Upside Down

Been thinking, since I started writing all this, about the women in my family tree. All of them back four or five generations were pretty independent and self-sufficient women.

None of them put up with much bad behavior from their men. When circumstances went bad, they did not stay around clinging and merely hoping for the best. They packed their bags and took to the road and took care of themselves and their children.

Grandmother Julia went to Mills College and worked in her mother's boarding house. Grandmother Leona cleaned rooms and made beds in motels and sewed like a haut coutier. Mother Joan eventually got a college education and was named Woman of the Year by the Department of History for the second graduating class of California State University at Hayward. She helped found two unions - the Motion Picture Pilot's Association and the California Teacher's Union.

(Here is reference to 'Pancho Barnes', a friend of my mother and competitor in the annual cross-county women's air race - Powderpuff Derby.
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Explorers_Record_Setters_and_Daredevils/Barnes/EX17.htm
She said about her life -- "We had more fun in a week than most of the weenies in the world have in a lifetime.")

My father was a Navy-certified pilot and instrument instructor, as well as eventually qualifying for his aeronautic engineering (A&E) license.

My husband worked in the Apollo program (Ford Aerospace, material management and kitting for the world-wide satellite earth stations and the receiving dish on the Lunar Excursion Module), at Varian (medical instrumentation) and consulting at most of the chip and computer manufacturers in the 60's and the 70's working on the implementation of a standardize part numbering system for the electronics industry. He graduated from California State University at Hayward four years before his father did.

My older sister Judy graduated from Cal-State Hayward, my younger sister Cindy did, too. So, did I. So the count is one father-in-law, one mother, one husband, two sisters and myself from Cal-State.

I had a culture and a family push to go to college. I studied science. It took me about 19 years to complete my education - I started in the Fall of 1962 and finished in the spring of 1981. And I worked and had three kids in the process.

I worked in my first job when I was fifteen, two nights a week. I did not need a work permit for this, I was a part-time classified employee of the San Leandro School Board. I was a chemistry lab technician for my high school chemistry teacher who also taught evening classes for the city sewage worker certification program. I made up all the experimental solutions, set-up each of the student apparatus stations, assisted during class, and then tore down and cleaned the lab after the students left.

I was introduced early to the 'work world' of science and the woman's role in it -- clean up, sweep up and shut up, and don't forget to make the coffee for the real scientists. There were definite class and gender lines. I found this demeaning culture in San Leandro High School (chemistry lab technician), at Chabot College (biology lab technician), veterinary surgical assistant, Clorox (associate scientist), Pacific Gas and Electric (316B Water Act federal complience report creation) and in the Physics department at Cal-State Hayward.

I worked at Scholastic Books for a year or so in order processing. I worked at Friden and then they were bought out by Singer who was looking to diversify into office electronics. I became a Xerox key operator on one of the first xerography machines as well as a very proficient user of the Wang word processing machine. I could always feed the family with my ability to use office machines. I picked up accounting when I was the sole office administrator for a year or so for a pressure sensitive tape company. You are asking yourself what is pressure sensitive tape? It is the official business name for masking or duct tape. I took these guys through a self incorporation and setting up their books, their bank accounts, business relationships with lawyers and CPAs, etc.

I was good with words and numbers, showed up regularly, was dependable and quiet and crossed eyed. Wives loved me, they were never jealous of me.

Finally, when I graduated I went looking for a work environment where women were respected and appeared to have an equal opportunity for management promotion. I did consulting for 3 years in engineering and research departments for PG&E, Lawrence Berkeley Labs at the National Center for Research in Chemistry (a support organization for college chemistry professors), and eventually for AT&T Western Region Department of Network Engineering, Intercompany Contract Administration District.

It was at AT&T that I saw women in management. I saw a culture that inforced EEO guidelines. It seems that AT&T had been hit early in the Equal Rights Act process and the subsequent culture turn over during the 70s. They lost a class action suit in the mid-70's that showed that they had been cloistering their women telephone operators and not allowing them to apply for any other type of position in the company and they got caught at it. They had to pay a lot of money for it and prove, and continue to prove, that they were complying. So they changed, and tried hard to make it into the women's magazines of the early 80s as one of the top Fortune 100 companies for a female-friendly workplace.

This is not to say that there were no gender issues at AT&T, but there was an awareness that it was not an allowed overt behavior and putting panties on the urinal with the District Manager's (a lady) name pinned on them got you suspended for a month.

So there was a family history and a culture thing that I am aware of as I grew up and as I moved through company after company during my 40-year working career. There was a life script expectation that I would get a college eduation. And I eventually did. Health Science, occupational health option, minor in physics.

