, which by then had undergone a few name changes. I have posted it here.

I also have posted answers that I provided to many very detailed questions to people that I don’t remember named Peter, James, and Len. The first two were dated February 4, 2008. The last one was sent on March 14, 2008.

Denise and I were encouraged at first, but after a few months we began to hear less and less. Steve still called once in a while, but there were no prospects who could be considered even lukewarm.

The buyer: Steve told us in early 2010 that an “entrepreneur” from St. Louis who had bought and sold several companies was interested in buying our company. His name was Tim Finney.¹¹

Denise and I had a conference call with him and Steve in early March. Evidently we did an abbreviated demo of our systems via Webex.¹² I don’t remember the details, but I found a letter that Tim sent to us on March 15 (beware the Ides of March!) that provided a fairly detailed analysis of what he was willing to pay us for our stock in TSI. It has been posted here. The important features were:

The total purchase price was $1,000,000 for 100 percent of the stock.
We would need to pay capital gains taxes on this amount.
I would work for another two years at a salary of $95,000. He would have the option of extending this another two years if “Tim and Mike agree that the business can or can not sustain itself at that time based on Tim’s progress with the software code/business.” In any case Mike would work for two months for nothing.
Denise would work for two months for nothing.

We were very interested. On May 7 Tim sent us a confidentiality agreement, which Denise, Sue, and I signed and returned to him. The confidentiality agreement has been posted here.

Tim sent the Letter of Intent a few days later with the specification that the closing would be by July 15, or earlier if possible. I made it clear every time that I talked with anyone involved that I needed for this either to be completed before August or postponed until September. Sue and I had scheduled a trip for August 8 through August 21.

The signed LOI has been posted here.

Tim made a trip to Connecticut in early June after the LOI had been signed. I discovered an outline of what I wanted to say to him. It is posted here. Denise and I met with him on a Saturday or a Sunday. I remember two things from that visit, which seemed to go very well. The first was that Tim said that he had purchase several companies, and had resold most of them. One that he was still holding was a software company, and he mentioned some sort of difficulty with it. The other memorable event was the surprising statement that he would have no difficulties with his banks. He claimed that he had great relationships with all of them. I only had two banks, and no one at either one had any idea who I was.

Both of these should have been red flags. I was already dreading needing to work for Tim for two or four years. If he already had trouble with other coders in a similar position, it might be even worse than I had imagined, and I already imagined myself being screamed at over the telephone on a regular basis,

His mention of the banks made it clear that he had not yet obtained the financing. I should definitely have called a halt to proceeding any further until he had lined up the money. It was a rookie mistake.

The office of Andros, Floyd & Miller in Hartford.

The lawyer: Back in April Denise and I could understand that we might be in over our heads. We asked our accountant, Tom Rathbun, if he knew of any lawyers that could help us in dealing with a prospective buyer for our business. He recommended that we contact Mark La Fontaine of the law firm of Andros, Floyd & Miller. We contacted him, and he sent us an engagement letter on April 5 that stated that his billing rate was $300 per hour. He waived the retainer fee.

Denise and I drove to his office one afternoon in April. We explained our situation to him. For some reason he was most concerned about Sue’s status with the company and the fact that she was part of our group health insurance. He strongly advised us to remove her from the group. I disagreed with his assessment. I was quite sure that I could defend our approach if someone accused us of fraud.

Mark explained the process of selling the company. I did not think that I got $300 worth of advice out of the meeting. I just had to hope that he would be worth the money when the exchange of paperwork got more intense. I am pretty sure that we provided Mark with a copy of the Letter of Intent. I don’t recall whether he had asked us if Tim had said in writing that he had lined up sources for the financing.

On May 20 Tim sent me forty-one “due diligence” questions. They are posted here. I wrote up answers, and Mark reviewed them. I then sent them to Tim together with the necessary attachments on May 24. The answers are posted here. Bring a lunch; it has eleven pages and several attachments that I did not post.

A second set of twenty-one questions came on May 28. They are posted here. My answers and supporting documentation was sent on June 2. They are posted here.

The third set of ten questions arrived on June 17. These, which were more personal than technical, are posted here. By this time I was getting very antsy about whether this process could be completed before Sue and I departed for our vacation in Russia. The file of answers has the same date and is posted here. Since all my answers were reviewed by Mark or his staff, one of the dates must be wrong.

I remember one after-hours telephone call that I had with Tim. I have always hated telephone calls, and I had been spending an inordinate amount of time writing up very detailed answers to his questions. He told me that I sounded like I had “seller’s remorse”. I explained that what he heard in my voice was my lifelong aversion to negotiating over the phone.

On Thursday, August 5, Tim finally sent to me and Mark the purchase agreement (here), promissory note (here), stock pledge (here), and employment agreement (here). I immediately called Mark’s office and left word that I was leaving for vacation on Sunday and would be back in the office on Monday, August 23. Nothing was to be done until they heard from me. I asked Denise to keep me apprised of any developments, but I warned her that I was not confident about how reliable my access to the Internet would be.

The documents were long and complicated. However, they appeared to my untrained eyes as pretty much in accord with the LOI. My obligation, which previously had consisted of a definite two-year commitment and another tentative two-year commitment had been changed to a definite three-year commitment.

Russia: For many months Sue and I had been planning to take a river cruise in August in Russia from St. Petersburg to Moscow (described in great detail here). Because the arrangements had been made in conjunction with our friends, Tom and Patti Corcoran, postponing the trip was never a serious consideration. I had put in a lot of effort to get the most out of the trip including spending a lot of time trying to remember the Russian that I had learned in the sixties. I even downloaded a set of flash cards for Russian vocabulary from the Internet. I used them for at least an hour per day.

I was very excited about the prospect of seeing both the major cities of Russia as well as a little bit of the vast territory between them. I was happy that the deal with Tim seemed to be nearing consummation, but I did not like the fact that I would be on a ship in Russia while the unsigned documents were in Hartford and St. Louis.

Viking Surkov is now known as Viking Helg.

On day #11 of the cruise, Thursday, August 19, our ship. the Viking Surkov, was docked on the northern edge of Moscow. I was scheduled to take a bus tour to Sergiev Posad, which had been outrageously described to us as the Vatican City of the Russian Orthodox Church. Before breakfast I had made my way to the center of the ship, where the Internet service was the closest to tolerable. My journal has only this brief description: “I had just enough time to download my e-mail messages. A couple of the work-related ones were rather disturbing, but there was not much that I could do about them.”

The disturbing messages were from Denise. Evidently Tim’s lawyers had been communicating with Mark about details of the agreement throughout my absence. That was disturbing enough, but Tim himself had contacted Denise and had told her that his bankers had been questioning some aspects of the deal. He wanted to rewrite the purchase agreement. I was astounded to learn that the bankers were still involved. I thought that surely he must have shown his plans to them before he sent them to the lawyers and then to us. What in the world was going on?

Tim’s new plan: I don’t have any documentation of the new plan that I had to deal with when I returned to work, but I am pretty sure that I remember it in some detail. He proposed to buy only Denise’s 25 percent of the shares immediately. Sue and I would still be majority owners. I would hire him as marketing director at a salary of $50,000 per year. In three years he would buy the remaining shares if we had met the sales objectives that we had outlined. They are posted here.

I considered this proposal laughable:

Sue and I received nothing.
Since the business was not being sold, Steve Pope received nothing except salary cuts.
He wanted me to let my most valuable employee go and voluntarily terminate a relationship that I had worked hard to cultivate.
My new partner would be someone with whom I was dreading working.
TSI’s new marketing director had no credentials and no ties to either of our target markets.
He wanted to set his own hours and work from home.
If (actually when) the plan failed, it was still my responsibility.
Sue would kill me if I agreed to this.

I tried to explain why this was a non-starter. I don’t think that Denise would have agreed anyway, but our agreement with her prohibited her from selling her shares privately.

I made one more trip to St. Louis to try to persuade him. Denise thought that it was a waste of time and money, and so I had to pay for it myself. Tim picked me up at the airport in his snazzy Lexus sports car and drove us to his house/office in Chesterfield, MO. I tried to resurrect his original proposal with every argument that I could think of. He listened to me politely and said that he would think about it, but I knew that the deal was dead.

I wrote a letter terminating our contract with Mark as soon as I returned. Here is the text:

Please terminate our contract immediately. At this point, it appears that the deal is beyond resuscitation. If this transaction is somehow revived, we may want to start anew.
Thank you for your assistance. It is a shame that so much effort was wasted on such a futile endeavor.

Explanation and Speculation: Here is what I think might have happened. The banker(s) were probably not impressed with his idea. However, they must not have rejected it out of hand because he was still willing to buy out Denise. So, he must have been able to lay his hands on $250,000. I think that they probably were asking him to put up his house or some other fixed asset as collateral for the rest of the money. Either this gave him cold feet, or perhaps his wife put her foot down. In either case I blame the feet.

Could this gigantic SNAFU been avoided? I think so. I should have insisted that Tim show the Letter of Intent to the bankers. He had allegedly already bought and sold companies. I assumed that he would have lined up financing first before telling someone that he wanted to give them $1 million. Like Fllounder in Animal House, I fucked up; I trusted him.

Would the original plan have worked? It would only have worked if Tim had been able to convince two or three large retailers to buy AdDept. At that point the only ones left who did not use AdDept and also did a lot of advertising were Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s. Dillard’s, and chains of grocery stores and drug stores. Maybe he could have pulled it off, but I cannot imagine how. Maybe he knew how to persuade them to let me talk with the advertising managers and then give a presentation, but I had seen no evidence of it.

