the oracle job

by pd bedard – 🦖👶 / writer / library commissioner / creator / producer / mba / jd

This whole story is true. Except for the parts that are totally made up.

Boston, realtime

The steely morning light brought out another cold, shitty day in Boston, much like other wet, December mornings which couldn’t choose between snow, rain, or sleet. We geeks and purveyors of geek goods crowded down in the basement of the Copley Marriott, attending an Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference.

AI had yet to graduate out of the catacombs of the old, dank meeting space that was the Copley. The Boston damp was beaten back by the many space heaters, juxtaposed with the slushy, bitter dirt snow covering the streets and sidewalks and a few remnants of last week’s dog show. 

A single, blaring horn echoed through the basement. Lights flashed on and off in an off-rhythm rhythm. This was not in Filene’s, the alarm was real, strobe lights and an authoritative horn of the Apocalypse told everyone to leave. Not panicked, people made their way slowly to the exits to evacuate, shuffling old men suited up with open-collared shirts and blue blazers. 

Random pockets of conversations with long-lost AI luminaries blocked the aisles. There were only two exits, one to the Square and one to the Mall. The walls of the basement vectored the humid human and dog smells, some applied on and others just sweat exuded, either out to the cold of the street or up into the Copley Mall to escape the noise and light of the alarm. 

Most walked out and up, in a steady, catatonic stream of demented grey matter, into the arms of the shopping center above. 

It was there I first noticed it – The Legal Sea Foods. It was not open this early, but it thrummed all the same. Outside the bar area sat a group of unoccupied, stuffed mall chairs, large and deep semi-love seats you disappeared into. 

I slammed my ass into the mall chair.

I was thrilled Legal Sea Foods’ would be serving tonight. I could smell the chowder. I felt its texture in my mouth. The potatoed broth coated my oversized soup spoon. The heavy cloth of the napkin dabbed my lower lip. Food fantasies got me through many things, especially when triggered standing in the shadow of The Legal Sea Foods. 

Someone in a camel hair coat plopped down in the chair adjacent. 

“How are you doing? Here for the show?” 

I started it. Small talk sometimes works. You never know who sits next to you in a Mall.

“Yup. Damn alarm. At least these chairs are comfortable.”

My bones hurt. We melted into the chair fabric, happy to be warm and off our feet. I remember the sound of the klaxon.

Falling Down

Criticize my choices, but the word “choice” long left my vocabulary. Driven by the need for health insurance, remaining employed was key. My family needed raising, and somehow, the unit needed to survive until retirement, Medicare, and a death that doesn’t bankrupt you and your partner (or your children).

In America, it’s always about health insurance.

Europeans and Canadians don’t understand the terror facing Americans over the lack of health insurance. It’s inconceivable in a socialist country that you should die or go bankrupt for lack of economic access to medical care. Not so in the United States. A lapse in judgment and coverage can doom you and yours.

There’s a popular movie from when the bottom fell out of the Southern California aerospace industry in the 1980s, Falling Down. The movie, a perverse mashup of Dilbert and Escape from LA, follows a nerdish Proud Boy Dilbert, played by Michael Douglas, making his way from the San Fernando Valley to Venice Beach sporting nothing but a white, short-sleeved shirt, horn-rimmed glasses, a pocket protector, and a Samsonite briefcase. Laid off, broken, and seemingly beaten, 1980s hilarity ensues as he Falls Down.

In 2003, IBM purchased Rational Software. I became an IBM employee at 45 years of age. Marked for extermination before drawing my first IBM paycheck, I was a journeyman and would remain one my entire IBM career, as it was. Fortunate to survive until turning 62. I fell down at IBM as I accumulated enough air miles and Hilton points to fly a small village to Las Vegas and shelter them for a month in a Hilton Resorts.

Working from home when not on the road, every day was another journey through a smoggy, IT wasteland dressed up to look like LA and spread out before me on my way to the beach. My brain IBM, I was proto-Michael Douglas, my IBM serial number [redacted].

The old at IBM, unless protected by some catspaw of family connections or foxhole bonding that takes them into their 60s, are destined to be just that — old. Put on ice or realistically, out on the ice, I am just one of many victims to the ages, or maybe one of many victims because of being aged. 

I eagerly waited for the bus to take me upstate to the puppy farm rumored to be in upstate New York. As an IBMer, I was on my own downward run through the Valley to Venice Beach my own private Falling Down.

