Tag Archives: TSI

1984-2014 TSI: Denise Bessette

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Programmer becomes partner. Continue reading →

TSI’s first, last, and best programmer was Denise Bessette. The beginnings of her career at TSI are documented here. At some point in the second half of the eighties she decided to finish her undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and then get a masters degree in econ at Trinity College in Hartford. She lived in Stafford, which is forty-two miles from Smith and thirty-two miles from Trinity. She commuted to both schools. During this lengthy period Denise continued to work part-time at TSI. She also raised her son Chris. Frankly, I don’t know how she did it. She never seemed burnt out or exhausted.

After she graduated she returned to work full time. At that time I named her vice-president of application development. I also arranged that Denise could share a portion of Sue’s office. At the time I did not think that there was much more that I could do. The layout of our office in Enfield (described here) provided for only two offices. Sue had the corner office. The other one was used by our salesmen. I worked in the computer room.

This arrangement seemed to work fairly well for a while. In 1994, because of TSI’s “second crisis” (described here), Denise was able to establish herself in that office. A few years later Denise decided that she needed to try to work at a company in which she had more control over her situation. This prompted TSI’s “third crisis”, which is described here.

After that situation was very pleasantly resolved, Denise and I worked productively as partners until the company was dissolved in 2014. She was in charge of getting the programming and support done and hiring the technical staff. She also continued to handle the payroll. The administrative and sales people reported to me. I continued to do the sales calls, demos, installations, and training. I also spent countless hours researching alternative approaches to our way of doing business.

After TSI moved its office to East Windsor and installed a network with a connections to the Internet, Denise handled all phases of it and worked with our clients to establish and maintain access to their computer systems. I was more than happy to let her deal with those issues.

She also managed the people who cleaned the office and a few other similar functions.

Memories: Denise caught on to my style of programming faster than any other coder that we hired. I was somewhat upset when she went part-time to be able to finish college. The silver lining was that it was unlikely that she would quit before she got her degree, or as it turned out, degrees.

In the eighties Denise sometimes brought her son Christopher into the office. She stashed him in the supply closet. No, she did not shut the door. He seemed to be content with whatever she gave him to play with there.

I remember that on one occasion Denise invited Sue and me to supper at the house in Stafford where she lived with her husband Ray for supper. It was a very nice house with a deck. The heating was provided by one or two stoves that burned wood chips. I had never seen such a thing.

That was the only time that we visited them. If you are wondering whether we reciprocated the invitation, the answer is no. I am not sure why, but we almost never invited anyone over to any of our residences in Connecticut. We probably were still living in Rockville.

I played golf with Ray and his dad a few times. They liked to play at Grassmere, a short public course in Enfield with only nine holes. I seem to remember that one hole had a huge tree right in front of the green. If you did not hit your drive far enough, your only shot to the green was to try to hit a wedge or nine-iron over the tree.

When we hired Denise she was a smoker. In the late eighties she quit cold turkey at about the same time that Sue, Patti Corcoran, and my dad also quit. I don’t remember her getting irritable or fat during the drying out period.

On one occasion her kitchen sink got backed up because Denise poured instant mashed potatoes down it. I bought her a box of instant mashed potatoes as a memento. Later I kicked a dent in one of our cabinets when I got upset at a client. She bought me an inflatable Fred Flintstone to punch when I got angry. It is still in the basement in 2023, but I haven’t tried to inflate it in a few decades.

Denise knew that I read quite a bit. She was taken aback when I casually remarked that I did not enjoy reading female authors, especially ones in the science fiction or fantasy genres.1 On her recommendations I read several Anne Tyler books. They were all fairly good, but I had to admit that Breathing Lessons was close to a masterpiece.

I was always envious of Denise’s cars—a sporty Mazda when she started working for us and a string of BMW’s thereafter. When in 2007 I bought my sapphire blue Honda Accord coupe, she said, “That sure doesn’t look like my grandmother’s Honda!”

She was almost never ill in the thirty years that I worked with her. Then again, neither was I. I remember that she got an infection from inner-tubing on the Farmington River on one of TSI’s summer outings. We never tried that again.

Denise and I enjoyed a very productive trip together when we attended the IBM PartnerWorld convention in San Diego in 2000. The details are described here.

Denise drank mostly tea and Diet Coke in cans.2 She ordinarily just dipped the teabags in the hot water once or twice. I’ve never seen such a weak beverage. Her favorite was Earl Grey. I purloined for her envelopes of tea from the hotels at which I stayed. She seldom took a lunch break; she just grazed on what she brought with her.