At the same time we probably would have needed to pivot our development to use more attractive input and output. We also probably would have needed to come up with a way to handle Internet advertising in a useful manner. Both of these tasks would be daunting.

Even if we had succeeded, I think that my life would have been hell for three years. I was absolutely and completely honest in everything that I said to him, but there were certainly things that he did not understand. For example, I seriously doubt that he understood that the A^xN revenue was dependent on the AdDept clients. When an AdDept client stopped using the system, was purchased or absorbed by another retailer, or outsourced the buying of its newspaper ads, all or at least a majority of the associated A^xN revenue disappeared.

Denise, who was ten years younger than I was, wanted to sell because she desired to try something else. I had no such ambitions. I wanted to sell because I could not see a way to make the business continue to be viable without a huge expenditure of time and money.

I would have done everything that I could to make it succeed, including going back to working 70-hour weeks. It would have required a herculean effort to make the business work without Denise. Keep in mind that I had celebrated my sixty-second birthday on the ship in Russia. Whom could I hire to replace Denise? I could probably find someone with the experience and skill of the Denise whom we hired in 1984, but no one in the U.S. could just take her chair and do what she was doing in 2010 without a lot of on-the-job training. My rule of thumb was that new programmers generally cost me more time than they saved during the first six months of employment, and Denise meant much more to the company than any programmer.

I would not have taken any vacations during those three years. That means that I would have missed the South Italy tour in 2011 (described here), which was our last tragic adventure with Patti and Tom. In 2012 we took a Larry Cohen bridge cruise, the famous honeymoon for one (described here). I would never have met Frank Evangelista. In 2013 I spent a few days at the Gatlinburg Regional bridge tournament with Michael Dworetsky (describe here). A lot of pleasant memories would have never been created.

Worst of all, I think that Tim would have inevitably come to blame me for the company’s failure. I can imagine awkward and even painful telephone conversations on a weekly basis. I don’t know what he would have tried to make me do to fix the situation. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. He might have sued me. I cannot imagine what the grounds would have been, but he probably had much deeper pockets for legal fees than I did. For a guy like me that would have been a real nightmare.

Expenses: Denise and I spent a lot of money, and I took on more than 75 percent of the cost. We spent $24,000 for Steve Pope’s activities. I don’t remember what the appraiser charged, but it was much more than $1,000. Mark charged us at least $12,800. The trip to St. Louis cost $500, and our dinner with Tim was nearly $150. So, the total charge was around $40,000. I also spent a great deal of time on this project, and at the time we were billing out my services at the rate of $1,000 per day.

This was not quite as bad as it looked. The expenses were deductible, and at the time I was paying a lot in taxes. Furthermore, if the effort had been successful, Sue and I would have received hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2009 I invested a high percentage of my savings in an indexed fund based on the S&P 500. I would presumably have augmented that with an even higher percentage of the windfall. From that time through October of 2023 the S&P 500 has increased in value by approximately 300 percent! Do the math.

1. Steve Pope was still in the business brokerage business in 2023. His company was called Pope and Associates, LLC. The website is here.

2. Mr. Gunville’s LinkedIn profile is here.

3. Mr. Dustin’s LinkedIn profile is posted here. FRG’s website can be viewed here.

4. M&F’s website can be found here.

5. NAS’s website is here. Mr. Lerner’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Several companies called the Catalyst Group existed in 2023, but I don’t think that any were the people to whom I sent the letter.

7. Corum’s website is here.

8. VR’s website is here. Mr. Capozzi’s LinkedIn page (posted here) indicated that he owned a VR franchise.

9. George Abraham’s LinkedIn page is here.

10. For a short while I placed the most current TSI backup tape in the P.O. box. The clerk quickly put an end to that. He said that it was not allowed for the owner of the box to put anything in it. The owner could take things out or leave them in the box, but only post office employees could place anything in the box. I did not argue. I think they were worried about a bomb.

11. Tim Finney’s LinkedIn page lists his occupation as CEO and Founder. It is located here.

12. Webex is an Internet product from Cisco systems. It allowed people to view on their own systems what was being displayed on remote systems. This was, of course, before Zoom existed.

2022 January-July: Providence NABC Preparation

Posted on November 20, 2022 by Mike

The super-spreader in Providence. Continue reading →

In the spring of 2019 the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) named Providence as the site for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) in 2021. The bridge players in New England were very excited about the prospect. It had been a very long time since a summer edition of the NABC had been held in New England.

At the time of the announcement Bob Bertoni was the District Director, and Lois DeBlois was the President of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC). Bob immediately appointed as co-chairs Lois and Joe Brouillard, who had shared the same responsibility for the 2014 Fall NABC that had been held in Providence. Their first acts were to notify the state and local officials that the tournament would be held in Providence in July and to reserve space in the Rhode Island Convention Center (RICC), the same site that had been used in 2014.

Joe, who was the Treasurer of the NEBC, also was in charge of finance. Hospitality was to be handled by Helen Pawlowski, who had the same job in 2014, and Sally Kirtley, the district’s Tournament Manager. Sponsorships were assigned to Phyllis Chase, another veteran of the 2014 event, and Megan Mihara DiOrio. Brenda and Neil Montague reprised their roles as chairs of registration and prizes. Sue Miguel was again in charge of the Intermediate/Newcomer program.

I immediately volunteered to help with the massive project of organizing, promoting, and running the tournament and anything else that they wanted me to do. I was not on the first list of committee chairs. At that point I was one of the “ministers without portfolio”. The other member at the outset were Bob, Jim Rasmussen, Meg Gousie, Paula Najarian, Sonja Smith, Linda Ahrens, and Paul Burnham.

At some point Joe asked me to write and send a few sets of promotional emails using the database that I had developed for the district. I was happy to take that on. It meant a lot of work preceding the tournament, but I was still full of vim and vinegar, and I had enjoyed working at the 2014 NABC in Providence immensely.

This was an all-star cast if ever there was one, and it only got better over time. The first meeting was held during the lunch break on Friday, August 30, 2019, at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. The emphasis was on the need to begin planning and execution as soon as possible because July of 2021 was not that far away. I think that the logo had already been designed by then. Everyone at the meeting liked it.

I attended several of the meetings at regional tournaments, but I did not participate much. I was there to get ideas about marketing the event in Providence. I remember that at one meeting the discussion was about what type of souvenir shirt should be sold. A few samples were passed around. Someone asked for my opinion, but I deferred to the others, explaining that “I have no taste.”

On June 30, 2020, a one-year-out Zoom meeting was held with Mark Hudson of the ACBL. The only additions to the committee at that point were David Rock, who had been the Partnership Chair in 2014, and Debbie Ouelette. I did not attend the meeting.

COVID-19’s effect: At least since I had been involved with tournament bridge, the American Contract Bridge League had every year sponsored three NABC tournaments—one in March, one in July, and one in November. They were dubbed “spring”, “summer”, and “fall”. Each lasted ten or eleven days. Games were available for players of all ages and experience levels. At the beginning of 2020 everyone planned on three NABC events.

COVID-19 forced the cancellation of all three NABC events in 2020—March in Columbus, OH, July in Montreal, and November in Tampa. Even so, plans continued to be made for the July event in Providence. By the end of the year incredibly effective vaccines were being produced, and seniors—by far the dominant age group for bridge players—were among the first in line to receive them. My most pressing question was when I should start promoting the “Big Deal” in Providence.

Then in fairly rapid succession two important events took place. In an abundance of caution the ACBL canceled the NABC scheduled for March 2021 in St. Louis. The Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C., that had hosted the 2016 Summer NABC and was scheduled to do so again was no longer available. So, despite the fact that the number of new cases decreased rapidly in the late spring and early summer of 2021, the NABC scheduled for Providence was moved to July 13-24 of 2022. We received notice of this in February of 2021. No NABC was held in the summer of 2021. In fact, the ACBL also canceled all sectional and regional tournaments through the end of August, thus wiping out the Ocean State Regional, District 25’s largest tournament.

So, the organizers of the Providence tournament were provided an additional year to prepare for the big event, but the committee members would have little or no opportunity for face-to-face communication for much of that period. Because of the ACBL’s action, there would only be at most one regional tournament in District 25 in all of 2021. In fact, however, the one tournament, the Harvest Regional in Mansfield, MA, that might have been allowed by the ACBL was also canceled by a vote of the district’s Executive Committee.

The other event that dramatically affected the preparations for NABC Providence was the death of Bob Bertoni on June 29, 2021. He had been our direct link to the ACBL, a role that Lois and especially Joe had to assume.

The ACBL resumed holding NABC tournaments in Austin, TX, in November of 2021 and in Reno, NV, in March of 2022. Vaccination cards were checked at both tournaments. Masks were required in Austin, and the number of new COVID cases reported was relatively small. In Reno masks were not required, and the number of cases was much larger. By that time the protocol was determined by the CDC rating for the incidence of new cases for the county in which the event was held. Since Washoe County was rated low throughout the tournament, no masks were required¹ in Reno.