The occupational health option was the equivalent of another minor - it consisted of 60+ units of forensic workplace inspection preparation. Now that most folks can watch CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) they get a feel for the same sort of work that the OSHA inspector does in the work place and with hazardous waste management. I was qualified to take the entry level OSHA certification and work in the federal center in Oakland, but I looked over their pay schedule and I just could not imagine working in a civil service type of job where they were still working gender issues. The work would have been fun, the people would not have been.

The school has changed its name, it is now California State University East Bay.

The work I finally ended up doing was imaginative, creative, team centered and challenging. Being a member of a three person skunkworks team on call for AT&T engineering data solutions. We worked our hidden agenda to get computer power out of the raised-floor secret rooms (think big iron IBM arrays) and onto the employee's desk in the form of Apple IIe-s.

We worked to demystify computers and to get 'power to the people' to get and keep good data for making business decisions. We maintained an approachable and can-do attitude and then performed beyond expectations. We were the propellor beanie group and laughed about geekhood a lot, especially at ourselves. However, we did get the reputation for being the miracle workers. We got called into situations where managment had themselves in the corner and needed rescuing.

Once, a district manager actually got on his knees and crawled into our closed in three desk office and placed his praying hands under his chin and begged us to save his sorry ass. It was a moment for a lifetime!!! We rolled in laugher for an hour afterwards. We then went on to manage to design a process to roll back an intercompany monthly billing error by calculating what should have billed, deducing what actually billed and then creating individual correction re-billings for 65 months of miss billing of rental for 6 billion worth of shared equipment leases in post-divesture contracts to PacBell.

We worked through a labor strike, slept on cots in a conference room, tended 300 baud 12-hour data file transfers across the country to our east coast data processing center, showered and never left the building for 4 weeks doing this project.

What we got in exchange was a spiffy new mid-sized AT&T 3B Unix computer of our very own, classes on some application software to use on it (Sybase and C++), tickets to a limosine transported Taste of San Francisco wine and desert event, $15,000 annual salary increases (each of us) and we each got a $10,000 one-time bonus. Needless to say, we felt appreciated.

The penultimate project was sort of interesting, too. We were in a national meeting for all the regional engineering data handlers with our district manager when he introduced us to the district manager in charge of the Denver Remote Work Center. The two of them pulled us off into a corner at the social mixer in the late afternoon of the first day of the meeting. This DM had a touchy sort of problem.

Our DM had been a manager for Bell Labs before he moved over into practical engineering management in the regions. He maintained his working relationships with all the engineering managers that he knew when he was supporting them from Bell Labs. He had a reputation of being able to pull rabbits out of hats, and our skunkworks team was one of his rabbit tricks.

This Denver DM had a data system that he leased from McDonnell Douglas. It was a main frame sort of application. He had been using it for six years and now McDonnell Douglas (MDD) did not want to support the application anymore. MDD raised the annual fees to some exhorbant price to get AT&T to pay for their entire annual data center budget as the cost to support this one application. It was a typical ploy. What the Denver guy wanted us to do was to reverse engineer the application and then AT&T could thumb their noses at MDD for their outrageous costs.

The thing was, MDD distrusted Bell Labs. They had had some intellectual property disputes between former employees and MDD was burned and did not want to lose again. The scheme we worked out was this -- my skunkworks team would be assigned and trained as the AT&T liason team with MDD, get copies of their application, work to read their code, determine what they were doing in the application and then replicate and improve it.

We were given permission from MDD to do this since they decided to let all the developers who designed the MDD code go and there was no one in house to actually do the support anymore. For a one-time fee, we got the tapes and walked back to California with them. I think we had to make two phone calls for some technical discussion to clarify something we found, but we managed to develop a unix application that mimiced the MDD big-iron application. Now, I am sure you are asking yourself, what did this application actually do?

What it did was this - it maintained a personnel data base for all the communication workers for the western half of the US for AT&T (35,000 people). It maintained their qualifications and certifications (what they knew how to do). It maintained their complete annual work schedule (according to union rules, vacation time is bid for, one year at a time, by senority).

It maintained the complete list of all maintenance routines necessary to support equipment and the schedule for the performance of these routines with associated estimated total time need to perform the tasks. It maintained the step-by-step procedural relationship of all detail tasks and time needed to complete a task. It maintained a history for all trouble tickets worked and an estimation of the forecasted workload from projected tasks associated with resolving troubles and alarms.

What this application could do was printout a daily work schedule for each communication technician with timed slots for work that was required to be done and open slots for their response to unscheduled tasks. This application was and is very similar to the SABER system that is used by the aircraft industry to get planes maintained, inspected, passenger and consummables loaded, crews assigned and runway and terminal parking gates scheduled. That is why it was developed by MDD for the airlines and then converted to apply to the telecommunications industry.

