When I was let go from the mutual fund, I caught on with a small software company called QuotePro.   It is a remarkable place.  The owner, Ernie Freudman, got in early on the micro-computer revolution.  He targeted the street-level auto insurance agencies.  QuotePro’s software generates over 90% of the storefront quotes in the Chicago area.  What was the key to their success?  Freudman assembled an unlikely team that could scratch out incremental — and money-generating — improvements to the software.  There was not one propeller-headed graduate of any school of computer science.  Over half the workers were minorities.  I had another “family” that I could be part of.

But getting accepted didn’t happen so fast.  Everybody must have wondered, “Who the hell is this guy?”  Though I was in my late 50s, I could switch in and out of cultural context with anyone.  My Spanish was very Mexican-sounding.  I let the boss know that I was fascinated with his past as a Viennese Jew who had escaped the Holocaust when his family immigrated to Ecuador.

I bonded with the nicest guy in the universe, Hugues Lemain.  He is one of 12 Haitian siblings and always on the watch to speak a good word.  I had many tasty six-in-the-morning chats with Jerry Taylor about harness racing and everything under the sun.  Claudio could never keep from hiding my hats or some other prank.  Ken played the role of underboss and instigator, with his Germanic, Wisconsin thing.  I fell in with everyone else as well – Marcie, Vince, Rick, Nancy, Brian, and Yesenia.

One day after I had been there over a year, Claudio put out an email to all that we would be celebrating my 58^th birthday at a strip club.  It wasn’t that I had never been to a strip club.  I just didn’t want to be put in an embarrassing situation.  They would be immediately to stitch me into some laughable QuotePro lore, the butt of jokes far into the future.

So I turned the tables on the pranksters, “Yes, let’s have a party.  My family and friends are invited as well.  It’s going to be at a restaurant and everyone is welcome.”  At that point I had to scramble to see if I could actually dig up enough friends to call their bluff.  We filled a party room at a restaurant called Cuernavaca on 18^th Street.  I thanked all for coming and blew out all candles but one.  I grabbed that symbolic last year and held it till the wax burned down to my fingers.  “That’s the way we live — each year to the max”, I said.

It was a way to reveal a bit more about myself – my Mexican family, my programming buddies, my political friends from the ‘70s.  What really impressed QuotePro, though, was when my older son, Ricky, strolled in with an entourage of really hot babes.

There was another funny incident having to do with the hazing that I had to endure at QuotePro.  One day I went out on my lunch hour to take care of some business.  I was on my way to get a new driver’s license because I had misplaced the original.  My mom was dying of a heart condition and I was talking through tears with her on my cell phone.  A cop caught me for blowing a red light.  He asked for my license and I said that I had lost it.

He thought I was saying that my license had been revoked.  On went the cuffs and into his back seat I went.  I didn’t even attempt to explain the truth – that I was actually on my way to get a new license and that I had been talking to my mom who was dying.  Fortunately, the cop wrote a ticket that would become null and void if I had no subsequent incidents for the next two months.  Back at QuotePro, I didn’t tell anyone of the adventure.  I knew the ribbing I would receive.

My proudest accomplishment at QuotePro was a project to rationalize a program of over one hundred thousand lines.  The QuotePro Comparative Rater had grown up the way many programs do.  I was like a bowl of spaghetti.  The program accessed the underwriting logic from a couple dozen companies.  Whenever something changed at one of the companies, Jerry Taylor had to modify the source code by re-writing conditional statements.  My challenge was to make screens for non-programmers to enter new rules into a data base.

It was an even trickier problem because only Jerry Taylor understood the logic.  Jerry is a self-taught African American programming genius.  He thought like a chess player envisioning situations 4 or 5 moves ahead.  He was the guy whose efforts had been instrumental to the very success of the business.  QuotePro even had a special insurance policy on their most valuable employee.

It was a friendly duel.  Jerry saw the data model and liked the idea of a calculation engine that could read from a database of rules.  With the improved system, Marcie would have screens to maintain the logic for each company.  At runtime, the program would determine the quotes for each company based on the car and driver.

One day, Jerry said, “You know you could actually compile the rules into an executable program.  That would skip the look up and assembly of rules.  It might be faster”.  Wow.  I tried it and the speed was amazing.  That was the checkmate.  Jerry knew that the improvements would replace thousands of lines of his code.  But he was on board – maybe a little begrudgingly.  The new module took a lot of weight off his shoulders.  It was our achievement – a blend of his work and mine.