At some point in the nineties Sue Comparetto, Denise, and I attended a performance of Carmen at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford. We all enjoyed the opera well enough, but I was disappointed that, as usual, Sue was late and so we missed the talk that was presented before the show.

Several years later Denise and I spent an hour or two at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. She wanted to show me some impressionist paintings. They did nothing for me. I am a Philistine when it comes to art.

Denise was afraid of escalators. She avoided them if possible. If not, she was very tentative. She did not like the moving sidewalks at airports, either.

When Christopher was in high school Denise told me that his best friend was a girl in his class. She alleged that they were just friends. Although this sounded preposterous to me, I kept my mouth shut.

Competition.

I remember when Christopher graduated from high school and was in the process of selecting a college. Denise wanted him to go to a good school in New England. He wanted to go to Penn State. I advised her to tell him that he would have a better chance with the girls at a local school. At PSU half of the male students were linebackers on the football team. I doubt that she took my sagacious advice. He became a Nittany Lion.

She especially did not like it when Christopher joined a fraternity in State College, but he somehow survived the experience, and Denise is now a grandma.

Their cottage was much smaller and a few blocks from the Sound.

Denise loved bodies of water—oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers, anything. She was always happier when she was close enough to experience a body of water through any sense. For years she and her husband Ray had a cottage in Old Saybrook near the Long Island Sound. Several times they took vacations in Aruba.

In 2013 Denise and Ray sold both their house in Stafford and the cottage and moved to Cape Cod. I saw her only a few times in the last year that we worked together and never since.

Business Relationship: For the most part Denise and I had a very productive relationship. Largely it was a case of staying out of each other’s way and (after I made her a partner in 1997) coming together in November and December to evaluate progress and distribute bonuses.

A blog entry about the agendas for the periodic meetings that the two of us enjoyed from 2001 through 2006 has been posted here.

Denise provided some needed organization and discipline to TSI’s approach to programming. My “cowboy coder” philosophy dictated that when I was at a client’s site, and someone complained about a problem, I would immediately investigate it. I often was able to fix it on the spot within a few minutes. This often made me a hero at the client’s office, but a pain back at TSI. It was not easy to isolate all of the things that I had changed, bring them back to the office in an orderly manner, and integrate them into the master copy of the system without disrupting processes used by other clients. Keep in mind that I installed thirty-six AdDept systems, and they were all running the same code.

I eventually had to refrain from addressing any problems at a client’s site. I documented them but did not change the code. … All right, I’ll fess up. Sometimes I could not keep myself from making changes that I was 100 percent certain would not interfere with what was being done at the office. Denise was not a bit happy when I did this. Perhaps we were fortunate that eventually our clients lost the willingness to pay for me to travel to visit them.

The only other point of contention between Denise and me involved research. Both of us knew that the platform on which we had built AdDept–BASIC programs on the AS/400–was considered obsolete by many people in the world of data processing. In most cases these people had veto power over a purchase of our system. It was generally a waste of time to try to persuade them that their evaluation was erroneous. They were hired as experts. We were just potential vendors.

Denise and I agreed that the ideal solution would be to move the whole system to the Internet to avoid the standards that were being established by IT departments. This approach is now called Cloud Computing. However, we were never satisfied that we could do it without man-years of work and considerable expense.

If there was no pathway to the cloud-based approach, the issue was whether the problem was BASIC or the AS/400. I thought that we should investigate the programming languages that coders were using on platforms outside of IBM. At that time the most popular languages were C and C++. C was somewhat similar in structure to BASIC. C++ was its object-oriented version. I spent some time researching the IBM version of C and concluded that a transition to C was possible but unquestionably difficult.

For reasons that I never understood Denise was quite upset at me for spending any time investigating this possibility. I had absolutely no intention of asking her to convert the programs. I was just trying to see whether it was a possibility.

The other side of this coin was Denise’s advocacy of converting all of our BASIC programs to a version of RPG, a language that was popular on the AS/400 but nowhere else, dubbed ILE.3 I never understood the reason for this, but it kept the programmers busy after the requests for programming began to dry up. So, for the most part I kept my opinions to myself.

After Denise moved to the Cape she only came into the office a few times a month. She was in rather constant communication by telephone with Jason Dean, who, at that point, was our only programmer. I liked it a lot better when Denise was in the office all of the time, but my philosophy had always been to take advantage of whatever time she could give me.

