A friend asked recently if I had heard from Sigi lately. We
were sitting at a hookah bar in Athens Greece. The same friend, who was once Sigi’s
Mendocino pot contact, had asked a few years back, and a Google search revealed
an article he had published for IBM. I
pulled out my phone. The first article
up was: http://atwaterpub.blogspot.com/2015/10/rip-sigitas-bigelis.html.
“Shit he’s dead,” I replied back. “Butt cancer. Nearly five
years ago.”
As I read, I couldn’t help but think the author had missed
the essence of Sigi. There was nothing inaccurate, it just seemed overly, well,
“In Bruges.”. You know that movie where
two hitmen end up in Belgium, one loves the architecture, the other is annoyed.
Sigi was like that, he either annoyed the fuck out of you or you thought he was
brilliant.
What follows is a series of stories about Sigi Bigelis, and
my interactions with him at work and outside.
Introduction
I met Sigi by reputation first. In 1986 I had just received
my security clearance, and ended up working on a super-secret satellite project
at Lockheed in a secured building where he was employed. My team lead, Charlie
Treadwell, at the time gave me a research project to figure out how some data
got corrupted in some orbital status files. It was a “let’s see what’s the kid
made of” project. Basically, it made me kick around the system, and ferret out
some anomalies. I’ll spare you the twenty blog entries it would take to cover the
peculiar tract of math dorks and statisticians the government had hired to
write orbital mechanics algorithms I met that week. But as I queried though what fields in the
data meant with people like the woman who’s glue on nails were so long she
couldn’t type, and the bearded programmer who always had one hand in his
pocket, typing with the other, I would hear the same response. “Oh, that’s in the “Eye dent-or”. You’ll have
to talk to Sigi.” They never bothered to
tell me what the Eye dent-or was. Just spoke of it with mysterious vagueness to
let me know it was an all-powerful program, like the ring of Sauron or
something, that governed all other programs in the building we worked on. Even Frank Kirchman, my team leads boss, told
me if I really wanted to understand our system, I could only find its meaning
through the Eye dent-or. “I should spend
time with Sigi.” His name rattled off people’s
tongues like he was the ninja master of mathematics. A super elvan, able to
program things us lesser beings could not, the “Eye dent-or.”
Being a working-class kid, fresh out of commuter college,
who thought he was at best a hobbit, and not one of the elves that seemed to
populate the building I didn’t feel myself worthy of an audience with the great
Sigi. Instead I bothered the hell out of
Jeff Stewart, a former Air Force guy who had worked in satellite tracking
stations, changing data tapes on computers in the remotes of the Aleutians and
had landed a job at Lockheed as he already had the clearance. He was starting a degree in Computer Science
at San Jose State, and had been given an assignment with the software group the
surrounded Sigi. While Jeff was helpful, I soon exceeded his knowledge of data
field meanings and he deposited me at the cube of Sigi Bigelis where he was
reviewing a code printout. There was a
quick intro sentence, “Ah, Sig, ah, Stan has some questions about the orbital
status files and how the Eye dent-or affects them.”
With that, Jeff made a quick exit. I was left standing in the
cube partition gap behind Sigi. He
looked over from his print out. Studied me, looking up and down, dwelling on my
tie for a second, and answering in a crass voice that reminded me more of
smoking women in trailer parks than what I expected from someone who’s name was
spoken of as though he was the Gandalf incarnation of a great programing wizard. I still remember it sounded like a crow
squawking at me. “What?”
If you are meeting the Pope, the Queen, or Gandalf, its best
to have a prepared statement. I did not. “Ah,” I said dropping a record format
book on his desk, “What is the correlation score used for?” I pointed to a 30 bit field in a Cyber
Record Manager layout. (This was the 80’s after all, relational databases
were infants, and NonSQL Hadoop etc. database inventors were still separate
sperm and ovum in their unmarried parents.)
Sigi just frowned a bit and squinted his eyes from behind
his large plastic rimmed glasses. Maybe 28 or 29 years old, he was trim, neatly
dressed in slacks and a casual button-down green shirt. I could tell I’d irritated him. He just stood, looked at me out of the corner
of his eye as he passed and said in that same crass voice, “Follow me.” He led
me through the hallways to a room labeled “Document Control” with a waist high
counter, grabbed a pad from it, and filled it out handing it to the woman
behind. She pulled a green covered two inch
book from a shelf and dropped it on the counter. “Sign for this.” The book had “Secret – Something or other”
labeling on it. He pushed it in my direction.
