Harris Associates was doing very well in those years. I likened it to the money pit from the Scrooge McDuck comics – a huge vault where the firm partners could tend to their fortunes by raking and shoveling coins and bills. Sometimes I could hear toasting and cheering from the conference room as some mega-million windfall was announced. In good years, we got Christmas bonuses of five percent!
My boss was a guy like me. He was a Navy retiree who had done two tours of Antarctica. He was an inventor and an experimenter. Also like me, he got a little careless in his work when he was overloaded. One evening when debugging a program to trigger bond purchases, he tested a calculation using a one-million-dollar bond order. Working late, he shut his system down but forgot to erase the test data. The next morning, a bond trader executed the buy. The partners gave him a pat on the back: “Everybody makes mistakes”.
Within a year, I had a new boss. If fact, I used my programmer’s network to recruit him. I even got a thousand-dollar bonus for finding him. He, in turn, began the process of de-emphasizing FoxPro. I found myself again under lots of scrutiny. When they asked me to spend more time documenting my code, I knew that my days were numbered. Two other FoxPro guys were shown the door. My immediate supervisor was watching my every move. She told me to put a cap on all changes to the Client Data Base. But whenever I discovered even a minor a bug, I couldn’t stop myself from fixing it. Every time my boss saw a date change to my source files, I got called to the office.
Every now and then I would let my guard down and inadvertently reveal that I was not such a corporate clone. There was a holiday party where I got drunk. I mean swinging a white table napkin and conga line dancing drunk. One of the African American clericals asked me when I was going to dance. I replied that I was “fittin to”. Eyebrows up and with a smile, she responded, “Fittin to?”
Another time, I let it slip that I had been part of shutting down lakefront traffic the previous evening. Coming off work, I had joined several hundred protesters against the first invasion of Iraq in 2005. Then there was the time when I already knew I was on my way out. Others were calling me to shut my computer down because we were supposed to go together to a company party. I made them crack up by joking, “Hold up. I’m rolling some joints.”
The end came when they asked for my badge and cell phone. I felt like I was the classic cop from TV shows having to turn in badge and gun to a police chief – for upsetting City Hall. I actually tasted cried a few salty tears.