Just for the record

In mid 1988-ish I moved from my first full time job to a new job.

It was with a company called TCG. I've briefly mentioned them before and promised to write this post in those mentions.

I enjoyed working at TCG.

My boss, Michael Ngai (if I recall his name correctly), was a lovely man.

I worked in a team of similarly nice people and we did interesting things.

Here's a picture of the team I worked with initially at TCG...

Mike (Michael Ngai) is 5th from the left. I am next to him on the right and at the far right is Christine Martin (nee Gardner).

Unfortunately those are the only names I remember and there's a fair reason for that.

A couple of years into what was a predominantly happy and enjoyable time at TCG, Mike decided to move on.

I was surprised beause I actually thought he was an owner or shareholder in TCG.

As mentioned in previous posts, TCG was a strange kind of "co-op" of "businesses".

Anyway, Mike was leaving us and we were sad.

He wasn't leaving us in the lurch. He was helping to hire his replacement and after a time the likely successful candidate was selected and brought in to meet and greet the team...us.

I won't say the new manager's name because what I am about to say, while a completely accurate representation of what we experienced, is something that could get me into trouble if this person decided to be an arse...and based on what I know, that's not a decision, it's his lifestyle.

At the meet and greet, much like the photo above, we all stood around as our new boss was introduced to us.

I was immediately saddened and worried.

This man did not look any of us in the eye, say hello or do anything to engender a sense that he knew how to manage people.

I had a bad feeling in my gut.

At or around this meeting, Mike told us that he'd be leaving 2 or 3 weeks before the new manager could start.

I can't remember if it was a formal thing or it just fell upon us, but Christine and I ended up being the defacto "managers" until the new guy would start.

We were already working long hours and suddenly we had to do more work.

But we liked TCG and we all had good work ethics so it wasn't an issue.

However, my gut instinct made me voice my concern about the new guy to Christine.

The gist of what I discussed with Christine was this:

1. We are working more hours

2. In roles we weren't being paid for

3. And this new guy didn't seem to care about us

4. ...so it would be a good idea to document everything we do (carefully and thoroughly)...

5. ...including but not limited to our total hours worked.

I can't recall how many weeks gap there was but I do recall that the number of extra hours I'd worked in that time came to 40 (ish).

That's a whole extra week's work on top of the regular weeks of work Christine and I had been doing.

The nature of IT roles then was that you got paid well but overtime was expected to be gratis (despite what your employment contract said) and there was rarely such things as leave-in-lieu or any sort of redress.

The first day our new manager arrived I have to say things seemed like they may work out.

He asked us, everyone, lots of questions and seemed to want to improve a lot of things. I was genuinely excited for the improvements.

Christine and I heaved a sigh of relief and at lunch time, went to lunch.

The local pub was great but sometimes not fast.

So our lunch hour took an hour and a quarter.

This had never before been an issue in any shape or form. We'd always worked more than enough hours to cover any lunch overrun.

But on this day, our new manager's first day, he decided to tear us a new one.

It was then I knew that our early optimisim was dashed.

I pointed out to this man that our lunch hour was , in fact, actually an hour AND that Christine and I had quite a bit more overtime in the last few weeks than the problemmatic 15 minutes.

He actually said he didn't care. Wow.

Back at home that night I dug out my employment contract and made sure I knew exactly how many hours a week I was supposed to work and verified that my lunch hour was indeed an hour.

From that point on I arrived at work at the designated start time. Had precisely an hour for lunch, and left at the designated day's end.

As you may have guessed things did not get better.

To save you the tedium I will just list some of the things this man did:

• Went through data storage (tapes, disks etc.) and discarded nearly all of our currently active client's program source code i.e. meaning we couldn't fix, or enhance what we'd already done for them.

• Identified the team's lack of decent equipment so went ahead and bought himself the best and most expensive computer gear and did nothing for anyone else.

• Manhandled members of the team, dragging them around the office by arms or elbows or whatever he could grab. NOTE: He never touched me because he knew I did martial arts.

• Had members of the team in tears on a regular basis.

• Smuggled equipment from his previously employer's work site and brought it to TCG to see how he could steal the project or technology somehow. NOTE: Surely this is actual industrial espionage if not just downright theft?!?

• Hired one of his mates on this project into our team (another smug turd).

• Stole my scientific calculator and denied it even after it was retrieved from his desk. NOTE: I had left the company at this stage and he was brazenly using it in front of a friend of mine who told me about it.*

• He regularly lied and then did whatever suited him.

• Treated everyone like shit.

• He squirreled away the best of everything for himself; office space, desk, computers, coffee, jobs, projects...whatever.

• He poked people in the chest while he was berating and belittling them.

As a result of these and many other failings he decimated the team. People started leaving in droves.

I warned people about this. Other business entities in the group hated him too and wanted him gone.

Nobody actually listened to me or did anything. I was only a junior employee but I'd been "good enough" to run the show with Christine for a time.

My 9 to 5 days came to the attention of one of the business owners, Peter Fritz, and one day he offered me a lift to the station.

In the car he said to me "you know David, in my day I never worked just 9 to 5".

