As a back office maven, let me recount a unique situation for you to consider. No doubt you will look and see and have your own ideas on where I and the crew went completely out of control trying to set up a PC in a temporary office. I doubt that anybody reading this can come up with a similar scenario. Surprise me.
This situation refers to the setting up of new software and hardware in very hostile conditions. The hostile conditions were mainly mud and running out to the porto-potty when the inside john in the trailer office in a parking lot was not working.
The accounts payable office of a construction company had been set up in several trailers in a muddy unpaved parking lot. This particular construction site was sitting across the highway from the old World Trade Center. As I sit and write this, that parking lot has finally been put to the ultimate sacrifice, and is becoming the first floor of one more office building in the greater Battery Park City.
We are talking mid eighties. I mention the mid eighties because it seems to be the last time that software programmers knew anything about the inside workings of a Personal Computer. Up to that point, programmers could use spit, glue and paper clips to improvise any temporary fixes on a personal computer and its insides.
And talking PCs, we are talking two drives, A and B.
Those unfamiliar with these old dinosaur drives, they were cutting edge. You put in your program on the A drive and plopped the other five inch floppy disk into the B drive to save your cutting edge managerial reports that looked quite sparse and full of tiny numbers.
Back to the situation room. The plan was to save money and close the distance between the construction site and the back office in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. The vision was to put a trailer in the parking lot with cabinets inside and start the grinding process of collecting and processing work orders for every aspect of a fast track office building in the new emerging World Financial Center. The WFC was rising up on landfill that had once been docks and a dock area on the lower Hudson River.
Work orders had to be approved by project managers and floor supervisors and get approvals all the way up to general manager before the back office could start putting data into the PC and checks could be delivered to the vendors. The vendors always needed to be paid. In many cases they were supplying materials and labor as subcontractors and a paycheck is a paycheck no matter how you label it.
As such there was a constant demand for exceptions and putting vendor work orders ahead of the production line.
So you get the flow. The finished work orders got approvals. Checks could be cut on site. Mop up statistics, auditing could get started. Managerial reports could be generated.
So the PC was a basic IBM model. The programmer was inventing software as we went along because the company wanted to patent and sell developed software to a new construction industry market.
The flow chart and the theory were great but then a little glitch started to develop. The company in its quest had designed a program to keep tight control over blueprints flowing into the construction area. These blueprints were sometimes reworks of reworks of original blueprints. The invoices of these constantly changing blueprints had been a major headache on previous construction jobs. Everybody in the auditing department wanted real blueprints and real invoices for real blueprints delivered on a daily basis. You have a fifty story building in progress and you have not hundreds but thousands of blueprints and their redone versions floating around the construction site. It was a nightmare.
The other part of the nightmare had to do with budgets. There was an expense to leasing trailers and to altering them. When construction was done you had to return trailers in their original condition or pay adjustment costs.
The cost of computers and other hardware was quite expensive then. I believe that the main programmer and two assistants on and off site ate up a lot of budget space.
In the overall scheme of things, me and my PC, were the bottom rung of the ladder in terms of back office work flow.
On top of this, my PC was next to a hole in the wall that led to the general manager’s office. On the other side of the trailer there was a hole in the wall that led to a makeshift conference room. Foot traffic between was constant. Noise came in the form of verbal fights over disputed work orders. Noise came in the form of yelling regarding redone blueprints being reviewed. There was the usual office politics between the head of accounting in my trailer and the general manager’s secretary in the next trailer constantly at war over turf. On one or two occasions, the yelling matches between these two trailer queens almost broke out into fist fights.
But I am a diligent worker. I love a challenge.
The PC, its hard drive memory, and its program too small for the needed data volumes. The blueprint vendor file went exponentially out of control one day and we were only half way through construction.
They bought a cutting edge exterior hard drive called a “grasshopper”. It did the computer software bit until some cement mixer came rattling and rumbling over the parking lot next to us and the computer crashed. This happened at least once a week. Luckily all the hard copies of data input could be entered into the system again. There was a daily chore of copying, downloading the daily data input onto a magnetic tape and locking it up in the safe. Of course, any flaws on the magnetic tape meant that the download could fail half way or three quarters of the way into the hour long backup process. Start all over again at seven or eight o’clock at night.
I am a patient person. Perhaps too patient a person. I felt committed to this project. I was a team player. I had invested a lot of time and personal interest in it. I was also young and stupid.
You come in at seven in the morning and you leave at eleven o’clock at night every day and nobody is listening. This was such a unique situation that nobody, myself included, had a clear picture of where this project was going. You only had past work experiences to draw upon in terms of a comparison. There were no comparisons.
You make your requests for more PCs and more bodies on the PCs. It fell on deaf ears. The general manager and the accounting department did not want to hear about flaws in the pet project of the owner of the company. I think that they did not understand what I was trying to communicate to them. Delaying any decisions is a managerial function that I have grown to hate.
It was the time to find another job. This I did.
In terms of any project or job I have ever gotten involved with since, I learned a major lesson from this one particular job. Know your capacity. Try to communicate. Constantly negotiate for win win. Endure as best you can. If all else fails, take a hike.
Like the lyrics of the song “The Gambler”:
“You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em, Know when to walk away and know when to run.”.
Live and learn. Live and learn.
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