When IBM buys you, they masticate your code, and then the people, slowly, in a very blue way, like a boa constrictor toying with its prey before swallowing it whole. They call it “blue washing,” when products brought into the intellectual property soup are dissected for their patent relevancy (literally) and turned IBM blue; literature and instructions enclosed and localized for worldwide sales. That’s a great concept if you have something the world wants or needs. 

While blue washing takes time, it puts the “International” in the “I.” Localization and internationalization remain key IBM competitive advantages. IBM has perfected this process.

The success of a product was its ability to be included in large agreements which IBM (and other large players, like Oracle) held tight with the Fortune 100, 500, and 1,000 companies. If you could bundle your technology into the yearly (or biyearly) deals, you were set as a sales representative or even better, a client executive.

Every five to ten years, technology changes and flows with innovations in software, hardware, and the combination of the two, bound by the algorithms which rule them all. It is the steady mantra of change. We were just waking up to the change. 

Not everyone survives change, just by its definition. IP dinosaurs knew how to acquire and aggregate technology — not create. This is why Oracle and IBM have had issues adapting. Their business models have calcified – clients are no longer willing to be beholden.

Are IBM and Oracle patent generators, or patent trolls? Your point of view yields different answers. I was at an event at my old school (Santa Clara University School of Law) when a younger alumna, knowing that I worked at (and for) IBM, posited that, maybe, just maybe, IBM behavior vis-a-vis their Pac-Man accumulation of patents, was in fact, trollish behavior.

Further thinking about this, I could not dispute her assertion. Employees were rewarded for patent creation. The field of business processes is ripe for patent creation.

What used to be new is now legacy — take Java and Javascript – two technologies linked by a very important trade name and little else. All technology, over the ages, makes pendular progress, back and forth.

The business model has changed, the old dinosaurs have been replaced by younger, more agile dinosaurs. It’s a recycling whirlpool of indecision covered up by financial re-engineering. Oracle and IBM are both expert.

Consequences

It was a shit time full of shit consequences and shit events.

My father was suffering the cumulative beating of multiple ministrokes, some more silent than others, some hidden from view, some not. Slowly becoming fully bedridden, stuck in his room, he was waiting very impatiently to die.

I flew down to San Diego one weekend and discovered that my parents had stopped eating. 

Mom claimed all was well, that they had never eaten better. We could not ignore the full refrigerator of expired food. It was one of the first of many signs vascular dementia was starting to have its way with her. My brother and I had to intervene and take over the day-to-day running of their lives, which was almost impossible to do right.

I was just graduating from law school at Santa Clara – having invested way too much money and time to get issued my Juris Doctor. I needed to study for the California Bar while working full-time. It was my first, and only attempt to sit for the Bar. It did not go well. 

Finding out you failed the Bar on travel is one thing. Finding out alone in a hotel room in Mumbai, India, overlooking Juhu Beach at 3 am local time, by repeatedly trying to log in to the California Bar website at the appointed hour, is torture. 

If you pass, you get in. 

If you failed, you don’t.

After trying forty times to log into a server for the Chosen, it was clear I had failed the California Bar on my first try. Sleep came easy – I was exhausted and gave up, not an Esquire.

I was disappointed but realistic.

Interviews

When IBM purchased Rational Software in 2003, I was already 45 years old, had two kids in high school, a mortgage, and parents who were aging quickly in a city 500 miles away. Rational Software made tools for software development. The Rational Unified Process was an industry methodology used to build software, which was a glue and rallying point for a bunch of disparate software. .

Above all, the need for healthcare for a family full of pre-existing conditions drove my behavior. I was captive.

When you are in your forties and working in high tech, if you can land a job, especially right in the middle of an economic crash, the dotcom shock of 2001, you hold on to it. This was my situation.

Many Americans believe that the country has a very fluid employment schema, and that freedom to work anywhere is a god given right. While we have made great strides in eliminating indentured servitude, where indentured people “worked off” their debt, many Americans can’t switch jobs because switching might mean changing or losing healthcare insurance. 

Job mobility is an illusion – our need for healthcare traps us. When you get sick in the US, the first question is not when you will recover or even if you can recover — it’s if you can pay for it. Disease, or rather, the fear of disease, the dread of getting sick, is a disease itself.

Looking for another job was about my ego, completely about me, a 53 year-old JD with an MBA and thirty years marketing, sales, and business development experience. I wanted the job at Oracle, I wanted to prove that I could sell again, that I had some relevance. 

There was a draw for me to work at Oracle, the promise of reliving a piece of life already lived at Sun Microsystems. It could be like the old days. The magic would reappear. 