I replied with "neither did I Peter until this guy arrived", and explained what had happened.

Peter promised to do something about it...but didn't do anything I could detect. I can't recall if this was one of the two promises to "fire him"...but it didn't happen whatever it was.

During the following weeks the team you see pictured above mostly all resigned.

Customers became livid with "us" because we were unable to update their software or fix anything (because it had all been thrown out).

This guy had brought in his smug arsehole friend and hired a new programmer who was, frankly, terrible and stupid.

I don't know why I was still there. I suspect it was some sense of loyalty to my lovely team and friends who had been treated so badly.

Somehow I was dealing with it and thought it would be fixed. Afterall, everyone else in the company seemed to want this fixed too.

There was at least one other lift to the station with Peter where there was definitely a promise to "fire him". I know there were 2 promises to fire him.

It didn't happen.

It's over 30 years ago now so the timeline duration is kind of compacted and hard to remember, but a few days or so after that I was approached at around lunchtime by one of the sales team to quote for some software a customer needed.

The timing of the request i.e. lunchtime, wasn't a problem.

What was a problem was that the salesman had wanted the quote in 30 minutes.

Now without even being in the IT world I bet that most people would know that you can't properly quote something like that in 30 minutes.

He couldn't even really tell me what the software needed to do.

So I was supposed to provide a binding quote for something undefined. Not even poorly defined. Undefined...and in 30 minutes.

I told him the quote would be very rough...very, very rough.

"Yeah, yeah, I just have to have it in 30 minutes".

We seemed to understand each other but I was still not happy about it.

The quote included a bit more contingency than it would otherwise.

I would have been a fool NOT to be extra careful. Even then I knew it could fairly well be something entirely different anyway. After all, it was nearly a complete unknown.

I completed the quote in the time prescribed and went to lunch (my now strictly hour long lunch - as defined in my contract).

When I returned I was set upon by the salesman and my arsehole manager.

Both were unhappy with the quote.

I (re) explained how the quote came about and how I had been very clear that it would be very rough.

My manager said "Even I can see that it isn't going to cost that much".

And I said, "Well you quote it then".

He said, "No, you are going to re-do the quote".

And I said "No I'm not".

He said "Why not?"

And I said "I did the quote within the parameters originally requested. I told him that the quote would be rough. He accepted that. I'm not going to redo the quote".

Neither of them seemed to notice that the incredibly urgent 30 minute deadline for this quote was now past by over an hour. I did wonder how redoing it would have any effect if the original deadline hadn't just been a lie.

He said "You'll redo the quote".

I said "I told you I am not going to. And, I'm not going to".

By this stage a couple of the remaining members of the team were watching this play out as the manager got angrier and more aggressive than usual.

He said "Come into my office".

I said "No. I am not going into any closed room with you".

I don't know what he thought about that, but I was thinking that if he assaults me I want witnesses when I break his arm.

Anyone with a glimmer of self defence knowledge will be aware that an outstretched arm poking you in the chest is very easy to break.

With his history I felt sure he'd get physical and that it wouldn't end well. So I decided not to play that game.

At that point I grabbed my briefcase, because we carried our lunches in them back in the day, and went home not knowing if I would ever set foot in that office again**...

...but I didn't re-do the quote and I have no idea what happened to it.

In the following days more of the team resigned. For some unknown reason I hadn't. I do recall wanting them to fire me so they'd have to pay me out.

Maybe I still hoped that it would be fixed. Surely this incident would bring things to a head...

...and it did.

Maybe a week later I was fired.

I was kind of surprised considering how many times I had been told that the other guy would be fired and/or dealt with, but I didn't really care. They'd worn me down.

For me NOT to care was an annoying surprise to me. A lot of why I had been sticking this out was for my team mates who had been, and were being, abused by this guy.

The reason I was fired was that the value of the projects that I was working on was not as high as the value of the projects that the manager was working on.

• There seemed to be no semblance of doing the right thing.

• There seemed to be no acknowledgement of how much damage this guy had done to the business (remember all the software he threw out and all the unhappy customers, just as a starter).

• There seemed to be no acknowledgement of how much business could actually be done by what was left of the team.

• There seemed to be no thought put into the trajectory of the business while this person was involved.

It was just purely David$ < Arsehole$.

What a lesson for me to learn.

What they did do was give this guy his own new little department that was just him and his smug mate.

I don't know why that change needed me to be fired. If that had happened when it was promised to happen, then much could have been avoided.

They then promoted the most senior, and most useless, member of the team to being the manager.

Yep, the useless programmer the manager had employed rose to the top job through attrition alone.

It was a huge mess and I was kind of happy about it. Because I had warned them. And then it came to pass.

I was also sad about it.

I'd come to TCG to learn new things and I had a lot of interesting experiences while I was there. The technology I was programming for took me into a lot of interesting companies and places.

But dear reader, here comes the Hollywood style twist in the tail/tale.

As soon as I was fired the TCG marketing department, who was the software department's biggest customer (I told you it was weird), started coming to me, as an outsider and freelancer, to do their software.

The internal software team, decimated as it was, was no longer even getting work from it's own company.