Attendance at both of these tournaments was very low by historical standards. People at both ends of the spectrum were upset by the ACBL’s approach. Roughly one-third of the United States refused to get vaccinated. The percentage of the anti-vaxers was probably lower among bridge players, but it was significant. A significant percentage of the rest of the players had great difficulty with wearing masks. Some found them unbearably uncomfortable, and some just did not like the idea of never seeing a smile. On the other hand, a large number of bridge players, including me, thought that the ACBL’s policy was too lax. I thought that the event in Austin was lucky to escape with few infections and that the idea of hold a tournament in a casino in Reno was crazy. I did not attend either event, but both Joe and Lois attended both events, and Sally attended at least one.

In MailChimp you can paste your code in the window on the right, and it displays the email on the left.

The first email campaign: I exchanged a few emails with Joe about which vendor to use to process our emails. I was most familiar with MailChimp; he had used a different vendor in 2014. There were a few things about MailChimp that annoyed me, but the district already had a contract that provided an incredibly cheap rate of 800 for $1. If we used another service, it would be at least a little more expensive, and I would need to learn it. MailChimp allowed me to design my emails in HTML. I could therefore make sure that their appearance was exactly what I wanted. If we used another service that did not allow this, I would undoubtedly have felt frustrated. Joe agreed with my choice of MailChimp.

I questioned whether it was permissible to use the district’s account—which at the time contained enough credits for over one million emails—for this project. Joe assured me that it was kosher. I trusted his opinion. After all, he was also the district’s treasurer.

The database² that I set up for District 25 contained one record for each ACBL member. It also contained records for tournament attendance at events in New England and for NABCs, including the 2014 event in Providence. My plan was to craft several emails based on whether players had attended any recent NABCs and whether they were within driving distance of Providence. New England players would receive separate emails depending on whether they had attended the previous event in Providence.

I began working on the first batch in January of 2022 and communicated my basic strategy for the first mailing on January 21:

I plan four distinct emails:
1. Attended 2014 Prov: 1,067 players.
2. D25 not in 1 above: 4,826
3. D3, D24 (at least 50 points) not in 1 above: 2,838 + 2,327
4. Attended recent NABC not in 1, 2, or 3 above: 10,107
I will send tests for approval as I finish them–probably today.

Joe, Lois, and Sue provided feedback on the four emails. They asked me to swap out a few of the photos that I had chosen. I don’t recall that they asked me to change any of the text. We had to hold off sending for a while because the ACBL had not published a schedule yet. Then when they did, the schedule for the first Saturday was obviously wrong. The emails finally were sent on February 5, 2022.

A sample of #1 can be viewed here. It was opened by 60.9 percent of recipients. 11 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #2 can be viewed here. It was opened by 46.9 percent of recipients. 2.9 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #3 can be viewed here. It was opened by 46.4 percent of recipients. 2.7 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #4 can be viewed here. It was opened by 43.1 percent of recipients. 4.2 percent clicked on one or more of the links.

The reaction was mostly positive. Quite a few people asked about the COVID-19 policy, which the ACBL did not publish until March. Joe and Lois received the following email from Joann Glasson, Grand Life Master and President of the ACBL:

Hi Joe and Lois,
I just received the terrific email about your upcoming NABC. I hope this got a wide circulation – did it go to all ACBL members?
The website looks great as well – really professional. I can’t wait to get to Providence this summer… Thanks for all your great work.

The locally maintained website³, which you can visit here, certainly was professional. Joe did all the work on it.

The one complaint was in regards to the captions on a few of the photos. There was nothing wrong with the code, but some email clients (including Microsoft Outlook, which is what I used on my desktop PC) did not interpret the code correctly. I spent several hours trying different methods of displaying the caption, but I never was able to get them to display correctly. You can see how email #3 looked when it was opened and then printed in memo form in Outlook here. So, I very reluctantly decided not to use captions on subsequent tournaments.

Hotel Reservations: On February 28 I felt confident enough that the ACBL would not cancel the tournament that I made hotel reservations. I decided that I would like to play in (or at least be around for) ten of the eleven days of the tournament. The schedule for the first Thursday did not appeal to me.

I redeemed 170,000 IHG Rewards points to pay for seven nights at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, which is about fifteen minutes south of the site of the tournament. I also redeemed some Hilton Honors points at the Warwick Hampton Inn for the two preceding nights. I had to pay an additional $155. Since the lowest bridge rate in downtown Providence was $179 per night, I felt that nine nights for $155 was a pretty good deal.

Months later Joe offered to provide a free hotel room for me in Providence. I told him that I had already cashed in my hotel points. In addition I preferred to stay in Providence while I was playing.

The Partnership System: Joe wrote a program to handle requests for partnerships and teammates. It was tested out during the district’s first regional in Marlboro, MA. Denise Bahosh managed partnerships there and deemed the programs to be working successfully. Since I was on my European River Cruise (documented here), I was not part of the testing process.

Meanwhile, the Chairs of the Partnership Committee for the NABC had been named. Jan Smola handled pairs, and Carol Seager was in charge of teams.

Partners: In the previous few NABC tournaments that I had attended I designed my schedule around playing in a couple of national (as opposed to regional) events. However, the schedule for Providence did not provide any national events—other than the GNT, which required qualification at the district level—that appealed to me. I had too many points for the Red Point Pairs and the lowest flight of the Life Masters Pairs. So, I would just try to play in as many bracketed team events as possible.

Shortly after making the hotel reservations I sent notices of my schedule to all of my usual partners and a few others with whom I had played at tournaments. Responses were very slow in arriving. The first confirmation came from Sohail Hasan. I had played with him in Mansfield in 2019, and we did pretty well together. On June 20 we agreed to play together the last three days of the NABC in Providence in team games if we could find teammates.

At about the same time Paul Burnham, with whom I had played a handful of times, agreed to play with me on Monday, Wednesday, and (the second) Thursday. That still left open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, on the first week and Tuesday.

Donna Lyons, whom I have known for years, finally claimed the first two spots. Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky had asked me to play teams with them on the first Saturday and Sunday. So, Donna and I planned to play with them on Saturday. I decided to take Tuesday off.

This was my schedule going into the tournament.

I tried to use the tournament’s partnership system to secure a partner for the bracketed team game on the first Sunday. I had to decide whether to fill out the partnership form or the team form. Since David Rock had told me quite clearly many times that the first step is to get a partner, I tried to fill in the partnership form. I was stifled when I had to specify the event, a required field that did not allow specification of a team event.

So, I filled in the team form and specified that our team was looking for one person. The only person that Carol paired me with was Abe Fisher. Here is the email that I got from him:

Hi Mike—
While in principle I’d love to play with you, if I’m reading the thread correctly, you’ve got 3 and need a 4th. I’ve also got 3, and need a 4th. So that doesn’t seem like it works.
Good luck,
Abe

I asked Carol if it was OK for me to fill out a pairs form and lie about the event. Then I might be able to persuade the prospective partner to play in the team event instead of the pairs. She said that was not allowed. I told her that, in my opinion, this was a very large flaw in the system.

So, the new partnership form failed both Abe and me. At the start of the tournament I still had no partner for Sunday. Nevertheless, I was not too worried. I expected a large number of people would have filled out cards for themselves by Friday or Saturday.

The second emailing: Here is the email that I sent to Joe and Lois about the plans for the email to be sent in April of 2022, three months before the tournament.

Joe and Lois,
I have set up segments for the next set of emails. There will be five basic emails based on masterpoints:
2-300: Emphasize 299er, Gold Mine, and Bracketed Round Robin. Sent to districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 24, and 25. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. 18,140
300-750: Emphasize Gold Mine, and Bracketed Round Robin. Sent to districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 24, and 25. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. 5,255
750-2500: Emphasize bracketed Round Robin, three-flighted events, and some national events. Sent to all districts. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. I don’t know this number yet. 19,480
2500+: Emphasize national events. All districts, but D25 one will be a little different. 6,077
Players who have attended a recent NABC or the 2014 Providence NABC will be excluded from the four just listed.
NABC attendees (all masterpoints): Emphasize national events and why Providence is different, but D25 one will be a little different. 12,071
It bothers me that this misses a lot of snowbirds, but I don’t know how to find them.
I tried three new approaches to captioning images. All of them work fine in the displays inside MailChimp, but my Outlook client did not display any of them correctly. So I will not use captions for now.
I have almost finished the 299er version. I will send it to you some time today.
Mike

Joe, Lois, and Sue all liked the approach, but they had small but important suggestions for the photos and the copy. I incorporated them before I sent them out.

Samples of the mailings: 299er, 300-750, 750-2500, Over 2500, Attended NABC. I made an embarrassing mistake in the dates for one of the more obscure national events, and no one caught it before it went out. I communicated with a few people who noticed it, but I decided that it was not critical enough to send a correction.

Site visit and walk-through: On May 25 I received this email from Joe:

The ACBL site visit in Providence will be on June 2 at 10 am. If you will be working during the NABC please plan to attend if you are available. If your committee work will be completed prior to the NABC you are welcome to attend but not required. We will meet on the third floor which is the level the exhibition halls are on.
Please let me know if you will be attending by Friday, May 27, if you will be attending.

I quickly responded that I would attend. I had a few questions to ask the ACBL people about educational events at the NABC. At that point they had posted very little information about that area. I also wanted to take some photos of the site. Most of all, I wanted to see other members of the committee. I had great respect for all of them, and a few of them were good friends. I had not talked with any of them (except Sally Kirtley, the director of the Simsbury game) for more than two years. I decided to bring both my camera and my audio recorder.

My one misgiving concerned Sally. I knew that she had recently tested positive for COVID-19. I wondered if she would make the trip. Although she now lived fairly close to me, I certainly did not volunteer to car pool with her. Whether she was there or not, I definitely intended to wear my N95 mask.