Sun Microsystems was a company of people driven to make a new world, and many of them ended up doing that, only not at Sun Microsystems. When Oracle closed the purchase in 2010, knowing what would have happened to the Sun employees had IBM purchased them, the Bay Area dodged a figurative bullet. It happened too often at IBM. 

Company purchased. IP absorbed. People disgorged.

I reached out and clicked through the LinkedIn job posting for the Oracle Job. I applied. It began.

Tik Tok

A business relationship with Oracle is much like a relationship with IBM – not just difficult but ridiculously one-sided, even if you are trying to buy something. At Oracle, it started at the top and made its way down from Larry Ellison, a man not slated for death until the year 2080. 

Two Larry Ellison anecdotes come to mind, one just religion; the latter something I experienced firsthand.

Q: What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison? 

A: God doesn’t think She’s Larry Ellison.

I first used that line in my book, selling to steve jobs, when talking about the relationship between Larry, an Apple board member, and Steve, the Apple founder (the Jobs one), when he came back out of the wilderness, known then as NeXT Computer, and back to Apple. It was all IP under the license grant bridge for what had been, until then, my career in Silicon Valley.

The second time I felt Larry’s Presence, I had been tasked with licensing an API needed to build test tools supporting one of the many Oracle offerings. I reached out to my Oracle business development counterpart. He faxed over a copy of Oracle’s license agreement for access to the API, which I forwarded to our lawyer for her review. As it went into legal, I did a cursory, yet detailed, review of all the obvious things going Oracle’s way in terms of the license grants, the rights granted to the licensee, in this case, IBM. 

The terms, of course, were to Oracle’s benefit. It was their software API, their “paper,” their agreement.  The first question in any deal, unless it is a true joint venture (and even then) is “whose paper are we using?” Whoever holds the pen controls what goes on the page. There was no doubt that this was Oracle’s paper.

Viewing the code we were trying to license was risking a peek at the software Ark of the Covenant – your face first melts, and the remnants are licensed back to Oracle. The contract could theoretically be interpreted to mean that anyone’s retina scanning the Code agreed to a binding agreement, assigning the grey matter of the brain attached to said retina forever belonged to Oracle, here and in the ever after, should one (or multiples) exist. 

Our lawyer reviewed the document and we sent back fifteen pages of objections to Oracle’s terms, pdf’ed for everyone’s safety. 

The business development director called, thanked me for my input, and told me Oracle was changing nothing. Larry had reviewed the document Himself and approved the entirety of the language in the document. So, nothing would change. It was a “sign or die” situation. What part of this could I not understand, he asked.

And that’s really what this story is about. 

Signing or dying.

Oracle

The hiring manager, Harry Waldorf, was just that, a first-line manager not important enough to be a director, someone who had to his access enough rope, enough juice to get a headcount for his group, maybe because someone had left or maybe a head for his department was one of the few perks of his petit management. As powerful as he and I, and everyone else wanted to think he had power, he did not.

I will never know why someone was needed for the role. 

I never asked and was never told.

The job working for Harry was in the government channel, helping two key system integrators sell an Oracle product to large government entities, like state governments. The company had a long of history selling to the government at all levels, city, county, state, and federal. 

Systems integrators are the people governments hire for IT projects they are certain are going to fail so they have someone other than themselves hired to accept the inevitable blame.

Oracle and Sun Microsystems sold an amazing array of software and hardware to a certain PO Box in Northern Virginia / Maryland. It fueled their early growth and helped fatten revenue margins, the things Wall Street loved.

My accounts were to be Systems Integrator X and Y who were selling to clients in the public sector. Harry made clear that there would be no direct compensation on the indirect sales, only on direct sales, of which there were none. 

Harry insisted I not worry, he and Oracle would handle my commission if I just “did the right things.” I didn’t press him to define these “things.” I would be in charge of indirect sales in a direct world, not get paid the same way as a direct sales rep, but “never you mind the gaping hole in your abdomen, we will take care of you” was the meta-message from Oracle.

We talked about expense reports. An expense report is the mechanism by which the company reimbursed employees for expenses. Reports needed to be completed and submitted in a timely and complete manner, or you would be threatened by the company finance team with non-reimbursement. Things like airline tickets, cabs, Ubers, meals, and the like all had to be accounted for in the sales operations ecosystem.

Harry began a fervent soliloquy on expense reports, about how employees should be doing their expense reports when off hours, not while working. Expense reports were meant to be done off the clock. 