1. I need to explain this. I have no doubt that women can write as well as men by virtually any measure. In 2023 (as this is being written) they definitely dominate the publishing industry. However, I contend that women have a basic fantasy about being rescued, and men have one about being heroic. I contend that this is not cultural but innate. Nature, not nurture.

I find that reading about the latter fantasies more interesting than the former. Is that a crime? I have never like a science fiction or fantasy book by a female author. Several times I got suspicious in the middle of one in which the author used initials or a pseudonym and looked up the author used initials or a pseudonym. After looking the author up and discovering the secret I stopped reading. Before you ask, I have never read a single word of the Harry Potter books.

2. I always thought that cola from plastic bottles tasted a little better. For some reason the two liter bottles are always cheaper and usually on sale somewhere. I like both Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke equally. I always have bought whichever one was cheaper. After the business closed I switched to the caffeine-free versions.

3A 220-page document from IBM that aims to show why ILE is a superior approach can be viewed here.

1988-2014 TSI: The Programmers

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Supporters and coders. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found a copy of the lyrics:

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

On corn cobs I’d be gnawin’.
I could graze upon your law-n.
It is my firm belief.
My dentitions would be so neat.
I’d devour piles of roast beef,
If I only had some teeth.

Oh, I could eat a pie.
I’d chew up all the steaks that you could buy.
I’d masticate on pork chops bye the bye.
If you object,
I’ll bite your thigh.

From ear to ear I’d be grinnin’.
Young girls’ hearts I’d be winnin’.
I’d steal them like a thief.
I would floss away my tartar,
and stop actin’ like a martyr,
If I only had some teeth.

Music by Harold Arlen; Words by Mike Wavada
TSI’s Christmas party with the Edward Owen Company at the Nutmeg House: Jamie Lisella, Steve, Doug Pease, Ken Owen, Denise, Sandy, someone, me, someone else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 16 is National Airborne Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucia Hagen, Harry, and Michael.

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

Michael’s boat.

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

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

Sean Finnegan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Sean Finnegan’s LinkeIn page is here.

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

1998 TSI: The Third Crisis

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Keeping Denise in the fold. Continue reading →

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

Background: For me the period from 1995 through 1999 was the busiest, most exciting, and most stressful of any that I spent working for TSI. It was also the most potentially terrifying period. Our marketing director, Doug Pease1, had hit the mother lode and put us in a position to dominate the market on which I had decided to focus our attention back in the late eighties.

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Shaw.

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

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

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

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

TSI’s corporate ladder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry and Denise dressed up for a TSI Christmas party.

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

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

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

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

The offices were on an upper floor of this store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denise as Principal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1994 TSI: The Second Crisis

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

This entry requires quite a bit of background.

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

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

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

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

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

I copied company names and addresses from the Yellow Pages.

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

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

Enjoyable but frustrating.

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

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

What about “sell”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Fire hydrants!
  • Junk.
  • Really old junk.
Sue is not the only hoarder in her family. These photos were taken in the lot behind the Slanetz Corp. office.

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

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

No more mainframe announcements, please.

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

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

1994 was a good year for J2P2, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one else thought that it was a mistake.

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

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

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

Amazon sells these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new logo as it appeared on invoices and letterhead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1985-1999 TSI: Administrative Employees (Rockville & Enfield)

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The record-keepers. Continue reading →

This may be the most difficult entry for me. I worked with all of these people, but I only worked closely with the last few. I hired only the last few. Sue hired most of the rest.

TSI’s administrative area had much more turnover than any other area. Some of the people whom we hired did nothing but bookkeeping. Some were hired primarily to help with marketing. Some were hired to be Sue’s assistant, which meant they could be doing anything or nothing. I am not even sure what responsibilities some of these people had.

I do not remember interviewing any of these people or talking with Sue about their qualifications or salary. My impression is that they just sort of appeared in the office.

Our first administrative employee was Debbie Priola. Her story is told here. Kate Behart was hired either just before or just after Debbie left. Details of her employment at TSI are posted here. For several years Kate, Denise Bessette, Sue and I were the core group, first in Rockville and then in Enfield. However, we often had additional administrative people—one, two, or even three at a time. I am pretty sure that I have completely forgotten some of them

One of Sue’s primary sources of new employees was our client base. One of the earliest of those hires had been Caroline Harrington, who did the bookkeeping for Darby O’Brien Advertising (DOB) (described here). I never really understood this. I worked closely with Caroline during the installation of the GrandAd system at DOB, and I thought that she did a really good job. One day she must have either called Sue or been called by Sue, and somehow she ended up as our employee. I don’t know why she wanted to work for us. It always seemed to me like a step down from her responsibilities at DOB. Then again, I am not sure how Sue described what her responsibilities at TSI would be.