I slightly underestimated how long it would take me to reach Providence. I arrived at the parking lot a few minutes before ten and parked on the fourth floor, which matched up with the third floor in the RICC. I saw the Montagues in the parking structure and said hello to them. Before I joined the group, which did include Sally, I visited the men’s room to dispose of the large coffee from McDonald’s that I had consumed on the drive from Enfield.

Sara Beth Raab left the ACBL a few months after the NABC in Providence.

In attendance were, by my recollection, all of the Chairs. That group now included Paula Najarian, who created the restaurant guide, and the two Chairs of volunteers, Linda Ahrens and Meg Gousie. The ACBL sent Sara Beth Raab and at least one other person. Lisa Watson represented the RICC. Erin Degulis of the Convention and Visitors Bureau was also there.

The traveling “Beyond Van Gogh” exhibit⁴ was occurring in the RICC while we were visiting. Therefore, we would not be able to see some of the playing areas. Everyone on the committee remembered them from 2014. The setup for playing was simple. The 299er and Gold Rush games would be held in one of the big rooms on the third floor. The other two big rooms would be used for team games and pairs games. The meeting rooms were on the fourth floor. The national events were on the fifth floor.

A good bit of the visit was devoted to determining the best places for the ancillary activities and exhibits—the partnership desk, the vendor area, the “In Memoriam” exhibit, etc. Others had strong opinions about these matters. Since I was only tangentially involved, I kept my mouth shut.

Afterwards we met in one of the fourth-floor conference rooms. I took advantage of this opportunity to ask about the educational programs. Sara Beth consulted her phone and then replied that the list of speakers and events had just been added to the ACBL’s version of the website for the tournament. When I returned to my house that evening I checked the website. There was no such list. I kept checking for three weeks, but nothing appeared. I sent an email to Joe to see if he could check up on this.

Eventually it did appear. They put it under the Intermediate and Newcomer (I/N) section. I guess that someone at the ACBL decided that once you have earned a few hundred points, you no longer have a desire to get better at bridge

The best part of the day, from my perspective, was the lunch at Murphy’s, a pub that was within a block or two of the RICC. I sat on the end of a long table. I made sure that Sally was far away from me. On my right was Paula, one of my favorite people. No one was on my left or across from me. Across from Paula was Lisa Watson, our contact at the RICC.

Lois and Paula won the Mid-Flight Pairs at the Presidential Regional in 2018.

Paula had not heard about my vacation in Europe. So, I actually had something to add to the conversation. I also told her about my two clients in East Greenwich, her home town.

The food was good, too. I had a huge Reuben sandwich and broccoli on the side. People were amazed that I cleaned my plate. I told everyone that if I had left food on my plate, my sainted mother would haunt my dreams.

This might have been my most enjoyable day since the pandemic hit.

Email campaigns in June: On June 5 Sue Miguel sent me the materials for an email that she wanted sent to 299ers. I had figured out how to do this for her. I opened the email in Outlook. I then took print screens of each image in the email, made jpg files of them, and stored them in the MailChimp folder. Then I saved the HTML code for the email as a text file. I removed the parts of the email that were not meant to be sent. I loaded the jpg files up to Mailchimp using the “Content Studio”. Then I replaced the URL’s on the “src=” parameters of the img statements in the email with the ones on the MailChimp server. I then enclosed the entire email in a table with one column that was six hundred pixels wide. That last step seemed to be the only way to set the width of any email in a way that all email clients recognized.

I selected all members of D25 with between 20 and 299 masterpoints. A sample of the email that was sent on June 7 can be seen here. 813 the 3,000 emails were opened, and 13 recipients clicked on a link. Those are not good results, but one must remember that most of those people had probably never played face-to-face bridge. It would not be an easy task to convince them that they should try it out at a national tournament.

On June 12 I received an email from Linda Ahrens, who was the co-chair with Meg Gousie of the Volunteers:

I was hoping you could use your creative genius to send out an email to everyone in District 25 requesting volunteers.
For every two-hour shift we will provide a $5 chit towards an entry fee. Volunteers will be able to play in any event as they will be scheduled prior to events or directly afterwards.
To sign up they should go to ProvNABC.org and then click on the blue volunteer tab on the left hand side of the page.
There is youth bridge on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the second weekend and we need volunteers for either half days or full days to work with beginners to provide support at the tables as they play. These volunteers will probably not be able to play on those days.
Meg and I will send out a schedule ten days prior. Volunteers will be asked to go to the volunteer/information desk prior to their shift where they will check in, get their assignments and upon completion of their shift they will get their chit.
If you need any more info please let me know. This might be too much info for one email so I will defer to what you think is best.

I wasted no time composing the email that you can view here. It was sent to about 6,000 people. 3,189 people opened it, and 51 clicked on the link.

Lois and Sue decided to sponsor a Zoom call that they labeled as an “Open House”. Sue designed the following image to serve as an invitation.

This went out to 6,000 New Englanders. Although only 38.2 percent opened the email, 110 clicked on the image, which allowed them to download the link.

On June 27 I finally received the email from Sue that she wanted to send to players with less than twenty points. You can view it here. I sent it out on the same day. Of the thousand or so recipients, 476 opened it, but only two clicked on a link.

In May Lois had sent me an email asking if I possessed or knew someone who possessed high-resolution photos of two recently deceased players from the Boston area, Bill Hunter or Shome Mukherjee. They were needed for the “In Memoriam” area of the tournament site in Providence. I looked through the photos that I had posted on the website, but I did not find anything that was usable.

A few weeks later she was frantic about obtaining the photos. She asked me to send an email immediately. I sent the email that is posted here on June 13. It went to about 1500 players in the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA). 824 of them opened it, and six clicked on the link. She was only looking for two photos, and eventually one of the respondents helped her obtain them.

In 2022 I was on the Board of Trustees of the Hartford Bridge Club. We voted to sponsor a day at the NABC to honor Victor King, a Grand Life Master who was a member of the club. He had been murdered in his own house by a tenant. I was asked by Felix Singer to send an email to people in the rest of New England who might be interested in donating to the project. I wrote and sent an email to players in central and eastern Massachusetts with over 1,000 points. Quite a few people donated. Al Muggia offered to curate the photos.

Steve Diamond, a player from Shrewsbury, MA, who knew me pretty well, sent a large check to my home address. I put it in the bottle with the rest of the donations. I overheard Felix telling someone that he could not believe that one of the participants in the novice group had been so generous. I told him that this was a different Steve Diamond.

Emails in July: Lois provided me with a list of items that she wanted to make sure that the people who were planning on attending the tournament knew about. I composed an email that contained these “nuggets” as well as the link to the ACBL’s well-hidden schedule of celebrity appearances. On July 1 I sent short emails to players in D25 and its two neighboring districts in the United States, a total of approximately 14,000 players. About 45 percent of recipients opened the email, and over six hundred clicked on one of the links. A sample has been posted here.

A week later I was asked by Sue Miguel to send an email to people in the district to promote the “Learn Bridge in a Day” program. I am not sure why the ACBL could not do this, but not enough time remained to argue about it. I sent out roughly six thousand emails. You can view the email here.

The last email that I composed and sent was designed to promote a play written by bridge teacher, columnist, and professional playwright, Adam Parrish. Bridge to Nowhere was scheduled to run for three nights in a small theater near the RICC.

This innocuous email, which I have posted here, generated as many replies as any that I had sent. Several tournament veterans challenged my claim that an NABC had never included a play about bridge. I deferred to their superior knowledge.

One person, who did not sign the email, said the following:”Remove my name from your mailing list. This email is an abuse of the bridge federation list if that is where it came from.”

Here was my reply:

I have done as you asked.
I have no interest in this play. I do not know the author or anyone associated with the theater. I sent the email at the request of the co-chair of the tournament committee in order to apprise potential attendees of a last-minute addition to the entertainments available in Providence during the NABC.

The Providence NABC Tournament Chairs: Here is a complete list of the chairs and co-chairs of the local committee.
Tournament: Lois DeBlois and Joe Brouillard
Hospitality: Sally Kirtley and Helen Pawlowski
Sponsorships: Megan Mihara and Phyllis Chase
Welcome and Prizes: Brenda and Neil Montague
Volunteers: Linda Ahrens and Meg Gousie
I/N and Gold Rush: Sue Miguel
Partnerships: Jan Smola and Carol Seager
Email Marketing: Mike Wavada.

Volunteering: I knew that I would be in the area for ten days. I volunteered to help whenever I might be useful. I also said that I had had a lot of experience working at partnership desks. When I filled out the form on the website, I indicated that I would be available from the first Friday through the second Sunday, but I would like to take Tuesday off. On July 1 I received the following email from Meg Gousie.

Thank you very much for volunteering at the Providence NABC. Your assistance will go a long way to helping make this event a big success! We notice that you have generously offered to volunteer, and have taken the liberty of assigning the following shifts to you:
Saturday, July 16.    1:30pm.   Registration Desk
Sunday, July 17.    8:30a,    Partnership Desk
Tuesday, July 19.    1:30pm.   Partnership Desk
Thursday, July 21.    8:30am.    Partnership Desk
Please review and confirm your availability ASAP so we can plan accordingly.
Please plan on going to the volunteer desk 15 minutes before your scheduled assignment. The desk is located on the third floor by the escalators. After your scheduled shift, please come back to the desk to pick up your $5 chit which is good for $5 off an entry fee in Providence. You will also receive discounted parking.