“Read sections six to nine.” With
that he headed out the door leaving me with a document titled “Data Correlation
Functions.” I felt a bit like Samwell Tarly
having just been let in the Citadel. I
was in maester training, but it was pretty much up to me and a book to figure
it out. I read the sections. They were full of trig formulas with drawings of
ellipses, discussions of multi-tiered databases and lots of comments about
being Grabbag compatible. (Whatever the hell that was.) Pretty much every page referenced something
that required me to check out another document. After a few days, I had about
20 documents on my desk. Grabbag it turned out was just a data query language
for data stored in Cyber Record Manager. I used to probe the stuff coming out
of the Eye-dent-or. I eventually answered most of my own questions. I even
figured out the Eye-Dent-or stood for Identification and Correlation which
everyone just called the eye-dent-or. Actually, I figured out there were like
twenty names for everything. I mean each field and program had several names,
depending on who you talked too. It was a bit like a classified Tower of
Babble. In the process I kind of decoded the meaning of the correlation score I
had asked Sigi about. It was a fairly
straight forward totaling of calculations.
His program ran a series of tests, depending on the results, it added a calculated
valued to the correlation score. Somewhere in the process, I noticed the
scoring mechanism kind of overwrote itself, and blurred its results. I didn’t
understand that. It left me back at Sigi’s
cube asking about it.
As I showed him the scoring overwrite and a segment of the
Eye-dent-or code, he just frowned. His eyebrows narrowed. “Jesus, we have to tell
Marge about this.” We were up and
walking the hallways again, landing at the cube of one Marge Tobias. Turns out
she was one of the “Hidden
Figures” women of our program. She started in 1962 and was pretty much
responsible for a lot of the orbital mechanics and high-level math algorithms. Twenty
years before SQL, she had invented Grabbag a data query language run on Fortran
cards. She worked part time, but as Frank put it, “She spins circles around
most of the engineers around here, and does more before one o’clock than most
do in a week.” About two thirds of the
twenty documents Sigi had indirectly made me read, Marge had written. She was
busily typing at her Wang producing another document I’d probably have to read
eventually. She looked up. Sigi pointed to me. “Stan here has found an error in the
Correlation Score of the Eye-Dent-or.”
“Oh?”, she replied.
I handed her the code segment and talked her through what I had
found. I pointed out it probably only
caused an error like one percent of the time.
-Not being sure if that was significant.
I’d only been there a week or so, I wasn’t sure how many times the
Eye-Dent-or ran. Most of my programs to
date, ran once when I turned them into a professor.
“That’s a lot,” she replied and started clicking on her
Wang. Next thing I knew she had the
document up I had been reading. “Let me fix
that.” She typed in some new
calculations into the text. ‘Sigi, you can get that in the new stuff,
right?”
He nodded, then noted: “Someone’s got to fix the production
stuff, and the upgrade version too.”
Marge turned to us, “I guess we should write a CR, you can present
it at the CCB, as you found it.”
Right out of college, first few weeks on the job, “CR and
CCB” sounded like a Martian astronaut hybrid language. Sigi had this look of dread on his face. “Perhaps Stan should do it. He found the
error.”
Marge looked me up and down wearing my tie of the day. “How
long have you been in here?”
Reporting back to my team lead, that I was supposed to
present a code change request to the change control board, made up of
government officials, just made him laugh. “Son of a bitch, two weeks, and you
are going in front of the colonels.”
It turns out, most of the software engineers were terrified
of the weekly CCB meeting. Mainly because they ended up presenting stuff they
didn’t understand. It turned into a
congressional inquisition a lot. That Friday morning, I had my one slide
explaining a change in the Eye-Dent-or scoring along with estimates, I was up
and down in two minutes. Sigi wasn’t afraid, he just didn’t want to be bothered
with colonels and majors with some political agenda. But he stopped by my cube
after. “Smooth up there. Beginners luck. Whatcha doin for lunch?” in is crow
voice.