We replicated it and added some bells and whistles. Got it on to Unix terminals on the desk top, and were so successful that when it was decided to reduce the workforce, the system was able to supply the decision making data to support the remote work center concept. A retirement offer was made and 28,000 communication technicians left the workforce.

Needless to say, we got the attention of Bell Labs, now called AT&T Labs. They were the traditional system support organization for the work centers and they were a bit miffed that they had not been offered this project. We had to be tactful and blame MDD for it all, but underneath it all, we knew we could bring in the project faster and simpler the smaller the development work team.

As someone once said (An Wang?) if a system development project is in jeopardy of making deadline, take people OFF the team, it is more likely to be delivered on time. This implies that time is wasted in communication between developers and that single-person control of sub-assemblies leads to quality work. I believe this is true most of the time. A small team can be very efficient in my experience. This is particularly true if the team has overlapping but well developed skill sets and works together for a long period of time. My team worked together for 14 years.

In our system application development we had three areas of expertise -- back-end, mid level processing (work horse activities) and front-end processing (what you see on the screen and on the paper reports). My job was the front-end stuff and in the business rule development (what you want the application to do). My stuff was easy and simple to use, was almost intuitive and had good support in the form of training manuals, how-to books and training videos.

One of my partners, Art, was a wizard, a world-class wizard at number crunching and knowing our industry data and all the pitfalls between systems and what we did to mangle things up. He could tie his programs to the data application software, and to the back-end processing so that it ran fast and efficiently and he was very, very, very accurate (a thorough tester of his code). His one flaw was he was almost incapable of spelling. I had the pleasure of commenting all of his code so that when we passed it off to maintance teams, they could find and easily go to the place where we put the comment "this is the tricky bit".

The other partner, Tom, was the poster-boy for geekhood. He was a national champion winner for knowning trivial details of automotive production and manufacturing, particularly Ford and GM. He could build a unix system so that it required maintenance in the range of millisecs per year. He made unix systems purr and call him daddy. What he did was a mystery to me, he could spell, so I never was forced to peek into his code. We danced around each other respectfully.

I made it all look pretty and I could talk business talk/rules to our users. Art made it crunch and could work on really good algorithms. And Tom made it all whirr and connect and stay up very reliably. And we all worked together on the design concepts and project scaling. Tom could poke in Art's code. I could poke in Art's code. Art could poke in my code and a little into Tom's code. We overlapped skills and knowledge sets and backed each other up. We laughed and cried and commiserated about life and family and work.

Our final project was to advise and assist in the implementation of an off-the-shelf accounting system to replace all our in-house antiquated big-iron applications for asset accounting and inventory. I worked on the data warehouse portion of the implementation, gathering requirements and specifying standard reporting products. This was the only piece of in-house programing for this project. We had to pull data out of the application, load it, back it up, secure it, load it into a data handler application and produce daily, weekly, monthy and annual reports as well as supply a robust ad hoc environment (place where users can write and develop their own reports).

Art worked on ensuring that the financial application was tuned and set up correctly (tweek the rules) for our industry. He worked on the data conversion extractions from the various old systems and the routines to load the data into the new system to set things up. Tom worked on the roll-out of a complete upgrade of all the desktop computers with standardized conformations and accurate user software for our financial application with reliable connectivity and secure firewall protections.

We are still grieving for each other.

When the company offered a stellar management pension buy-out in 1998, we three decided to take the money and run. We saw our industry moving to commodity billing (4 cents/min) vs the old service-related fee structure. That is a highly competitive and stripped down cost-cutting management environment, not like the flowing-like-milk cash cow of years gone by. The company was not going to be managed for the widows and orphans who supposedly owned 75 percent of the stock.

Art was ill with a failing heart and Tom and I just could not face working without him. We retired at the end of December in 1998, two years later Art died. Tom and I swap emails and I hear the news about his nieces and nephews, sisters and brothers (he has a large extended irish-style catholic family).

I did some consulting in very large data warehousing at Data General (trouble ticketing) and at BellSouth (personnel system consolidation) in 1999. However, I was miserable emotionally, very lonely and under challenged. So I walked away and have not looked back nor kept my programming skills current. I am convinced that SQL is SQL is SQL, there is not much to change or evolve there, nor with unix shell script programming. I really don't want to work, I am living off my just deserts, so to say. My health this year has been a little rocky, but I am pulling out of it slowly and deliberately.

I try to work on-line at writing periodically, doing mind-challenging puzzles, and doing some on-line multi-player gaming with my grown children to keep my social skills up. That is about it.

Now it is time for me to go to bed, lay there and work on organizing my TiVo programs, turn off the flashing clock on my DVD player, and see if the Iron Chef competition is still on. I am a geek at heart, can't you tell?