Salespeople, good salespeople, did their expense reports off hours, and that was that, in case you didn’t know.

I nodded in affirmation, trying to make sense of the Oracle work ethic according to Harry.

SAP

Meanwhile, as I was engaged with Harry and Oracle, setting up for interviews, a like position in business development with SAP appeared.

SAP dominated the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space at the time. Even today, if you purchase anything almost anywhere, online or in a brick-and-mortar store, you touch a piece of SAP software and/or infrastructure. The company had intermediated itself into the world’s business processes. 

Work for Oracle or SAP? No contest, work for SAP.

“I’m talking to Oracle. It’s moving along. Talk to me if you are interested. Do it now.” I was brusque with the recruiter. It was all about timing. All about luck.

My interview with SAP in their office in Palo Alto, nestled in the Santa Clara County Santa Cruz foothills. 

I may have already been 53, but my credentials were excellent – I was a freshly minted JD, a seasoned MBA, and a bunch of experience to back it. One of the interviews took place using a room equipped with a videoconferencing sensurround system — you faced a curved wall that tried to take you into another conference room far, far away. It was state-of-the-art teleportation, before Webex and Zoom. 

The first interviews went well. We were connecting. Pros and cons of different business models, managing channel conflict, setting up developer ecosystems, it all solved out well, until . . . the last interview.

“Would you put your client’s data on the cloud?” 

When I ventured to say that, yeah, I would, I was suddenly naive and weak, not prescient.  This was 2011, well before the cloud was established. The interview was over. Thank you for your application, but . . . 

Visionaries get rejected. At the time, no client in their right mind would put their key data on any cloud. My interviewer would have none of it. Some truths hold for a time. 

The SAP interest was validated, sorted, and disposed of faster than one could spell ABAP. So much for vision. 

Being a visionary often means not being right.

Oracle was my last hope for a software sales rapture out of IBM.

Level 5

Because of my age, Oracle must have been looking at me with a jaundiced eye from the start of the process. The extended team brought me in for an interview, which was a very good sign. Autocratic regimes, like IBM’s, often keep their employees from interviewing incoming people. As a result, you meet your peers on your first day. At least Harry let them check me out. So many people, like IBM, don’t seem to involve other team members in the hiring decisions — it’s the province of the system. 

In a doctrinal, Calvinistic way, you are triaged and predestined by the algorithm. Age is at the top.

Oracle had great staff. Some of the old Sun vibe hidden deep came through. In my opinion, IBM would have slashed, burned, and moved everything to RTP – Raleigh, North Carolina – far from the Bay Area. They would have picked their teeth with Java’s bones and would have enjoyed it.

The interview with the team went well enough. They liked me and the feeling was mutual. 

After the interview, Harry met me at a local Thai restaurant to debrief. He told me that he was thrilled with how it went and that I would be a Sales Level 5, the top level, something in line with my sales lineage, my alleged sales prowess, and my proven ability to “sell to the C’s” among other things. I had the demonstrated ability to plow through the ceiling to sell to the prized and often mythical “C” level. I had whatever it took to sell for Oracle. 

In Harry’s mind, it went well and he just needed to get some approvals together. Oracle would get back to me soon.

Very soon.

Level 4

The next time he was out from Boston, Harry called and asked that we get together at the same Thai restaurant. He didn’t really like Thai food, Harry was just a creature of habit. I ordered something hot — likely basil chicken, extra hot.

He was always getting off a redeye flight from (or to) Boston to (or from) SFO or about ready to get on one. He never ate much. Meeting with me was something to do and report on in some mandatory weekly status report. Or not.

He creased his face in disappointment as he looked up from his plate and began the preamble to his upcoming talk, like a cat regurgitating a hairball — puked out. Harry was nowhere near as disappointed as he would be later that afternoon when United did not upgrade on the redeye home to Boston, but still, somewhat disappointed.

“Pierre.” 

“Yeah.” 

“We have a problem.”

“Yeah.” 

“It’s about compression, grade-level compression. I can’t make you Level 5.”

“OK.”

[BIG PAUSE]

“If I do that I’m going to have some problems with some Sales Level 4s we already have out there selling. And we can’t afford any problems with any Sales Level 4s who are already out there selling. You understand . . .” 

He looked at me expecting a snit, expecting me to walk. 

“Is the base the same?” I asked. 

“Yeah.” 

“Upside?” 

“Same.” 

“Who cares, then? I’m in it for the money, not the title.” 