Pizza and BBQ.
There were two items that Sigi evangelized, proselytized,
criticized and basically dorked out on: Chicago style pizza and barbeque. (And Pink Floyd. More about that later.)
I can’t pin down the day when he first expounded to my
engineering group the virtues of Chicago deep dish. Probably just after the first Pizzeria UNO opened
in the Bay Area. A few of us had lunch there.
We might have been extolling the novelty of it compared to Round Table.
Sigi wasn’t having any of it. “It’s a
knock off. Yah want good deep dish ya gotta go to Chicaga.”
Parallel to this, I had a roommate, Bruno Pichinich from
Long Island who almost nightly would criticize Bay Area pizza with the comment:
“You want good pizza you need to go to New York!” I put in the exclamation point because he
always emphasized it with an upswing in his voice on the “New York.” Upping tones with each word. Much like Sigi emphasized almost every word
he used. He was a bit biting tonal in
his conversations. Direct tone. Emphatic
tone. You almost felt like you were being poked with each word because you had
dared to claim “chain” Pizzeria Uno deep dish was good.
“Nah. It’s crap. The
only thing that approximates real Chicago pizza in the Bay Area is maybe Zachary’s in Berkeley.” He upped his tones like Bruno as he worked
through the phrase: “Zachary’s in Berkeley.” He used those same tone changes and crow
squawking in design reviews or in conversation just drinking beer. You had to develop a callus, otherwise they
felt like needles. Sigi would eat Round Table, but he wasn’t going to discuss
it, he’d switch the subject to Zachary’s.
“They have half bakes. I’ll have to bring one in, you don’t know what
you’re missing!”
The other thing about Sigi is, when he ate, he smacked.
Loudly. It was a peculiarity we did not begrudge or mention to him. Though when he was excited on a subject of
conversation and drinking, the smacks tended to get louder. There was like a little smack scale to let
you know how many beers and how passionate he was about a subject or the type
of food. The rest of us just summed it up by occasionally making note of it
when he wasn’t around. Usually when we had been drinking. People would ask how
my evening with Sigi was after we went out.
I’d just reply, “We got to level six on the smacks.”
Then there was the Queue. Not the Star Trek one, the meat
roaster. Sigi loved the queue. Ask him
what he did over the weekend on Monday you usually got, “Ah, I threw some stuff
on the queue.” He did other stuff too,
went to concerts etc. But what he grilled always got a mention. It was a bit
like the Instagram photo’s of meals nowadays. Except at Lockheed it was covered
verbally in the start of the week Monday morning two-hour bullshit session, not
to be confused with the daily half hour BS sessions we started our days
with. There was a lot of bullshitting at
Lockheed.
Early on in 86, right after I moved into my first apartment
at Durham
Greens in Fremont. (Think Office Space thin
walls, cheap furniture and feelings of encapsulation.)
Sigi found out I did BBQ’s on the porch. That was the phrase.
BBQ’s on the balcony would be more accurate. On weeknights we’d fire up the mini
Webber and hold a bring your own meat event. There was a cavalcade of college friends
who showed up. Mostly single veggie avoidant men who graduated from Keystone
and discovered blended drinks. At some
point one of my roommates introduced me to a “Skip and go naked.” His recipe: 12 ounces of frozen lemonade, 12
of tequila, and one beer all tossed in a blender. Serve over ice. The police visited a few times. One of the
police visits, the mattress from my hide a bed ended up on the neighbors porch.
Stories of these events peaked Sigi’s interest after I mentioned them in BS
sessions. “I gotta go to one of these.”
They were not planned like a weekend event. More organic they
seemed germinate at 8-9 o’clock at night. Well after I had left work. So, there
were quite a few bullshit session BBQ on the porch debriefs followed by “Invite
me to those,” statements by Sigi before we had one with a planned date. Probably six months. Someone was in town
visiting, so he got the invite. He showed up early bearing marinated chicken. It
was “Queued” and offered around. A
certain amount of Sigi razzing was endured to some of the unimaginative plain
burger grillers. He was wasting his pokes, to this day they still only BBQ
burgers. Engineers will venture into
space, but not much in food it seems. Eventually we made a batch of “skip and
go naked” and the Sigi’s razzing hit the 8-9 on the smack scale. Not much else happened that night. Though, the next Monday he stopped by my cube
for the start of the week BS session.
