Phil had left ASD back in April of 2000. Havoc had gotten him the job and would end up leaving right before the company went public in 1999. They opened at 8 and peaked at 36 in April of 2000…right around when Phil left.
Phil had his own reasons for leaving the place. I think the thing that really drove it home for him was the issue with the printers.
The data center had just been rebuilt and when Phil had worked on it, he had intentionally left a space behind the “command console” for the greenbar printers. His boss, Norm, wanted Phil to move the two printers into the electrical closet with the UPS’s.
“No.”
Norm almost stopped breathing. “What?”
”No. I won’t move them back there.”
Norm crossed his arms. “And just why not?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” Phil explained. “If someone goes back there to pick up a print job and mis-steps, they’re going to land face-first in a bank of 220 volt UPS’s. Anyway, it’s illegal to put a printer that close to a set of batteries. It’s a huge fire hazard.”
“So you’re not going to do it?”
“No, sir, I am not.”
“Do you really feel safe in your employment here saying that to me?” Norm asked.
“I do now,” Phil smiled. “Because you just threaded to fire me for not doing something illegal. I can go make a phone call right now and seal the deal, if you like…”
Shit like that. It happened to him all the time.
What was really great was the Y2K compliancy tests they had to run the network through. Most of the applications in the call center and data center were Clipper based. That version of Clipper wasn't Y2K complaint and never will be (so there!). The developers tried to pass the test by fucking the timestamp on the Novell NDS. They never did get it to work just right.
In mid-2000, someone got the brilliant idea to develop proprietary software (NOT Clipper based) to handle receiving, processing, and shipping orders. A great idea in theory, but this was right as we were slipping into a recession, so it wasn’t going to do that much good.
Dart had started working at ASD right after we both left Software Spectrum. She was working in the data center adjusting and formatting reports. In the summer of 2000, she was asked to document the policies and procedures for the call center, data center, and warehouse. She called me in as an assistant; I was sick of answering phones and happy to go.
It took about a month to get the interviews completed and we soon organized a document 3 chapters long. It wasn’t really an in-depth piece, which bothered me; it was more for management than anything else. We also had an Access database of the reports being generated in the call center. The idea was to try and streamline the process and reduce paperwork.
Everything was going fine until we were asked for a “field report”—essentially a shit sheet. The high higher-ups wanted to know why the rate of attrition in the call center was so high. Why customer service levels were dropping, “What makes them tic? What’s going on in there?”
Well, a lot actually. And it didn’t put us in a good light with the call center director. Actually, it really put us on her bad side.
The call center was undergoing a renovation. The entire thing was being rebuilt and they had to squeeze everyone from a huge call center into a rather small room while the construction was going on. There wasn’t enough room for everyone and it was idiocy thinking that plan would work for any amount of time. Several people quit because of the overcrowding situation.
That’s a major fire hazard.
So I started to look at the ceiling and noticed there weren’t any sprinkler units. And Dart said she remembered their being a haylon system in that room when it was the old data center. And I started thinking about panic situations and trampling deaths and the overcrowding problem and how that place was going to turn into a Triangle Shirtwaist death trap. And when Dart and I asked the building manager about the fire suppression unit, he got very evasive with us and shouted, “I’ve already been through this with the city of Dallas!”
And when Dart and I started poking around this new, renovated building we noticed other fire hazards and panic situation problems. The generator was four feet in front of the main fire escape. Directly in front to the doors. Sure, you could open the doors, but then you had to make an immediate right or left turn to get out of there. And to get to those main fire escape doors, you were going to have to run through a break-room and hope a table and chairs weren’t in your way.
That’s really dangerous.
There were also new chairs in the call center and the idea is everything would be uniform. I don’t know why it’s important the all the chairs be the same. If you’re going to take it to that level, why not make everyone wear a uniform? Why not just enforce a business casual dress code? There was no dress code at the time, so it wasn’t like anyone was going to make the company look bad in front of a client. But these chairs had arms and leaned forward, and weren’t adjustable by any means. Straight up, these were cheap-ass chairs that might have looked nice but were useless.
I tried sitting in one once. My legs went numb and I had a knot in my back afterwards—and that was from only sitting in it for an hour. These folks had to sit in them all day.
And it was against the rules (under pain of termination for gross insubordination!) to bring in any kind of “accessory” for the chairs. No lumbar pillows, no cushions, no nothing. And you weren’t allowed to make any adjustment to the chair, like remove the arms.
Now why would someone want to remove the arms? Well, let’s think about this for a moment. It’s a call center; what kind of people work in call centers? People who don’t do heavy lifting. People who don’t stand all day. People who don’t do a lot of walking around. Some of these people have been doing it for 20 years. That’s 20 years of sitting.
That means you’ve got some pretty fat people.
And fat people sometimes need chairs that don’t have arms. As one woman put it, “You better take those arms off, honey, or you can just call 911 to get the jaws of life over here.”
That’s fat discrimination.
One woman had been working for the company since its inception, back when it was “Athletic Supply of Dallas.” She had applied to be a manager multiple times but been passed over for promotion. Eventually, she demanded the director explain why she hadn’t been promoted. The director replied, “You have to have a college degree.”
We found out later that two of the three managers in the call center had no degree. One hadn’t even finished high school.
When we asked the director for the policy (in email) she wrote back for us to come visit her.
We asked her to just mail us the policy. Just a couple lines in email, no biggie. Again she wrote back for us to come and talk to her about it.
Finally, we wrote he one last email asking why she was afraid to put it in writing. If it’s policy, we need to document it. It can’t be so complicated that we need to talk about it, can it? Just an email will cover this. We cc:’ed her boss, the director of operations.
She had a meeting with him the next day.
We never did get an answer on that policy, but I guess it was removed.
Then we found out why we were documenting the policies and procedures for the call center and warehouse. ASD was selling both and doing a sideways business more into software development. The announcement was made in one of the back storage rooms (well, another warehouse, really) on September 29th, 2000…right after the stock market closed. Those of us who had been called into the meeting looked at each other worriedly. We knew it wasn’t good news. It was time to start looking for something else; the boat was sinking.
It didn’t take long to sink. The entire project management department was let go on October 3rd. We had severance checks on the way (a month and a half) and we would be eligible for unemployment benefits. I had never received unemployment before, so I thought it was great.
After we were all let go, we stood outside and smoked, even the non-smokers. Everyone was joking about how we would cash our severance checks and buy controlling stock of the company. We had until the end of the day to clean out our desks, so we had enough time to sit outside and joke. I called Phil at home to bring up the zip drive so I could collect my things.
Dart was out of town the week she was fired. I left a box in her cube and someone stole three of her books.
It’s just as well we never bought controlling stock. They dropped to 3/16ths a share within the month.