There was no time to worry about how the world perceived me. I wanted to prove that at 53, I could get a job offer. What mattered to me was a steady W-2, a place to work, a way to raise my children, and to stay whole somehow into my 60’s to try to retire with some modicum of respect. That’s all I wanted.

“Fine, then.” 

“Fine.” 

No amount of water keeps anyone from sweating basil. The sweat on my brow soaked the restaurant napkin. I thought about reaching over to the next table for a stack of fresh paper napkins when our waiter set a few down on the Formica. 

It was a different time; before the virus. Salespeople thought nothing about living on the road and traveling, all in the name of commerce. Salespeople were proud of their status — airline, hotel, rental car, gym, golf, and tennis clubs — we all thought it all mattered. At IBM, we did Hilton and Hertz, topped off with American Airlines. At IBM, you were your status.

People would go to great lengths to maintain the illusion of status. One late December, short just a few miles of qualifying for my American Airlines Executive Platinum status. I flew to Dallas and back on the same day, on the same plane, just for the mileage. I stepped off the plane, went to McDonald’s for a filet of fish sandwich, hit the washroom, reboarded the same 737, and flew home.

The difference between Platinum and Executive Platinum on a flight to Europe or India mattered. The flight from Chicago to New Delhi was 16 hours long, and that was after a four hour flight from San Francisco. IBM did not, as a rule, fly you in business internationally. You had to score an upgrade, somehow, or suffer in Economy.

I was sitting in the International Admiral’s Club Lounge at ORD – Chicago O’Hare airport on my way to god knows where. More than likely, I was headed to London for some Euro junket taking me up to Amsterdam and down to Paris from London on the Eurostar in the Chunnel under the Channel.

Level 3

My phone vibrated. It was Harry. I walked out of the lounge to talk.

“Pierre, how are you doing? Good time?” 

“Hey, Harry, sure.” 

“Look, Buddy.” 

When someone says “Look, Buddy,” you know that what’s coming is nothing good. Nothing good ever comes after “Look, Buddy.” 

“Look, Buddy. It looks like I’m not going to be able to get you the Sales Level 4 like we were talking about.” 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah, well, it turns out the VP who my boss works for, saw another issue in another group he runs.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, cutting him off. “The money is the same, right? Same comp plan?” 

My mantra of greed needed to be heard.

This had to stay strictly about the money if there was any hope of getting an offer. It could be about nothing else. It was always about the money, above all else. It is always about money. 

Above all else, this was Oracle.

“Same comp plan?” I prodded, again. 

“Yeah. Same plan. $125K base. $125K upside to target.” 

“OK, then. How long are we going to talk about it? When am I getting an offer?” 

This shit and vacillation was tiring. It was late, and fresh from being locked up in a cylinder from SFO to ORD for five hours, I had a redeye to London to board. 

I was 53. I was tired. I wanted an offer. I wanted it in writing. I wanted it now.

“OK. We’ll write it up.” 

I paused. 

“Good. Looking forward to signing when I get back from Europe.”

I hung up.

As promised, the offer arrived. Like an anti-climatic punch line in a bad Fox Sitcom, I received the offer in writing, getting demoted twice before even having the chance to sign. It was a good offer, as we had agreed on. I would be making more money at Oracle than at IBM. I would be much more highly leveraged. 

There were warning signs.

First, I would not get comped on the software sold as part of a hardware bundle to a systems integrator doing business in the government sector. Well, my accounts only sold to government accounts. I had not riddled that piece.

Then, the elephant — being demoted twice before receiving an offer. Was this a test? What were Oracle’s expectations? Was this a question of mind over matter? They didn’t mind because I didn’t matter.

I printed the offer out and read it once, twice, three times, just proving to myself that I could get a job offer in my early fifties, that I still somehow mattered, if only to Larry Ellison and his puke minions at Oracle. 

I waited a day and then called Harry.

“Harry.” 

“Oh, hey Pierre.” 

“Got a sec?” 

“For you, of course. You get our offer?” 

“I got it.” 

We paused.

“Ya know, I’ve been thinking bout this, talked to my wife, and I think I’m going to need something else, Harry.” I began. “I need another $25K base and $50K on the back side. Can you do that?”

I knew Oracle would never do that. I knew it as the words left my lips. I was saying FU by asking a question.

I thought briefly about what an asshole I was being in the moment, about how much Oracle had invested in me, about how much Harry had invested. He could have been spending his time filling out expense reports and call sheets. Instead, Oracle was busy demoting me. 