“Nice set of friends. You place is little small; we won’t be hanging
there much.” Sigi’s one bed one bath
place in Sunnyvale was smaller. When I visited it the first time, I repeated
the “Your place is a little small line to him.”
Over the years, we didn’t really hang at each other’s place.
Preferring bars or occasional barbeques
at places with more than Sigi and Stan room. More than once we ended up hanging out with
Jeff Stewart and his wife at their condo. It was Sigi size certified. Sue
Stewart made some sort of Oreo cookie crust cream pie once. Not sure what was in it. Fat, I know that.
After a barbequed stuffing and a few glasses of wine, I had a slice of the pie.
Maybe two, I don’t remember. A complete pain took over my gut like that feeling
Mr. Creosote had just before exploding in The Meaning of Life. I assumed a full horizontal position Jeff
and Sue’s couch, Sigi inquired to my health status, “This ever happen before?”
It had, just a couple months before in Chicago, when on
Sigi’s advice I had hit the real Uno Pizza for a pie of what seemed like a disk
of cheese with a smidge of tomato sauce. Sigi was right, you want real deep
dish, the stuffed in Chicago was great. But, on my second piece I suffered the
malady which had me on the Jeff and Sue couch. That time, it had me on the
couch of my friend Eric Runge. Who had similar questions about my health. I gave them both the same answer: “It was
that second slice.”
From the couch, I relayed my previous experiences. The led
to me being the subject of the Monday bullshit session. Sigi squawked. “That guy can’t handle his pies.” He loved
retelling that story. I must have heard it mentioned a dozen times over the
next few years.
Ironically enough, when I finally bought a house in the Bay
Area, it ended up being just a couple blocks from Zachary’s in Rockridge. I
suppose I should have invited Sigi up for pie, but by that time we’d fallen
out. (More on that later.) But now when
I walk by a few times of week and get the whiff of tomato and basil in the air,
I think of Sigi. Zachary’s is the only thing close to Chicago pizza in the Bay
Area. I can also eat four or five slices without getting laid out on the couch.
He’s still probably telling people in the afterlife I can’t handle my pie.
Technical Prowess & Bullshit
Dorky computer types. Where do I start? Watch a couple
episodes of Silicon
Valley and you think, it can’t be like that. It’s worse.
I said earlier Sigi was Gandalf. More like Gilfoyal a
bit like Richard
Hendricks. Arrogant, cranky and full of contempt for the lesser skilled. In
the seven years I worked with him, I caught one mistake in Sig’s code: The Eye-dent-or scoring overwrite. He never missed
a schedule and always delivered quick code that worked first time. He
documented well and wrote understandable specs and presentations. A bit of a natural. He looked like Gandalf to
his peers because they weren’t. The
crowd that surrounded Sigi had been labeled “The Common Software Group.” In every IT company there are groups like
them. The “Utility & Framework” group, “The Maintenance” group. If Lockheed had been a construction company
these people would be relegated to the more mundane tasks of window or toilet
repair and swapping out garbage disposals.
They could fix something already in place, that needed a patch. A valuable
job, but you don’t let them loose with design, engineering or skilled carpentry
as they are quickly overwhelmed. The Common group had a bit of a reputation for
being, how did Sigi put it, “Unable to program their ass out of a wet
bag.”
The first time I heard that sentence was just after I had
been working with a recent Berkeley grad: MW.
(I’ll stick with initials. Those that worked with us know who I am
talking about.) She was working on a code level upgrade. She’d run some code through an auto converter
and it had made the updates. All she had to do was compile and test. Her code wasn’t working. This was a regular
occurrence in the Common group. When I say “not working.” I don’t mean it had a
bug; I mean it wouldn’t execute. It was the “blue screen of death” in modern
terminology. We were looking at her code to determine why. As I looked it over, I noticed she had a lot
of errors in variable length declarations etc. Part of the upgrade was no
implicit variable declaration. (Probably to geeky for you non computer types.
In construction terms: measured the distance, cut to measurements. But have a
plan set of dimensions before you start and don’t make dimensions up as you go.)
