American Dreaming – 1990’s / Part XXI

My life took a wonderful turn after I met my future second wife. For the first time in almost a decade, my focus between my domestic life and my professional life became more balanced. Probably because I had a domestic life to focus on but, the shift was noticeable and welcome.

The later portion of the decade passed with settling into this new relationship and enjoying some needed time with family. I also had a new family (her family based in Detroit) that welcomed me into their midst. It was a very happy time.

My job became very interesting in that we were building the business (seemingly to me) by merging with another managed care facility in Baltimore. I became involved with replacing all of the IT infrastructure for this business including the telecommunications services for a customer service center.

This was an exciting project that allowed for a fair amount of travel to Baltimore. I came to like this beautiful and historic city. We wound up replacing all of the static VT100 terminals on the staff desks with diskless workstations and a comprehensive and aggressive implementation of thin client technology with a Citrix core running Windows NT 4.0. The implementation went well but, the support challenges were many. It was difficult to maintain this type of install with all of my staff in Albany.

We eventually took on the task of having a manager in Baltimore with staff that were trained to support Citrix in order to ease the administrative burden. In retrospect, I think that this was a great experience but, overall it was an idea that was before its time. The build out was eventually replaced with the next generation of Windows OS and putting full PC’s in place.

Towards the end of the decade, the company’s focus was preparing for the Y2K scares. We had as our core applications a COBOL application that required a fair amount of development to prepare for and certify that we were ready for the turn of the century. The development staff geared up for this effort in the later portion of 1998 and the early portion of 1999. The goal was achieved in July of 1999 with a certification statement that went out to our suppliers and clients.

Unfortunately, the company was failing. The next generation software that the company had “bet the farm on” never came to pass. Despite a fair amount of development resources and outsourcing consultancy, the software package was never completed. As a result, the company was sold off in the waning months of 1999. I stayed with the company post the sale announcement and committed to manning the data center on the eve of the New Year 2000 but, was looking and eventually accepted a position with Non-For-Profit organization that I would join in February of 2000.

I was sorry to see the entrepreneurial venture go bust but, it did. I had to move on. I walked away from a fairly large retention bonus because the purchasing company wanted me to hang on to supervise the dismantling of the data center we had spent the last three plus years building. I was at a point in my life that I had grown weary of mergers and acquisitions and decided I just didn’t have the heart to hang on for that additional six months.