I did not work much with Caroline in TSI’s office. At the time I was spending at least half of the business hours out of the office at one client or another. When I was in the office I spent most of my time preparing work for Denise or going over work that she had already done. If I had any time left, I spent it writing programs, dealing with support issues, or writing proposals or contracts. Also, I took a nap every day after lunch.

Caroline’s employment did not last very long. I don’t know why she left or where she went; one day I learned that she was no longer working at TSI.

Another person whom Sue does not remember was a young woman who worked for us for one summer between her junior and senior years of college. I don’t remember what she did for us, but I do remember that I was impressed with her. However, the impression was not strong enough to prevent me from forgetting her name.

I had hoped to recruit her as a permanent employee until she told me that she planned to move to Japan after she graduated.

Crater.
Coyne.

I remember absolutely nothing about Linda White, whose name I found on TSI’s payroll for 1989. Sue remembered her. Apparently she worked for us for a week or two. Then one day she went out for lunch and never returned to the office or called. She might be holed up in parts unknown playing cutthroat pinochle with Judge Crater1 and Thomas Coyne2.

I remember Kim Ouellette. We hired her shortly after we moved to Enfield in 1988. I don’t remember what her precise role was at TSI, but I do recall that at Christmas that year she was my “Secret Santa”. She gave me three pairs of wool socks. I lost one of the socks, but I still wear the other pairs on cold winter days.

Chris Vegliante (she/her) worked at Group 4 Design, one of TSI’s clients (described here). I don’t recall what caused her to leave Group 4 and join our staff. Nor do I remember when or why she departed.

No badminton here today.

I remember two things about Chris. I am pretty sure that she came over to our house once, the summer that we decided to host the summer outing at our house in Enfield. I grilled some burgers and dogs, and we set up a badminton net in the yard between two of our maple trees. Those two trees in 2021 have grown to the point that they nearly touch in the middle. No one would consider playing badminton there today.

My other recollection of Chris is about the day in 1988 on which I received two telephone calls from the Hartford Courant. When the second call came, she announced “I think that you won that short story contest!” The whole event is described here.

For a short period in 1989 a woman named Judy Morrill3 worked for TSI, specifically for Sue. She even came over to our house for a visit once. She brought her young son, who was terrified by our cats, Rocky and Woodrow. He screamed for five full minutes.

Both cats were completely harmless.4

Galilee Pease5 (she/her) was a college student who worked for TSI over two summers. She was an excellent employee. Everyone liked working with her. We had much more success with college students than with permanent employees.

When we were looking for someone to help with the Y2K project, she mentioned that her brother Fred, who stayed up all night playing computer games, was available. She warned us that we might not like him.

Bernice Gannuscio6 worked at Keiler Advertising, but she lived in Enfield. She asked us if we might have an opening. I thought that she could be a valuable employee for TSI. The problem was that we wanted her to answer the telephone in the office, but she had hearing problems that prevented her from being able to do this very well. She investigated hearing aids, but none that she could tolerate seemed to work for her.

Titus?

Titus Britt7 had the distinction of being taller than I was and just as skinny. He was also the only Black person who ever applied for a job at TSI. He lived in the southern part of the state, and so the drive to Enfield was considerable. Because he loved his Camaro, he did not mind too much.

I was never quite sure what Titus’s role at TSI was, but when he heard that TSI’s sales rep, Tom Moran, and I were planning to fly to Seattle to demonstrate the AdDept system for The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest, he asked if he could come. I don’t remember why we agreed to this—from a business perspective it made no sense—but we did. I think that he had family there.

Terri.

Terri Provost8 came to work for us in the late eighties. Her previous employer was Colonial Realty, the company that bamboozled thousands of people in Hartford in the late eighties. The scam and its results are described here. Terri was a secretary for William Candelori, one of the company’s principals. Even after the scheme unfolded, she still had great respect for him. He was charged only with tax evasion. The other partners went to prison or committed suicide.

Evidently, although CR treated its investors with disdain, it was very nice to some of its employees. Terri told us that the company took its employees to a casino in (I think) Atlantic City. Her boss even gave her some money with which to gamble. I never adopted such a policy.