Her code compiled but when it executed it overwrote memory etc. Boom. She
seemed to have some fundamental weaknesses in the concepts of computer
science. I attempted to educate
her. (I was young and naïve.) Sigi was in the cube next to MW. MW and I spent probably twenty minutes
discussing the concepts of memory arrays,
their size declarations and how you reference their memory spots. (Think rungs going up a ladder and how many
rungs you have. What is the number of the sixth rung?) I could tell she was not
comprehending. But I left her to her struggles.
She called back in an hour, saying it worked. I came back over. We ran
the program. It didn’t blow up, but it gave the wrong answers. I started looking at her code. I noticed she
had declared the array bounds correctly, but didn’t seem to step through each
run very well. I asked why she had
declared the array bounds at 33 words.
She replied, “Sigi said too.”
I paused a moment, “But do you understand why?”
She replied, “Sigi said too.”
I got a little more direct.
“What would have happened if you had set it to 27?”
She looked a little cross eyed at me. “Sigi said to set it
at 33.”
“But why?” I replied.
She parroted back the same response, a little frustrated,
with a tone showing she was growing impatient. “Because, Sigi said too!” One does not question the great Gandalf.
The conversation continued for another twenty minutes
without resolution. I might have been demonstrative. MW could bring that out in me. It took her a month to get her program
working. I think Sigi just took 20
minutes and fixed it one day. Sometime
after the “Sigi said so” session he stopped by. A line of common group programmers was asking
me how to fix their code. It was like office hours with the professor. Mostly
problems with variable declarations etc. I finished with them and turned to
Sigi. I don’t remember what Sigi came by
for but I remember is comment on the common group struggles. He just said, ‘Let me cut to the chase, why
do you bother? Most of them couldn’t
program their ass out of a wet bag.” He was loud enough most of engineering
could hear it.
I rebuffed quietly with
“And why did you bother with MW? “
He just looked indignant. “Look I don’t know why you are an
engineer; why aren’t you coding? You could be a fucking wizard in that group!
You’re wasting your skills.” He walked
away in a bit of a huff.
I continued on my assignments. There were a lot of reasons
why I chose the engineering job. When I
hired in, my boss, Frank Kirchman, showed me a few possible assignments. Coding
was one of them, engineering (design and test) was another. I struggled getting
my Comp Sci degree. Working my way through college and doing auto repair. A lot of classes I took twice Various units
in the Calculus series more than that. The first four years had netted a lot of D’s
and F’s. I joked years later, I learned advanced mathematics by osmosis. Sit in
classes long enough and the information will just saturate the brain. At some
point four years in, I realized working and trying to go to college was the
issue. I quit and got student loans. The focus jumped my GPA. So divergent were
my last two years Professor’s thought I should go to grad school. But in every
class, there was always someone, the Sigi, who finished their assignments
quicker and with more flare. My ego was damaged. When Frank presented my
choices, Engineering looked like a good place to hide.
A week or so later, I was walking by Frank’s office. He
pulled me in.
“I’ve been getting a little feed back on you.” I was afraid my demonstrative tone with MW
might have come back to haunt me. She
had started referring to me as “Gruff.”
“What did I do?”
Frank just smiled. “We’re
re-organizing a bit. Sigi and others have stopped by and I think we are going
to reassign you to Marge Tobias as your lead.”
Bing, I was still in Engineering, but in the center of the action with
one of the main design jobs. I wasn’t quite sure what to think. Gandalf had put
in a good word for me.
To tie or not to tie, that is the question
I was basically the first male in my family to complete
college. The Pisle’s and Dunn’s (Mom’s maiden name) are from farm and factory
stock. One grandfather ran the lid making machine at the Dixie Cup factory, the
other mined coal and farmed strawberries. Most family pictures seem to have men
in overalls. Then there is this whole thing with growing up an Air Force brat
with my dad being enlisted and not an officer. The officer’s college degree
seemed to get the spiffier uniform with the tie and the better pay. Somewhere I
equated the tie and the degree with leadership and success. So, I wore them to work right out of college.