I persuaded them to remove me from the Tuesday afternoon assignment. Shortly before I left for the tournament I checked my emails again and sent the following to Meg and Linda:

The email that you sent on 6/30 had me listed two shifts on 7/16: registration in the morning and partnership in the afternoon. The email sent on 7/1 had me working on registration in the afternoon on 7/16.
Two questions: 1) What is my schedule for 7/16? 2) Do I have any additional responsibilities other than the ones for 7/17 and 7/21 that are on this email?

By the time that I shut down Outlook my desktop computer⁵ before leaving for Providence I had not received a reply. I figured that I could check on it when I arrived.

My adventures at the Providence NABC itself are chronicled here.

1. Of course, only a very small percentage of the players at the tournament in Reno were from Washoe County. More than a few were from Europe or Asia. Using the rating for the county was like the old joke about the drunk looking for a lost coin under a lamppost that was a block away from where the coin was dropped—because the light was better. Furthermore, the event was held in a casino.

2. Starting in 2014 I designed and implemented every aspect of the database using MySQL and php.

3. The ACBL also had a webpage for the tournament, but it could not hold a candle to the one that Joe designed and implemented.

4. No one in our group went in on June 2. A description of the exhibit is posted here.

5. Incoming email was configured to download automatically downloaded to the Outlook application on my desktop computer in Enfield. If I did not close down Outlook, I would not be able to get email on my laptop for either of my email accounts.

1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Air Travel Adventures

Posted on September 12, 2021 by Mike

Getting to the clients and returning. Continue reading →

I always took the route from our house in Enfield to the airport that Google claimed took 28 minutes. At 5:30 AM I could make it in less than 20.

My routine: I always flew from Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, CT, which was usually identified on the departure boards at airports as “Hartford-Springfield” or BDL. We were fortunate in that almost every major airline had a presence at Bradley. The last to arrive was Southwest, which began its service at Bradley in November 1999.

I usually took one of the first flights in the morning, often around 6:00. At first Sue drove me to the airport and picked me up, but this became tiresome for me. I soon elected instead to park at Executive Valet Parking, the only lot that was north of the airport. It was easier on both of us.

The people who worked the early morning shift at Executive came to know me pretty well. The driver was usually an extremely friendly and loquacious guy named Larry. His style was too much for me at that early hour. I mean, it wasn’t even 6:00 yet. I was never in the mood for chitchat. Vacationers probably appreciated his approach more than business travelers.

The lady at the desk knew me well enough that I did not even need to show my frequent-parker card when I checked in. She even knew what I drove.

On every trip I brought exactly one suitcase and one briefcase that was large enough to hold my laptop. For several years my suitcase was a large bright blue fabric one with wheels. It was large enough to hold my pillow. I always had a hard time getting to sleep after a stressful excessively caffeinated day dealing with problems or requests at the client’s office. Having a familiar pillow helped. The suitcase’s bright color also made it easy to spot on the luggage belt, and the design made it light. I only got rid of it when the zipper broke.

When I arrived at the terminal, I checked in at the ticket counter. In the nineties I flew enough that I could use the express lane at Delta or American. Later, of course, the airlines installed kiosks that made the check-in process much easier.

Security was a breeze before 9/11/2001 (described here). Even during the busiest times (early in the morning and around 6 PM), it seldom took more than a minute or two. Since the employees worked (directly or indirectly) for the airlines, they were always courteous and tried to make sure that passengers arrived at their gate expeditiously. After 9/11 it was a good idea to plan for an excruciating period of at least twenty minutes.

In the first few years of my flying days Bradley had two terminals. Terminal B housed American Airlines and a few small carriers that I never used. Later this terminal was demolished and Terminal A was greatly expanded with two long “concourses” that connected to the central area.

In the mornings I usually bought a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich at McDonald’s in the airport. I also purchased a large coffee even though the restaurant at the airport did not participate in the long-standing promotion of “$1 for any size coffee” available at most McD’s in those days. If I was in a hurry I brought the breakfast bag onto the plane.

If I had a lot of time, I would try to find a place to sit near an electric outlet. Most airports were not designed for the electronics age. In the nineties almost no one brought a computer onto an airplane, and cell phones were even rarer. Furthermore most of the devices in those days could not hold a charge for more than a couple of hours. Consequently, as the use of electronics grew, those few seats near electrical outlet were in great demand. I knew the location of most of the outlets at BDL.

An inviolate rule was to use a men’s room in the airport before every flight. The restrooms on airplanes were not pleasant, and waiting in line in the aisle when you had to go was very annoying.

I tried to reserve window seats. I liked to look out and try to identify cities. Of course, no one wanted a middle seat. When I sat on the aisle someone always seemed to hit my elbow. I usually tried to get on the port side. If no one sat in the middle I could stretch out my right leg under the middle seat in front of me.

I always brought my computer, my Bose headphones, my CD player, several magazines, and at least one book. Some flights showed old television shows on a screen; I never watched or got a headset. I played opera music on my CD or the computer while the plane was in flight. I also played music in my hotel room, while I was running, and especially during the periods between flights in noisy airports. On one of my last trips I had been listening to Mozart’s Così fan tutte when it was time to board the plane. I left under my seat in the waiting area the CD player that contained the opera’s third CD. I never got the player back or bought a replacement for the CD.

I almost never slept on the flights out to the client’s location, but I regularly dozed on the return flights even when someone occupied the middle seat. I found the most comfortable position in close quarters was to lean my head against the little pillow that was provided to my seat braced against the window or side of the plane.

I never put anything in the overhead compartments. My briefcase, which had all my electronics and other diversions, was under the seat in front of me. If the plane was crowded, it was sometimes difficult to extract the stuff that I wanted. If I had an overcoat or a jacket, I used it as a lap rug.

I usually took the stairs down to the Baggage Claim area.

Most of the time my return flights landed late, sometimes very later. I tried to get to the baggage area before most of the other passengers in order to occupy a position near the beginning of the belt. I knew which direction all the belts ran. No airline ever failed to deliver my luggage¹ on a return trip. Nevertheless, by the time that my bag arrived—no matter how well the trip had gone—I was always angry at everyone and everything. For me air travel for business was inherently stressful.

There were a couple of banks of phones in the baggage area. Each parking lot and hotel had a direct line. I just picked up the phone and read the number on the ticket that I had been given when I checked in at Executive and told them which airline I had been on. Within a few minutes (usually) the shuttle bus would arrive. Executive would almost always have my car warmed up by the time that the bus reached the lot. Executive charged the credit card that I had on file there. The receipt would be on the seat of the car. My drives home were always uneventful.

I recognized quite a few celebrities while I was in airports or on airplanes going to or from AdDept clients. My spottings are documented here.

Weather and other close calls

In the winter I tried to avoid scheduling flights that required stops in Chicago, Detroit, or Minneapolis. Nevertheless, on quite a few occasions I ended up missing my connecting flight back to Hartford. Since my return trips were almost always in the evening, on most occasions there were no other flights that I could take. This was a nuisance, but after a while I came to appreciate that the inconvenience was just part of the aggravation inherent to traveling for business. The airline always found a seat for me on a flight in the morning and put me up at a nearby hotel for the night. I can only remember one bizarre exception. I have described it here.

Once, however, the disruptive weather had subsided in Chicago long before my United flight from Des Moines touched down at O’Hare. Earlier that day the winds in the Windy City had exceeded fifty miles-per-hour, and O’Hare had been closed for a short period. It was about 8:30 PM when my flight effected its landing there, and my next flight was not scheduled to leave until 10:00. So, even though United connections in O’Hare could require very long walks, I was not very worried about arriving at my gate in time to board my flight to Hartford.

Most of my horror stories involved United.

I did not account for what happened next. The plane usually taxied around for a few minutes and then pull into the designated gate. Not this time. The pilot parked it on the tarmac out of the way of the other planes. He then announced that there was no gate available for our flight. He did not explain why; he merely stated that he had been ordered to park where he did. Every few minutes he would make an announcement on the intercom, but fifty minutes elapsed before we finally reached the gate.

My recollection is that I ran from one of the B gates in Terminal 1 to an F gate in Terminal 2.

At that point there was almost no chance that my checked bag would be transported to my connecting flight. That failure had happened to me a few times. The airline just delivered it to my house later in the day. The big question was whether I could make it to the gate before the plane departed. I knew that it would not be easy as soon as I saw that my flight to Hartford was in a different terminal. On the other hand I was in the best shape of my life. Even carrying my quite heaby briefcase I rated that I had a pretty good chance.

I wasn’t as fast as O.J, but I was certainly not about to have a heart attack. They should have just let me board.

In fact, I did reach the gate ten minutes before the scheduled departure time. I was dismayed to see that the door was already closed. I went up to the desk with my ticket to demand that the two female agents let me on the plane. I was, of course, out of breath. One of the ladies told me to calm down. She warned me that I might have a heart attack.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I assured them. “I am a runner. In a minute or two I won’t even be breathing hard.” This was true.

They refused to open the door. That was bad enough, but they then also refused to authorize me to stay overnight at United’s expense. They claimed that it was weather-related and therefore not the company’s fault.

I explained that my flight had landed on time, but it then parked out on the tarmac for almost an hour because United did not have enough gates. The bad weather had ceased long before this happened. The agents were intractable. I have seldom been so angry. I might have said something inappropriate.