I wasn’t even an employee and they were demoting me.

I’m not sure what Harry said. I did not care. I had said what I had to say. I had essentially guaranteed that I would never walk the halls at Oracle as an Oracle employee. Ever. Ever. 

At 53, I had told a major corporation where to go. Doing the Oracle Job, I also cast my lot with IBM. 

Did I tempt fate? Absolutely. Did I make the right choice? Decisions are made, life moves forward. Karma reigns too supreme in the channels of our lives. You don’t want to tempt it. Not too much, anyway. 

Life goes on with IBM

No story is complete without a postscript, an after-script, a flipside, or a director’s cut. Much like “Look, Buddy,” nothing good comes after “Ya know . . .” 

One of the main tenets of my book, selling to steve jobs, is that it’s better to be lucky than good. No truer statement than that. It’s the universal truth that no one wants to admit. You can make your own luck, but only to a point. 

Soon after I decided to stay with IBM, my son was operated on for thyroid cancer. He is fine now, but I remember pacing in the surgery waiting room, as the room slowly emptied through the night, leaving my wife and I alone, waiting.

The next Monday, my father passed away. My parents had been living in San Diego, where we had caregivers coming in. My brother and I were the only family, and we worked together to keep them going. When my father died, my Mom could no longer be alone. Her vascular dementia and the mini strokes necessitated 24/7 care. It was all coalescing together. 

Had I left for Oracle, I don’t think I could have survived. As it was, I would walk my neighborhood, crying silently, and marshaling on. It may have been another reason God wanted me not to take the Oracle Job. 

My mother passed away three years after my father. We buried them together in my father’s village of Saint-Croix, on the shores of the St-Lawrence River, bringing both of them home to Quebec.

I put together a list — reasons to stay and reasons to leave. The only thing in the Oracle column was money.  I made the right call.

So I stayed with IBM and gave Oracle the FU, telling them in only the way they knew, with an outrageous demand which had no hope of being fulfilled — the absolute Oracle FU. I knew Harry was hosed and I felt bad – I truly did. But it became the point in my career where the money became irrelevant and my spirit could not be bought. You can’t pay someone to believe. You can pay them to pretend to believe well, and I just could not do it anymore.

The Oracle Job was wrong.

Six months later

Six months after the Oracle Job, I sit at my laptop somewhere working, plotting my next trip to Europe. It was a time of travel.

The phone rings. 

“Hi, Pierre? It’s Harry.”

“Who?”

“Harry, remember? Oracle?”

“Oh yeah, Harry.” OMFG. Why the hell was he calling? Larry’s revenge? “What’s up?”

“Well, you know, after we talked, things started changing.” 

“Oh.”

“Yeah. First, my boss’s boss got demoted. And then they took my boss out. Me, at the same time. I left about two months ago.”

“Oh.”

So they had taken out an entire branch of the organization. I would have been toast. I would not have lasted six months, maybe six weeks, at best. I would have been out there competing with Harry. That’s definitely an Oracle Job, in its purest, corporate form.

“Well, anyway, there’s a job I saw on the IBM job board for a sales spot out here in Boston, I was wondering if you could look into it for me.”

I felt bad. I really did. For Harry. Not for Oracle. Not for IBM. 

The half-life of any organization created around a problem is usually short. Sales organizations are no exception. Management can redeploy at will. Harry got caught in it. 

All the hardcore get caught up in it. Flying weekly worth is measured in air miles. It was a treadmill that never ended. Made me want to look up Sisyphus on Wikipedia for a refresher.

I found the job on the job board for Harry. I had no clue about the hiring organization. I wish I could have helped. It was a day I thought I would not see, receiving a call from Harry asking me to put in a good word for him for a job at IBM.

And here we were in the Copley Mall above the dungeon where was held an artificial intelligence conference in Boston. It was one of the last trips I would ever make for IBM. Right in the middle of MIT and Harvard. A hotbed of AI. It’s where I learned what singularity meant — and I was put in my place, thankfully by a human.

Back to Boston

Harry was the guy, like me, sucking heat in the mall chair sitting next too me, talking about nothing much and everything, all at once. 

He told me he didn’t get the job at IBM he had called me about — he was at the trade show consulting for an Artificial Intelligence firm, a firm on Route 128. 

I tell him not to feel too bad, that no one but the employees get the job at IBM.

We laugh nervously and find mutual cause to part ways back out into Copley Mall and into our holes, to make contacts for our day jobs, who wait for us in the basement.