From the beginning Sigi was curious about them. Not in a positive
way. The first barbeque on the porch we
were doing the twelve second tour of my apartment and he asked, “Where are all the
ties?” I obliged pulling back a closet
door to reveal the wall mounted tie rack my grandmother gave me at graduation. Organized by color and material, there were
probably thirty on the rack. He noted my permanently up ironing board in the room
corner, then sneered back at the tie rack, “I suppose you iron those in the
mornings.” I just shrugged. He continued in the tone he used when he made
wet bag programming statements. “Why do you fucking bother?”
I just smiled. “They are the keys to the gates.” He probably said something else snide after
that, but you get the picture.
Sig wasn’t the only one ribbing my ties. Even Sinbad the comedian
harassed me at a club in Fremont. I showed
up right after work one night. Sinbad
walked out on stage took one look at my tie and said, “What the fuck are you
wearing a tie to a comedy club for? “
Sigi was with me and I felt him poking me in the side. I just shook my
head. Then Sinbad poked at me again,
“What, you aren’t going let me harass your ass?” I shook my head again. He just laughed.
“You’re probably the smartest guy in here.”
I shook my head again. Sigi was shaking his head too. The whole audience
laughed. One of my friends on seeing me in a tie the first time, just said,
“Christ, you look like an adult.” In a way that was what I was going for. I
didn’t really have to shave till I was 30. At 36 my prematurely gray
37-year-old boss thought I was 23. So, the ties were a distraction from the
youth and inexperienced look.
The truth was, just about everyone in the building had some
dorky uniform they wore to work. There seemed to be a division between degreed
and non-degreed people. We had several groups:
ex-military, people with B.S. degrees in something and hired out of
college, and people with PhD’s. The non-degreed ex-military dressed a little
better than the degreed. Catch someone in a tie, he was probably ex-military,
with his first good paying job. One guy,
Spike Hisey, (I never knew what his degree was in, as he only displayed his
high school diploma in his office) wore blue Levi’s, a blue button-down shirt
and a navy blue V-neck sweater every day.
Another guy who managed to drop the fact he graduated from Harvard into
a conversation once a day only wore a dull light green button-down shirt and
green plaid pants. One non-degreed coworker
actually asked him if he washed the same clothes every day, or if he had five
sets of the green garb. The guy was just
about cube height, you could see his bald head turn red as he walked away. Spike who sat next to me, just looked over
and said, “I have five sets.” Sigi was a
bit above all that, wearing low key but professional slacks and shirts I’d say
bordered on party button down. But it was the 80’s. I think he thought I was
worshiping relics. It took me six years
to get a degree, so I saw myself as non-degreed with my first good paying job.
Truth was, it’s hard to say if ties gave me an advantage or
not. The logic of why people rise up in
the ranks or not has mostly to do with ability. When I met Sigi, he was an
engineering grade six. “Senior Developer” or something. Not the top, but well up the ladder. Spike
was an EG-12, though he had been at Lockheed 25 years. I started as an
engineering grade two. “Associate Engineer.” I suppose in my mind my promotions were slow.
In reality, only one person got promoted faster than me. She went off and got a
Master’s degree in the process which gave her a six-month nudge to EG-4 over
me. I bought into the bullshit of dress for success. It’s really all an issue
of choosing your costume. I have with great amusement watched senior executives
of major corporations in the last 20 years move from tailored suits and ties to
jeans and a suit jacket, with button down shirt. No tie in sight. It’s supposed
to be casual. It just looks dorky and out of touch. But it’s the costume. Sigi had great contempt for mine. I always got
the impression he thought I was dressing above my station. Outside of
ex-military, only department heads wore ties. Though he couldn’t help notice I
did a lot of presentations for others. This had more to do with my ease of
speaking in front of the colonels. Two years on the speech team will get you
that confidence. He was a bit envious of that skill. I wasn’t above having Sigi
sit in the audience and look to him for signals if I wasn’t sure a question
posed to me. He called it cheating. I called it using resources. “--Whatever
tie boy,” would be the response.
Mostly, he enjoyed picking on my ties after a few
drinks. When it was just the two of us
griping about wet bag trapped programmers. One night we were somewhere in
Sunnyvale and he was in a bit of a mood.