Fortunately for me, United had plenty of customer service desks in O’Hare, and they stayed open very late. I walked over to one and explained the situation to the clerk. He told me that he did not understand why the ladies would not give me vouchers for a hotel room and breakfast.

I understood the reason very well. They were planning to leave ten minutes early, and they were already packed up. Dealing with me might actually have required them to stay another ten or even fifteen minutes.

The customer service guy issued the vouchers without hesitation. I stayed at a hotel and arrived in Hartford the next morning on the same plane that had my luggage.

Tornado

I cannot remember even one occasion in which weather prevented me from arriving at a client’s office by the scheduled time. The one time that my plane faced really serious weather was when I was flying to Des Moines in the late afternoon. A serious tornado was approaching Des Moines from the southwest at about the same time that my plane was approaching from the east. The plane was forced to land in land in a much smaller airport in Cedar Rapids. Our aircraft and crew were going to spend the night in Cedar Rapids. The flight to Des Moines would resume in the morning. So, the luggage stayed on the plane. There were no flights available to Des Moines on the evening that we arrived.

“Go out the exit. Go south until you hit I-80. Then go west.”

I needed to be at the client’s² offices at the start of business in the morning. I decided to rent a car and drive to Des Moines. I usually patronized Avis, but Avis had no office in the Cedar Rapids airport. So, I went to the Hertz counter and rented a car. The agent assured me that I could return it at the airport in Des Moines. He also gave me a map and indicated the route. This was Iowa. You can always get from one place to another with only a few turns.

I was not too worried about the tornado. Airplanes cruise at about 30,000 feet. At that altitude a tornado is quite wide. The chances of it engulfing an airplane are good. I was driving at an altitude of five feet or less. The swath of a tornado when it touches down—and many never touch down—is usually not very wide. My chances in the car were much better than ours in the plane.

In fact, I encountered some wind and rain, but not enough to bother me or my vehicle much. I made it to my hotel not much later than I would have if the flight had continued in Des Moines. The problem was that I was wearing shorts, sneakers, and a Bob Dylan tee shirt. I had everything that I needed for work in my briefcase, but all my clothes were still on the airplane in Cedar Rapids.

In the morning I checked the phone book in my hotel room. I discovered a Walmart within a couple of miles of the hotel. I drove there at about 8:00 and purchased a pair of pants and a shirt. They were not exactly elegant, but they would pass for one day. The people would just need to put up with my inappropriate footwear.

The advertising director told me that it would have been fine to come in my tee shirt and shorts, but he was not familiar with the condition of that outfit.

The only time that I felt a little frightened on a business trip involved a landing at National Airport in Washington, DC. I had heard that the runways at the airport were shorter³ than those at other major airports, and the pilots did seem to apply the brakes rather hard as soon as they touched the runway. On this one occasion, however, the US Airways pilot did not hit the brakes at all. The plane did not roll on the runway; it bounced. The pilot then immediately placed the aircraft in takeoff mode. The plane cleared the far end of the runway, rose steadily, circled back around, and eventually landed.

The pilot never explained what had happened, and the extra circuit only cost us a few minutes. Maybe we were coming in too “hot’; maybe something was on the runway. Who knows?

Food

Most of my flights occurred before 9/11. The longer flights offered meals in those days; on the shorter ones snacks were served. If the meal had more than one choice, my initial strategy was to take the one that sounded the most appetizing. After several disappointments I reversed course and chose the one that seemed less appetizing. That seemed to work better.

In the morning I ordered tomato juice with ice and black coffee. At other times I chose Diet Cokes (or Pepsi)—with the can if they would let me. I never ordered an alcoholic beverage in coach, but I usually had one Scotch on the rocks if I was in first class and on my way back to Hartford.

If the flight offered only snacks, my choices were—in order—potato chips, peanuts, and Biscoff cookies. I always passed on pretzels and anything that I had never heard of.

I substituted broccoli for the French fries.

I actually liked the food at restaurants at a few airports. I liked the babyback ribs at the Chili’s in Concourse F in Atlanta. The Usinger’s brats at the Milwaukee airport were outstanding. The Italian beef sandwiches in the American Airlines section of O’Hare were delicious. I frequented a Mexican cantina at DFW. The Taco Bell in the Baltimore airport sold beefy burritos for a while.

I found something tolerable at most of the other airports. Chicken wraps of some kind were usually reliable. I avoided fried foods and tried to eat some fruit. I usually enjoyed Chinese food, but I had bad luck with it at airports.

Puddle-jumpers

Most of my flights were at least an hour long, and I usually rode on full-sized jets. I did have a few memorable trips on smaller planes.

I flew on a small plane from Fort Meyers to Naples when I was asked to make a presentation to the Frederick Atkins Group. That flight was uneventful. I also once took the very short flight from Minneapolis to St. Cloud, MN. That flight hardly even seemed to get off of the ground. On subsequent trips to Herberger’s I rented a car in Minneapolis. The short flight was from LA to Fresno provided me with my first view of both LA smog and Bakersfield.

One short trip was momentous, not for me, but for my flying companion, Doug Pease. The Continental flight from Bradley to Newark was pretty choppy. I was gazing out the window the whole time, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Doug reach for the air sickness bag⁵. After we landed he nonchalantly threw the bag in a trash can. I asked him, “Don’t you want to keep that as a souvenir?”

Miscellaneous: For some strange reason on at least three occasions a woman with a young child waiting to board a flight approached me. Each woman asked if she could entrust the kid to me while she went to the ladies’ room (or maybe to the bar for a quick stiff one). Nothing happened.

On another occasion I sat next to a boy flying alone from Washington. I don’t remember the destination. The weather was terrible when we took off, and we bounced around quite a bit. It dd not seem to bother him at all. He had books and toys with him and was a perfect little gentleman the entire time. I had the impression that he had flown as much as I had.

Once on a trip from Bradley to, if I recall correctly, Chicago I sat in the very last row next to another computer programmer. We both ran small software companies. Although he worked on Macintoshes, and our clients used IBM mini-computers, we discovered that we had experienced similar frustrations in trying to get our businesses off the ground. We were lucky to find a niche market that lasted just long enough.I wonder how his turned out.

I could just imagine the agents at the ticket counter saying, “Oh, God, here’s another one. Put him in the back row with that other geek.”

My trip to Portland OR, on February 21, had several strange features. This is from my notes:

I drove to the airport Sunday evening and discovered that there was no place to park. I went to six parking lots. They were all full. I ended up parking in short-term parking. It costs $20 per day. Although this is outrageous, it will hardly make a dent in the cost of this trip. My plane from Hartford was totally full (most of the passengers appeared to be high school-aged). I assumed that at least some people would miss the plane because they couldn’t find a place to park, but I was wrong. From now on I guess I have to call Executive Valet Parking before I leave. If they don’t have any room, I will just leave my car at 7B and call a cab. It’s bound to be less than $140.
I wonder where all the people parked. Bradley has closed off half of the short-term parking and all of the B lot.
By contrast, the plane to Portland had only about forty or fifty people on it. …
This is a first. The crew on the flight from Cincinnati to Portland also was on the flight from Hartford to Cincinnati. Different plane; different gate; same people.

To get from the airport to the parking lot after a trip I had to call Executive. Someone ordinarily answered on the first ring. One night no one answered the phone. I hung up, waited a few minutes, and called again. The third time that I called it rang ten or fifteen times before a breathless woman answered. She took my information and said that she would be there as soon as she could. About thirty minutes later the bus arrived, and she was driving. She explained that three or four people ordinarily worked the night shift, but the others did not show up that evening. So, she had to answer the phone, go out in the lot to find the cars, drive them to the office area, and then drive the bus to the airport to pick up the customers at three different locations.

Four or five of us were on the bus at the same time. No one gave her any grief. Nothing similar ever happened again. I stuck with Executive, but I imagine that the company lost a few customers that evening.

If I could arrange it, I would work in a visit to my parents on the way to a client. This was often feasible for trips to Texas or California. Direct flights to DFW, Houston, and LA were available from Kansas City’s airport.

Yes, my signature on the back might have been more legible 25 years ago, but …

I arrived at the ticket counter at Bradley for one of those KC trips, and, to my dismay, I could not find my driver’s license. The agent would not give me my ticket without proof that I was the person who had purchased it. They would not accept my many credit cards as proof of identity. In the end they accepted my library card from the Enfield Public Library. They said that it would suffice because it was issued by a government organization. Yes, but it did not have my name on it anywhere! Isn’t the purpose of a piece of identification to show that the name on the card matches the name on the ticket?

Needless to say, I did not object. However, I knew that this acceptance only deferred my day of reckoning for a couple of days. I would certainly need to produce real ID to fly from KC to LA.

Delaying worrying about the problem was a good approach. My driver’s license was actually resting comfortably in my shirt pocket the entire time. I had placed it there that very morning so that I would not need to dig through my wallet to find my license. This was a good example of being “too clever by half.”

Luggage

A different trip that included a stop in Kansas City resulted in the most frantic half hour that I ever spent in an airport. My final destination was Des Moines. Because there were no direct flights to Des Moines from KC, I decided to rent a car in KC and drive to Des Moines. I would arrive sooner than if I flew, and I could set my own schedule. I must have played golf with my dad on that trip. I remember that I had brought my golf clubs with me.

