Metro Chicago Information Center had allowed me to become an application developer.  So I was able to move to a better programming job at the American Dietetic Association.  This national membership organization for nutritionists was an interesting society.  Ninety percent of the workers were female.  The bosses wore pants suits with short haircuts and the clericals showed feminine flair.  I got along with everybody.   A group of Mexican ladies adopted me for their lunch group.

While I was there, a new management faction did a takeover of the organization.   Most of the former leaders were fired.  The new figurehead was working closely with a shady consulting company to gain control of the budget.  We had to attend all-staff meetings at the Sears Tower.  They were like pep rallies with vacuous themes like: “The future is so bright we have to wear shades”.  Of course, the new CEO was wearing comical, oversized sun glasses.

Even though I was still in the not-for-profit world, I was getting a taste of the cutthroat culture that inhabits the concrete canyons of the Chicago Loop.  Those were the days of the tech bubble.  Money was flowing and greed was infectious.  It seemed like every day, I saw new highs on the S&P tickers along LaSalle Street.

As I had done in my two previous jobs, I took initiative to invent programming solutions for special problems.  It was not a far step from my days as an organizer applying the “mass line”.  Just like in the old struggles, success depended on listening to people’s needs and offering one after another iteration of a way forward.  Always the key was to stay close to the users and then bring to bear all positive factors.  Once I wrote a program to display the layout of a banquet room for an easy way to do seating assignments.  I couldn’t figure out how to position ten chairs around a table in the computer screen.  My sons had a great math teacher at Franklin Fine Arts at the time. “That’s easy,” he said, “Just use a cosine formula from trigonometry”.

Always feeling that I had come into my career late and that I was carrying a lot of former baggage, I drove myself hard.  If I over produced, I reasoned, I would have the freedom to experiment and learn new things.  As I climbed the ladder into more corporate settings, this freelancing style was not as easy.  Additionally, I began to run into the requirement to constantly upgrade and diversify my skills.  I was heavily committed to programming in Visual FoxPro.  But around this time, Microsoft bought the language and began giving off not-too-subtle hints that it would be eventually phased out.

At American Dietetic, a new director of IT started tracking my efforts more closely.  One day I received an email which he had mistakenly copied to me.  It said, “Here’s a good website for Bill – Just FoxPro Jobs”.  I saw the handwriting on the wall.  I jumped when another FoxPro opportunity appeared at Harris Associates, a boutique investment firm at Madison and LaSalle.  Landing there, I experienced a full confirmation of my earlier hopes.  They wanted me for my skill and did not care a whit about the drug conviction from ten years earlier.