I don’t remember what all he’d had to drink, but he looked me over after
a few. You know the up and down look, like he was in full evaluation mode. He paused. Then spoke in his intense probing
crow squawk voice, “Stan, why the fuck do you wear those ties? You realize you look like a dork.”
We were both a little lit, so I paused a moment, all
philosophical. Then smirked. “We all
look like dorks. We all are. Shall I go
through the dorky features of each of our co-workers?”
He got a little frustrated, “Just answer my fucking
question.”
I smiled, “What did you get for your last raise?”
He paused a second, then squawked with a little pride. “I
got eight percent.” He was almost defiant.
I rebutted. “I got sixteen.”
He was quiet for a few seconds, then kind of nodded his
head. “You might have something there.”
The smirk came back to my face, “So you wanna run down to
the mall after this to shop for ties?”
“Fuck no,” he shot back, “You still look like a dork.”
“Fuck You Stan”
I was not a morning person. One of those guys who had three
alarm clocks to wake him up, I was late to work in the auto center in college
for three years. My boss tolerated it, because as he said, “It was a
predictable late.” Scheduled at 8:30, I
consistently showed up at 8:42 or so.
From the point where my alarm started till I pulled out of bed was
regularly 45 minutes. I might manage a grunt for the first few hours. I could
walk and drive to work, but higher cognitive functions like talking didn’t
engage till at least 11:30. Quite literally at the auto center if I was
required to talk to a customer before 11, I struggled to form words. So it was
at Lockheed. We had flex hours, so I solved some of the problem by coming in
around 10 and working till 7:30 or so. But I didn’t always register people who
spoke to me. All brain power was dedicated to navigating pathways between
cubes.
Sigi was one of those “Hi” guys. You know, the people who think they need to acknowledge
you as you pass. He’d expect a reply.
I’d manage an oomph, a nod, or something in response. Course he’d “Hi”
you every time. If you had just passed him in the hall ten minutes ago, no
matter, he’d say “Hi” again. It was a bit tedious. Especially early in the
morning for a person with mouth motor issues. I figured if I had managed a
grunt at 10:15, I was done for the day. How many times do you have to grunt
before 11:00? Apparently seven or eight.
Once on the way in, then on the way to the bathroom, the doughnut tray, any
meetings you had to go and on the way by to see what the boss wanted.
But as I said, Sigi wanted a response. If I didn’t answer,
he’d stop in place turning, “Stan! I
said hi!” Waiting. You could hear the wait. Probably it was his
impatience in breathing. Sometimes I thought it was him drawing his gun (he had
one, more on that later) getting ready to pull the cocked trigger if I didn’t
respond. I had been warned. Comply or
die. I would manage a grunt followed by a single syllable form of the name
“Sig.” There would be a frown, but he would allow me to pass. Though I could swear
I could hear Sigi’s frown and head shaking as he proceeded from where we
passed. He would mention my “Hi” crimes to my coworkers. Like I said, his voice pierced, so he might be
ten cubes down, but I could here, “We need to do something about that guy’s
rudeness! Can’t he manage a simple Hi?”
Most people at work just realized I wasn’t a morning person
and were amused at my zombie walks before 11:00. Slacker programmers would
comment it was better to have me in a design review in the morning, as I didn’t
have much to say, in the afternoon I’d find every error. Even my first and fifth period teacher my
junior year in high school compared notes once and decided I was not the same
person. My noisy evil twin took over my
body in the afternoon.
Anyway, one morning a couple years after I was hired, I was
walking down the hall, passed Sig, got the usual “Hi Stan.” I grunted my response. There was a quick,
“Fuck you, Stan!” No waiting, gun
cocking, or demand of response ceremony.
It was kind of refreshing. I might have smirked. As I headed towards my desk, people seemed to
be making a point of saying, “Hi.” It
was like a Japanese business meeting, “Hi, Hi, Hi,” I had to issue five or six grunts in fifty
feet. Each grunt was followed by a quick,
“Fuck you.” Not with the piercing Sigi
crow voice. But a fuck you that let me know something larger was operating. MW
even said, “Fuck you.” Though I could tell she had rehearsed it for a week.
With all the ex-military in the building, swearing wasn’t
that unusual. Neither was being
gross. Our department manager Willie
Bell, who ran the Advanced F Program, a $500 million sub-contract of a $2
billion system we spent two years on, said after the final readiness review,
“Signing off Advance F, was like jacking off and shooting all over
yourself.”