What the marketing department would do is ask both of us for a quote.

Being the tightarses I knew they were, all I had to do was undercut the software department's quote by a few dollars and I would get the job.

While discounting may seem stupid, what they didn't know was that I could write the software in one tenth of the time it took the software department to do it.

You see, before I left I had been working on a new program skeleton and template that would produce this ten fold increase in productivity.

I had told my smartarse manager about this and he poo-pood me and dismissed it completely.

This miraculous increase in productivity wasn't due to any genius on my behalf.

I had simply followed the programming guide provided by the hardware manafucturers.

So when I replicated this strategy as a freelancer I could quote mere dollars less for a job yet know I was making 90% profit over the internal software department.

I was also better at security and warranty support than the internal department had ever been. This meant the "wriggle room" and shenanigans of proprietary code being a free-for-all didn't happen under my watch.

I even had some of the disgruntled customers come to me directly.

So even while I was working at my new job, a few hours in the evening made me quite the stash of cash.

To put it into perspective, I was effectively earning a smidge over $120 an hour in the early 90s. The inflation calculator tells me that's well over $250 an hour in today's money.

But as seemed to be TCG's want, they soon screwed up this relationship too.

They decided to not pay me for the last job.

But lucky for me they found a small bug in the program.

Unluckily for them, my warranty support only worked if I had been paid in full for the job...and my code was all safely locked away in an encrypted file.

Believe it or not they actually tried to break the encryption and reverse compile the program rather than pay me.

But eventually they came back to me to fix the bug.

I told them that they needed to pay me.

They promised to pay. No payment arrived. The bug went unfixed.

They pestered me for the fixed software. I told them that finding the bug was hard, and by the way where's my cheque?

I'd fixed the bug almost instantly but was not about to admit that and hand over any software until I'd been paid.

This went around a few times until eventually I said "The software has been fixed from the start. I have been waiting for you to pay me as contracted. No money. No software."

Within hours there was a secret agent style handover of software for payment. I sent them on their way having decided that that was the last job.

BUT, in TRUE Hollywood fashion there was some fun after the credits had rolled.

The end customer of the software then wanted some functional changes. "Only minor ones".

The marketing department said "we can do them ourselves". and I said, "No you can't. You don't own the source code"...

...and they didn't and it was safely locked away in an encrypted file...

...and after that last payment debacle "I'm not doing any more work for you".

"But we're desperate!", man these guys never did themselves any favours did they?

So having made more than enough money out of them I offered them/TCG one last deal...

"You can have the key to the encrypted file. BUT, per the terms of the contract, all warranty and liability is terminated. You have no recourse what-so-ever AND I never want to hear from any of you again!"

They took the deal and I smiled the wry smile of a third time victor. {Not meaning to sound like Alan Partridge}

The wash up

This experience changed me greatly as a person and probably not for the best.

Sure I am much better at looking after myself and detecting horrible people, but my baseline trust took a massive hit.

I'd been brought up with a strong work ethic, honesty, integrity and the maxim of a good day's pay for a good day's work.

All of these were punished by the TCG experience.

The idea that I could enjoy my work and colleagues also took a battering.

The names of the arseholes have been withheld. Only the good people have been named here.

NOTE: While Peter Fritz may appear to be a villain here, he's not. I do give him credit for talking to a lowly employee like me and making an effort. That didn't really happen much in the 80s. He had to do what he had to do for the greater good of the company. It was a view of things I didn't have...but yeah, he still didn't keep his word to me.

There's also many good people whose name I simply can't remember.

I wonder how they are doing?

POSTSCRIPT:

This post is the one referred to in this prevuious blog post as "the one I should write one day".

https://ihatemypc.wixsite.com/i-hate-my-pc/post/my-second-job-a-malaysian-restaurant-a-crime-boss

It should be noted that the state of the TCG web site, as descibed in the above linked blog post, has changed. It seem like my snipes at the state of it may have pushed them into an update. It could also be that I am deluded and the update was inevitable. :-)

I am guessing Peter Fritz may one day see this and not like these facts either. Maybe he'll ring me again. That's OK.

* The follow up to the stolen calculator...

After I had been fired I was having some drinks with TCG friends after work one day and purely by chance mentioned that I had lost my scientific calculator while at TCG.

One of my friends asked me what it looked like and I described it to him.

He said, "You know I think your mate has it. I have seen it on his desk when we've had meetings".

I was shocked and said "well it is easy to identify as mine, my initials are carved into the back of it".

The next time we met at the pub my friend handed me back my calculator.

Need I say more?

** I did go back to empty my desk. This is when I found my calculator missing and when I confronted the guy about it. He had borrowed it from me from time time before this all went down, so I knew he had an interest in it. He lied to my face about ever having touched it let alone taking it but i had no proof at that time.

Googling this arsehole generates no result.

I don't know where he is or where he isn't.

However, one day, many years after this in St Leonards (Sydney), out of the blue he walked in front of my car and I had to brake sharply.

My friend in the car with me instinctively said "be careful, you nearly hit him".

I laughed and said "I should have run the prick over" and told him the tale you presumably have just read.

He laughed.