QuotePro had to lay me off. And I tasted a few tears on leaving such a great family. My FUDG connections directed me to a French insurance company right across from the Art Institute downtown. There, I found myself staring at more legacy FoxPro code. It was a claims system for AXA-Assistance which administered travel insurance policies to tourists. They have a huge call center with operators speaking Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese as well as English. Our operators even arranged for helicopters to evacuate sick and injured patients from remote locations.
AXA was another bonus in life. I traded quirky stories in the lunch room with people from all over the world. The place was totally corporate with a French twist – four weeks of vacation even for new hires. I unraveled and decommissioned the main FoxPro claims system.
Fearing that I was working myself out of a job, I leveraged my understanding of the business rules. I began adding features in AXA’s language of choice, C Sharp. As I gained competency with the more modern paradigm, I was able to release decades of anxiety. I was no longer a singer who only knew one song.
But, alas, my career was coming to an end. I celebrated my 65th birthday in the company of a team of younger and very expert C Sharp programmers. Then, after 3 years at AXA, management showed me the door. It was in a major IT downsizing. Our work was off-shored to an affiliate in Argentina and a software house in Poland.
That birthday was the occasion of a strange, strange interlude at AXA. I’m not sure why it fits into the arc of my life story, but it is too strange not to mention. I think the episode reveals something about rips in the fabric of corporate culture. It is about a person struggling with a mental illness who double-downed and triple-downed to get attention.
As we were about to light the birthday candles, Beth, the project manager for the claims system conversion, asked that we close that door. “I have brain cancer,” she announced. Everyone was mortified. Someone suggested that she post blog entries on a cancer web site. So each week her details got more and more grave. Once it was heart irregularities. Another week it was a collapse. Then it was chemo side effects. She even shaved off all her hair and wore a scarf on her head.
I was the first one to figure that it was a scam. But I couldn’t say anything because I was only about eighty percent sure. Just think of the blow back from outing a fraud, only to find out that you were cruelly wrong. My work station was in earshot of hers and as I listened to her ploys for attention, I became convinced. She would powder her face on Mondays to make it look like she was washed out from a weekend chemo session.
I finally told my boss. He admitted that he was getting suspicious too. When she announced the date of an upcoming surgery, the human resources department asked for the name of the hospital. They said they wanted to send flowers. She refused to name it. She had used no insurance for medical bills. Later that day, her password was nullified and she was ushered to the street. A little research confirmed that we had seen a very extreme case of Munchausen syndrome
Here is one more story about the corporate revolving door. One day I was in a pay dispute with the department head. He had promised me one raise and then reneged when he realized that they had gone over budget. I fought it, “What about my budget?” He caved in and all seemed well. Not long afterwards, a workmate named Vasudha told me that Human Resources had come to escort Antonio out.
I felt like it was my fault. Antonio Wells was one of the few African American men in the whole company – and a great guy to work with. When I saw him a few months later at a conference, I told him how bad I felt. He said, “That was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He used his severance and the unemployment checks to support his work on a web site that he had been developing. Today his site is the number one source for reviews of Android apps and he appears to be making buckets of money.
I thought AXA would be my last job before retirement. I started thinking and worrying about my sons. Had I really given them the best I could to prepare them for what’s happening to America? I had never revealed much detail about my days as an organizer. They regularly heard recriminations from my wife about how I had wasted my early years. Like so many others of their generation, they were finding little in the way of career opportunities. Both made it through college but the next steps were not that obvious.
Coincidentally, around this time, I started reading fiction again. My brother turned me on to several great authors. Most of them were about detectives who were older and wiser. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and Hennig Mankell’s Kurt Wallendar were guys who waded into complex situations. They employed deft tactics and judicious measures of insight. I also enjoyed Inspector Chen of Qui Xiaolong, Jack Taylor of Ken Bruen and Bernie Gunther of Philip Kerr.
Once I was at Harold Washington Library looking for stories by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. I discovered a historical novel by Konstantin Simonov. He was a Russian war correspondent, poet, and novelist. His novel, The Living and The Dead, is about the Red army in retreat, constantly having to break out of encirclements by the Germans.
I was struck by how similar is our own situation. One union, one community, one individual is targeted and isolated by superior forces as the whole front has to retreat. The story has an additional dimension: an organizer who finds himself in the middle of it all, always having to figure out the best path to take. I could relate. Previously the only books I would touch were about programming. My mind was opening back up to imagine possibilities.