Advanced F had been trouble. Probably sixty percent of the
software didn’t work on delivery. When Frank Kirchman reassigned me to Marge
Tobias, he put me right in the middle of trying to debug and sort out what did
and did not work. This led to more than
one meeting in Willie’s office with a set of software engineer’s claiming I was
an idiot and just didn’t know how to run their software. Add in pressure from what I called the
“bullet point chart crowd.” People whose sole duty seemed to be to report status
each day in morning government briefings. They were complaining my test results
were keeping their percent complete charts from changing. It was all my fault. There
were two system’s in particular, the Composite Database and another called OI
History where the bullet point guys made me run formal tests I knew would
fail. “Maybe something will pass, and we
can at least change our charts a bit,” was the reasoning. Nothing
passed. The Lockheed centralized
software pool wet bag trapped programmers attempted to get the government
auditors to transfer blame to me. It all came to a head in a meeting with Willie
one day. It was like nine people against
the most junior guy. Willie kind of looked the situation over, then looked down
the table at Marge, Frank and Sigi in the corner, “This kid know what he’s
doing?” They all nodded.
Willie kicked everyone out of his office. Then, me in tow, headed over to a couple
programmers of Sigi’s status just outside his office: Dave and Jim.
There was a short conversation about how long it would take to stuff the
data that was suppose to be in OI History and the Composite database into the
new relational system we were experimenting with. The answer was a few days. The wet bag trapped had worked on the stuff
for over a year. Willie just pointed at me, “Work with Stan, he’s the only guy
that knows how the fuck it’s suppose to work.”
So, on the mass “Fuck You” morning the last guy to say hello
to me was Willie. Being the guy that controlled my rases I had brain reserves
that could kick in an emergency. I
blurted back. “Good morning Willie.” He was a bit dumfounded, hesitated a second,
then went to small talk, “How have things been going with that, --ah,” he
pulled, “Composite database,” out of the air.
I hesitated, “Its been done for a couple months?”
“Oh,” he replied, “Keep up the good work.” And quickly ducked into his office.
A half hour or so later, Sigi stopped by my cube. “Notice
anything different this morning?” He had
an intense but satisfied look on his face. Wobbling his head, and squinting his
eyes so much, they pushed is glasses out on his nose.
I looked up from my computer screen, “The department seems
to have developed a explicative response policy?”
“That’s right, we had a meeting, until you learn to respond
to our Hi’s we are just gonna say, FUCK YOU in the morning. Even Willie agreed.”
Assuming the department meeting was really a bullshit
session prior to 10:00 AM, I just said, “Willie didn’t mention anything
regarding fucks. Just the composite
database.”
I could see Sigi was a bit perplexed. But he persisted. “You
get the point, right? It’s the new
operational plan till you comply.” With that he left, stopping my Willies
office.
I didn’t hear what Sigi said through the open door, but I
heard Willie’s laughter, “He said, good morning, what was I suppose too do?”
Anyway, that afternoon, as I walked by Willie stopped me,
“Stan!” I popped my head in his office.
He gave out a sigh. “Could you do me a favor and say hello to Sigi when he says
hello to you?” We need his talents more focused.”
Thereafter I made a point to respond. For Sigi, he got a full on. “Good morning (or
whatever part of the day it was) Sigi.”
With a up tone on the syllables of his name for good measure. He usually
just frowned at me, and finally just stopped saying hi.
(There is no place to fit this in, but Willie was
connected. He talked to our local congressman a lot, and his daughter Sheila
married Mike Espy
who became the first African American congressman from Mississippi since
reconstruction and Secretary of Agriculture under Bill Clinton. Willie also taught me a lot about how to rise
above the fray. When about 75 percent of
the Advanced F project was passing tests, there were a lot of people dragging
out fixes to the nth degree before we launched.
Estimates showed we might slip another year. Willie just advocated we put it up as is. Within a couple weeks we’d fixed the stuff
that mattered. Rather than trying to fix everything to perfection. Most software companies use that method
today. Issuing software with known bugs. Willie was a true pioneer.)