At the end of the training/support/research session in Des Moines I flew back to Hartford on TWA. This meant that I had to stop in St. Louis. By coincidence the flight to St. Louis continued on to Hartford. This was a rare occurrence. I almost always needed to change planes when we reached the hub airport.⁴

At some point after I boarded the flight to St. Louis I noticed an anomaly on the baggage check that had been stapled to the envelope holding my ticket. Although the destination on the ticket was Hartford, the bags were designated for St. Louis. I pressed the call button for the flight attendant. When she arrived I explained the problem. She conferred with other crew members and then advised me to go to baggage claim in St. Louis (leaving my briefcase on the plan), retrieve my checked luggage, bring them up to the ticket counter, check the bags again, go through security again, walk to the gate, and reboard the plane.

I guess that there was no way to tell them not to unload my luggage.

I did all that, but it was exhausting. I had to drag my suitcase and my golf clubs up the stairs to the ticket counter. Fortunately, I found a short line there, and the trip back through security was not much of an issue before 9/11. I made it to the gate with perhaps five minutes to spare, but I was completely spent. The rest of the trip was blessedly uneventful.

On quite a few flights a crew member attempted to say something humorous over the airplane’s intercom. I only remember one who was really able to pull it off. The flight was on United from Bradley to Chicago. My recollection is that it was in the evening. The head flight attendant was absolutely hilarious. Almost all of the people in the cabin—who usually pay little attention to announcements—were in stitches. I only remember one line. It occurred when she was advising us to fasten our seat belts to prepare for the landing. She began with, “The captain reports that he has found an airport…”

1. On one flight to Pittsburgh, at the time a hub for US Airways. I could not find my big blue bag on the conveyor belt. I went to the agent. She found it for me. She said that it was the only piece of luggage on my flight that was not directed to another flight.

2. The client was Younkers, a chain of department stores based in downtown Des Moines. Much more about the AdDept installation at Younkers is posted here.

3. In fact, the longest runway at National Airport was less than half the length of the runways at the other major airport in the Washington area. It was also much shorter than the runways at Bradley.

4. I can remember only one other time that my flight continued to my final destination after a stop at a hub. It was a Continental flight from Bradley through Cleveland to Houston. I was the only passenger who stayed on the plane, but the crew for the second leg was the same. This was in the days that the airlines served food. The flight attendant apologized to me because the meal on the second leg was the same as she had served me on the flight from Hartford. I ate both meals. I have almost never turned down free food.

5. While I was working at TSI I never got sick on an airplane. However, on our vacation in Tanzania in 2015 I had an absolutely awful experience on the first leg of our journey from Serengeti to Katavi. The tale of woe is told here.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Clients: May Company

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Mike

The G. Fox & Co. store in downtown Hartford.

As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central Connecticut was—by far—G. Fox, a traditional department store similar to Macy’s that was based in Hartford. They even had a store that was within walking distance of our new house in Enfield.¹ I was well aware that G.Fox was part of the May Company and that the May Company was largely responsible for the development of the mall.

I had purchased a book from somewhere that contained marketing information on large retailers. In it I learned that the May Company, which had been in business since 1877, operated the following divisions in 1989:

G. Fox & Co. based in Hartford.
The Hecht Company with headquarters in Arlington, VA.
Filene’s, a former Federated division based in Boston.
Foley’s, a former Federated division based in Houston.
Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh.
Famous-Barr in St. Louis
J. W. Robinson Co. in Los Angeles.
May California in Los Angeles.
May D&F in Denver.
May Ohio in Cleveland.
Lord & Taylor in New York.
Meier & Frank in Portland, OR.
Venture, a chain of discount stores based in O’Fallon, MO.
Payless, a chain of shoe stores based in Miami.

That’s fourteen independently run divisions that were, except for maybe the last one or two, good prospects for the AdDept system. I figured that if we could persuade the parent company to commit to using AdDept in all of its divisions, TSI would be set for life. Maybe they would even buy us! That was the way that small software companies thought (and dreamed) in the late eighties.

In fact, the May Company during that period was busy acquiring other department stores, and that attitude put a lot of stress on the advertising departments of the divisions that acquired the new stores. There is no doubt that the May Company’s acquisition of thirteen Thalhimer’s stores in 1992 was the impetus for Hecht’s to purchase the AdDept system that year.² Hecht’s advertising department had been using a PC-based system for producing corporate reports. It was completely incapable of handling the extra load. Similarly, when May D&F was folded into Foley’s in 1993, the Houston division suddenly was facing a greatly increased workload. That caused them to call TSI for help, and we installed an AdDept system for them.³ Capacity was never an issue for AdDept; we always proposed hardware near the lowest end of the available AS/400 models. If a client outgrew its hardware, it could migrate to a more powerful model.

In 1993 G. Fox was absorbed by the Filene’s division. Having a pretty good idea of the problems that this would cause for the advertising department of Filene’s, we tried to interest them in using AdDept. However, for reasons that I have never completely understood, we were unable to get our foot in that door for many years. Filene’s advertising department never took advantage of a significant portion of the system productively enough that we were able to use them as a reference.⁴

Instead, our third May Company installation was at Lord & Taylor⁵, where I learned that L&T did not play by the same rules as the other divisions. In some ways that caused headaches; in other ways it was delightful.

Doug Pease: In 1993 Sue and I hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. One of the primary reasons that we selected him was because he had formerly worked in G. Fox’s advertising department in Hartford. He was looking for a job because the G. Fox stores had been converted to the Filene’s logo, and the advertising for those stores was planned and purchased from the office in Boston. Doug was quite familiar with the work flow of an advertising department that was similar to the ones that TSI was targeting, and he also had some contacts in the industry. Our hope was that he could grab the brass ring of the May Company for us while I was busy trying to get the systems for the three divisions—and a few other retailers—that we had sold up and running.

This was a very important time for TSI. My image of those days resembles a hockey stick. Until that time TSI had experienced rather flat earnings. We were basically just getting by. By contrast, in the last seven years of the twentieth century we had as much work as we could handle, and our financial statements were much better.

Unfortunately, I have almost no notes for that entire period. I talked with Doug on a regular basis, but my focus was on the current installations. I depended on him to establish a relationship with prospective customers. As soon as we hired him we did a mailing to prospective customers, and Doug took to the phones. He talked with several people at the May Company.

The main liaison person between the May Company and the advertising departments of its divisions was named Fred Christen. I never heard anyone say a bad word about him. He had, of course, heard about our work at our three installations, and he seemed to be impressed.

I am pretty sure that we had another “guardian angel” at the corporate headquarters. I often seemed to be at an advertising department at a division at the same time as a corporate auditor whose first name was Linus. His job was to assess the way that divisions were reporting their advertising expenses and income from co-op programs for their vendors. He seemed to be impressed with the way that AdDept handled these things.

Fred Christen left the May Company shortly after Doug arrived at TSI. I heard that Fred left to manage his family’s business. Doug established a relationship with Fred’s successor, Dennis Wallace. I am pretty sure that Doug made at least one trip to St. Louis, but I don’t remember the details. At any rate, at some point the May Company decided that AdDept should be installed in all of the department store divisions. At that point Robinsons and May California had merged, May D&F had been folded into Foley’s, Kaufmann’s had taken over the May Ohio stores⁶, and the May Company had divested the Venture stores. So, we learned about five new clients in one swell foop: Famous-Barr⁷, Filene’s, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Kaufmann’s.

In retrospect I find it rather incredible that I have so little recollection of the details of how or when this decision came about. It was definitely a momentous occasion for TSI, but I remember no fanfare or celebration at all. I don’t think that the deal was finalized until 1996 or 1997. In the interim I installed quite a few AdDept systems at other retailers.

Employees at the May Company treated us fairly from day one right up until the time that the company was purchased by Federated in 2006. Most of TSI’s dealings with the May Company were at the division level. The following is a summary of my notes of our dealings with the corporate entity after all of the systems had been installed.

Notes: The first note that I have is dated October 18, 1999. It makes reference to a “sales tax fiasco”. I think that this must be about whether it was necessary to charge sales tax on our software and services. Because all of our AdDept clients were in other states, we were generally able to avoid doing so. However, there is an Excel file with a similar date that lists three invoices for Robinsons-May, which was in California, and three for Filene’s, which was in Massachusetts. Massachusetts and Connecticut had an agreement by which each collected taxes for the other. So, we definitely needed to charge Filene’s tax.

We also had a problem with California. TSI’s second accountant, whose name I do not remember, was hired in the early days of the AdDept system. She advised us to register with every state in which we had clients. This was poor advice, and we changed accountants shortly after that. However, there is no way to take back a company’s registration.

I vaguely remember an issue from several years earlier that involved an arrangement that my partner (and later wife) Sue Comparetto had made with Gottschalks, another store in California. In this case, the invoices were probably sent to St. Louis and paid by the May Company. We had never registered in Missouri, and we never paid sales tax there.

On January 2 of 2000 I wrote the following email to my other partner, Denise Bessette:

I think that we need to get something established as soon as possible with the May Co. to get compensated for your time and mine. Do you have any suggestions? I also think that it might be time for one or both of us of us to go to St. Louis and talk turkey with them. I am serious about this. I really am tired of not knowing where we stand.

I found a six-page document dated February 7, 2001. It concerned the specs for a Planning System Interface. Evidently they had an application called WD that they wanted to feed. They provided me with a document describing the system that had at least sixty-seven pages. Evidently we had been talking about this for at least two years. The document lists my questions and their incredibly vague responses. No one could conceivably quote an interface based on the responses that we received. I only vaguely remember this whole process. “WD” sounds familiar, but I am pretty certain that we never quoted it, much less coded it.