Not Terri.

Terri and I went on a sales call in Manhattan once. I wrote about it here.

We had no dress code at TSI. As an army veteran who was forced to wear a uniform at work for eighteen months I felt that this was my right. It was never a problem. Most of us wore shorts in the summer and jeans or something similar in colder weather. On more than one occasion Terri came to work in a short dress and back-seamed stockings. I did not know what to think of this. It seemed totally inappropriate to me, but I have never in my life criticized anyone else’s sense of fashion. I said nothing.

Terri came back to visit the office with her young son.

Terri had a baby while she worked at TSI, but the child died after a few days. She kept a picture of him on her desk. I certainly would not wanted to be reminded of a sad event at work9. I said nothing.

My recollection is that Terri became pregnant again and decided to quit her job at TSI. By then she was working for Michael Symolon. I don’t think that they got along too well. I know that Michael was more than happy to replace her.

The woman that Michael hired to replace Terri was Linda Fieldhouse10. She was a joy to work with, and she seemed to like both Sue and me. I am not sure why she quit. I vaguely remember some health problems.

Two from this can, please.

I remember a woman who worked for us in a period in which both Sue and I seemed to be very tense. Both of us drank coffee, and one of the prime responsibilities of the administrative person was to make sure that the coffee pot was not empty. We always made the coffee with two scoops of regular coffee and two scoops of decaffeinated coffee. This employee did not get the message and made it with four scoops of regular coffee. So, for a week or two, Sue and I consumed twice as much caffeine as we thought.

I think that this may be the same lady whose favorite task was the printing of program listings, a task that required very little skill or knowledge. Mostly it was just making sure that the printer did not jam. Everyone else just let the printer do its thing, but she enjoyed monitoring it.

This lady left TSI soon after the coffee incident was discovered. I don’t remember her name, but I found evidence that someone name Bettijane Kaschuluk11 worked for TSI in 1987. Neither Sue nor I remember anyone with that name.

Ann Locke12, who was married to Sue’s cousin, Jimmy Locke, worked for TSI off and on for a while. I think that she mostly did cleaning. I once remarked that she “brought a little bit of Appalachia to TSI.” Denise later told me that she was shocked when I said this, but she later told me that she understood what I meant.

My sister Jamie was married to Joe Lisella Jr. for the decade or so that she lived in Simsbury, CT, and West Springfield, MA. She worked for TSI for part of that time. Her daughter, Cadie Mapes, also worked for TSI part time. That period is discussed in detail here.

1. Judge Crater disappeared without a trace in 1930. His story is here.

2. Thomas Coyne was scheduled to appear on the fourth episode of the podcast Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone in 2018 . He never showed up or called to cancel. The cast organized an international search that lasted for months but he was never spotted by any “nobodies”. However, I don’t think that any listeners looked form him at the survival school in California that he runs.

3. I think that Judy Morrill still lives in Enfield.

4. This was not strictly true. Rocky never hurt anyone, but Woodrow, although extremely friendly, had an alter-ego whom I called Nutso Kitty. His eyes glazed over, and all bets were off. Once while I was napping Nutso Kitty pounced on my left hand and ravaged it with all twenty claws. I had to throw him out of the bedroom, and I mean that literally.

5. Bernice now goes by Bernice Zampano. Her LinkedIn page is here. It does not include her experience at TSI. I think that she lives in Portland, CT.

6. Galilee is now known as Galilee Simmons. I think that she lives in Utica, NY. Her website is here, but I don’t think that it has been updated in years.

7. I think that this may be Titus Britt’s LinkedIn page. He has had a lot of jobs, but he did not list anything as far back as the nineties. This person does not look as skinny as I still am.

8. Terri Provost, who now goes by Terasia Provost-Darr, in 2021 is a realtor in Vernon, CT. Her LinkedIn page is here. Neither TSI nor Colonial Realty is listed as part of her experience.

The view from my desk.

9. My current office includes pictures of Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, and my photograph of the statue of Constantine’s head in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Nearby are a plush slipper of my guinea pig Chardonnay, action figures of Wonder Woman and Pope Innocent III, and a plush toy wolverine wearing a tee shirt with a block M whom I named Mitch Egan.

10. Linda Fieldhouse lives in Vernon in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here. Don’t bother to look for TSI on her experience list.

11. A woman named Bettijane Kaschuluk who is a little older than I am lives in Stafford Springs in 2021.

12. Ann Locke still lives in Enfield in 2021. Her Facebook page is here.