Denise and I went to visit the May Company together, but I think that it was in 2002. I went to St. Louis in 2001 to install AdDept for use by Filene’s on an AS/400 in the Midwest Data Center. I stayed in the Adam’s Mark Hotel. I did not like where they told me to stay. This is what I wrote to Denise.

My hotel room in St. Louis is absurd. It is a huge suite. I located a microwave and refrigerator inside what looked like a chest of some kind. For some reason it is much easier to find these two features in places where it is impossible to buy food (because I am downtown). The bathroom is right by the door, about a quarter mile from the bed. There are two TV sets, but no Jacuzzi, at least not in the room. The thermostat is out of whack. You have to set it to nearly 80 to keep the room from being frigid. I fear that they may not offer free breakfast here. They did not mention anything when I checked in.
It is supposed to rain all day here. There may even be thunderstorms. I was too lazy to run on Sunday. I will probably regret it today.
I hope that the May Co. has a comfortable nap room. I have become quite accustomed to the two-hour post-breakfast naps.

I think that the guy on the phone is Dennis Wallace. I don’t recognize the other two.

I remember that room and the rain much better than I remember what I did at the May Company. On subsequent visits I stayed at a nearby Hampton Inn. Incidentally, more than two decades later I still take lots of naps.

I found an agenda for a meeting with the May Company dated August of 2002. This must be the trip that Denise and I took together. Here it is:

TSI
1. People
2. History
  1. Founded in 1979.
  2. Advertising in 1981
  3. Retail in 1988.
  4. First May division (Hecht’s) in 1991
3. Custom programming
  1. Good at diagnosis.
  2. Incredibly efficient system of delivering custom code using BASIC.
  3. Two principles:
    1. There should be one version of the truth;
    2. Everyone should be able to take advantage of work done by others.
  4. People capable of completing difficult projects within parameters.
AdDept
1. Intent
  1. All administrative aspects.
  2. All media.
  3. Easily customizable.
  4. Require a minimum of local support — AS/400.
2. Retail advertising is difficult.
  1. All the difficulties of retail — stores, merchants, accounting, A/P, and co-op
  2. All the difficulties of advertising
    1. Multiple media, each with almost completely different structure
    2. Media scheduling, production scheduling, estimating, loan room, etc.
3. System design
  1. Scheduling:
    1. Every media represented in the ad file.
    2. Open on-line database works best when each person updates the system with information as soon as it is available.
    3. One main program, many well-normalized files.
    4. History of significant changes:
      - Production.
      - Financial.
  2. Financial:
    1. One main set of files (header and detail).
    2. Many front ends with supporting detail files.
    3. Two months, three amounts.
    4. Interfaces
  3. Cost accounting (data warehouse)
    1. Detail at the department level using May Company rules.
    2. Can also be used for other purposes:
      - Planning
      - Store-level analysis
  4. Add-ons
    1. Productivity
    2. Competitors
    3. Loan room inventory and transactions
    4. Photo studio
May future plans
1. Filene’s
2. Uniformity
3. Best practices
Technology
1. Explain CFINT
2. Explain performance of 5250 v. browser-based
3. Why “web-facing” doesn’t help
4. Explain V5
  1. BASIC compiler.
    1. Should we convert to C?
    2. Should we convert to Net.Data?
    3. Should we convert to WAS/Java?
    4. Should we look to Wintel?
  2. Can’t save back very far.
  3. InfoPrint server allows output as .pdf files.
5. Browser-based programming requires VPN or the equivalent for support.
Other things
1. AxN.
2. Peggy Southworth labels.
What else?

Some of this has fled my memory. I do remember that CFINT was a program that regulated performance. Prior to version 5 of the operating system the users could allocate priorities for jobs between “interactive” jobs (5250 sessions on terminals or PCs) and “batch” jobs (everything else, including jobs that relied on something between themselves and the operating system, such as a Java server). IBM wanted to show that the Java jobs had good performance. To do so it slowed down all jobs that were running as interactive. Nothing that IBM had previously done was as hated as this tactic.

I also remember the Peggy Southworth labels. Every division was required to create these labels for each print media job in a precisely specified format. We wrote a program for one of the divisions to do this for them.

The notes indicate that Denise and I met with Rob Cole and Mike Henry. I only vaguely remember them. I have a more vivid memory of Lew Allder, who was a Vice President in the IT department. He showed us around the machine room and assured us that the small size of our organization was not an issue with him or anyone else at the May Company. Everyone with whom we talked was very supportive of what we had done and what we were planning for the future.

I also remember one incident that occurred when we were driving either from or to Lambert, the St. Louis airport. I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves on the bridge that goes across the river to East St. Louis, IL. I had no interest in taking a tour of that town. When there was a break in the traffic I jerked the rental car’s steering wheel to the left, made a clean U-turn and headed back to St. Louis. I think that this maneuver shocked Denise, at least a little.

I tried to find information on what became of the May Company employees mentioned in this entry. However, I was not able to find any information on the Internet about most of them. After a good bit of digging I found Dennis Wallace’s LinkedIn page, which is here. In 2022 he appeared to be working for a company in Houston that provides technical assistance to the hospitality industry.

1. All right, I never actually walked to G. Fox’s store in Enfield Square mall, but I could have.

2. The Hecht’s installation is described here.

3. The account of the installation for Foley’s is provided here.

4. The troubled AdDept installation at Filene’s has been documented here.

5. The Lord & Taylor installation is described here.

6. Doug and I made a strong pitch to Debra Edwards at May Ohio, but the division was eliminated before we could close the deal. That “whiff” is described here.

7. I think that Famous-Barr may have already committed to getting AdDept before Doug arrived on the scene, but their decision was probably made because of the May Company’s commitment to the project. The installation at Famous-Barr is described here.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Famous-Barr

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Mike

May Co. division in St. Louis. Continue reading →

Famous-Barr (FB) was a chain of department stores based in St. Louis Mo. It was owned by the May Company.

The aspect of TSI’s dealings with FB that I most clearly recall occurred before the installation. I think that this was in 1993 before TSI hired Doug Pease (introduced here) as Marketing Director, but I may be wrong. TSI received a phone call from Vicki Rosenkoetter, FB’s Advertising Director. Vicki had heard about AdDept and was interested in attending a demonstration.

I immediately phoned the IBM office in St. Louis to arrange for a room for my presentation, a ritual with which I was quite familiar. For the first time ever the woman with whom I was speaking asked me a question that I had difficulty answering: “How many customers are coming?”

I calmly explained that the audience members would not currently be customers. They were prospective users of the AdDept system that my company, TSI, had developed to run on an IBM AS/400.

She repeated, “How many customers are coming?”

“I don’t know. Is there some kind of limit?”

“Find out how many customers are coming and call me back.”

I did. Vicki provided an estimate of a dozen or so. IBM then produced enough employees so that one was seated beside each person who attended. At the time I was amazed that Famous-Barr was able to allow so many employees to attend. I was ordinarily happy to address a handful of people.

In retrospect it seemed likely that some must have been May Co. people. The parent company’s headquarters was only a block or so away from the downtown FB store that also housed the Advertising Department, and the May Co. was definitely a customer that had a lot of IBM “iron” in its data center.

As for all of those IBMers, I don’t know what their function was. They did not interrupt my presentation, which seemed to go very well.

Dave O. Bad camera and worse photographer.

Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay before the contract was signed and the system for FB was installed. During much of that time I worked with Dave Ostendorf², whose position at FB was “Advertising Systems Analyst & Admin”.

FB had been using a PC-based system for many administrative functions. Dave developed it. I was a little worried when I learned that Dave would be the primary contact. No coder is ever happy when his work was being replaced by someone else’s. However, Dave understood that he had squeezed as much out of his approach as he could, and it was not enough. Since he was already very familiar with both the expectations and the attitudes of everyone in the department, he was often a great help.

On the other hand, the fact that Dave was formerly their custom programmer and could deliver changes without worrying about other clients sometimes caused frustration in TSI’s relationship with FB’s users. I wrote this in 2000:

They loved this system, but they had to abandon it because the architecture could not accept the volumes they were trying to put through it. Essentially our strategy was to replicate the output from their previous system.
Because the department had a programmer on their staff, they became accustomed to quick customization. They are therefore frustrated by our inability to deliver what they want as quickly as they want it.
It is very difficult to get the managers to agree to use AdDept for anything new. They like their PC programs. They still use a lot of spreadsheets and small pieces of the old system.

Dave provided almost all the information needed from the media managers. It was seldom necessary for me to talk with them . I met often with Roxanne Shanks³, the Business Office Manager about the way that she wanted to handle financial issues. In 2000 Roxanne went to part-time, and Ervin O’Neal⁴ was named the Business Office Manager.

After Vicki left in 2001, I think that Jim Anderson became the Advertising Director. I found some photos of him, but I do not remember working with him. It is embarrassing that I have so few memories of the FB installation. It may also be a testament to the fact that Dave was an excellent liaison who made my job much easier.

At some point David Graves became the official liaison with TSI, but I think that we only worked with him on hardware and connectivity issues. I don’t remember talking with him.

1. Vicki Rosenkoetter worked at FB until 2001. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. After Macy’s took over the May Co. stores Dave went to work for Macy’s Corporate Marketing. He resigned that position in 2007.

3. Roxanne worked at Foley’s before coming to St. Louis. Her LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

4. Ervin’s LinkedIn page is located here.

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