This situation refers to the setting up of new software and hardware in very hostile conditions. The hostile conditions were mainly mud and running out to the porto-potty when the inside john in the Trailer office in a Parking Lot was not working.

The accounts payable office of a building company had been set up in some trailers in a muddy unpaved parking lot. This single Building Site was sitting across the highway from the old World Trade Center. As I sit and write this, that parking lot has ultimately been put to the ultimate sacrifice, and is becoming the first floor of one more office building in the greater Battery Park City.

We are talking mid eighties. I mention the mid eighties because it seems to be the last time that software programmers knew anyone about the inside workings of a Personal Computer. Up to that point, programmers could use spit, glue and paper clips to improvise any temporary fixes on a personal computer and its insides.

And talking Pcs, we are talking two drives, A and B.

Those unfamiliar with these old dinosaur drives, they were Cutting Edge. You put in your program on the A drive and plopped the other five inch floppy disk into the B drive to save your cutting edge managerial reports that looked quite sparse and full of tiny numbers.

Back to the situation room. The plan was to save money and close the distance between the building site and the back office in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. The foresight was to put a trailer in the parking lot with cabinets inside and start the milling process of collecting and processing work orders for every aspect of a fast track office building in the new emerging World Financial Center. The Wfc was rising up on landfill that had once been docks and a dock area on the lower Hudson River.

Work orders had to be beloved by task managers and floor supervisors and get approvals all the way up to normal manager before the back office could start putting data into the Pc and checks could be delivered to the vendors. The vendors all the time needed to be paid. In many cases they were supplying materials and labor as subcontractors and a paycheck is a paycheck no matter how you label it.

As such there was a constant request for exceptions and putting seller work orders ahead of the output line.

So you get the flow. The accomplished work orders got approvals. Checks could be cut on site. Mop up statistics, auditing could get started. Managerial reports could be generated.

So the Pc was a basic Ibm model. The programmer was inventing software as we went along because the company wanted to patent and sell developed software to a new building manufactures market.

The flow chart and the principles were great but then a diminutive glitch started to develop. The company in its quest had designed a program to keep tight operate over Blueprints flowing into the building area. These blueprints were sometimes reworks of reworks of customary blueprints. The invoices of these constantly changing blueprints had been a major headache on former building jobs. Everyone in the auditing department wanted real blueprints and real invoices for real blueprints delivered on a daily basis. You have a fifty story building in develop and you have not hundreds but thousands of blueprints and their redone versions floating around the building site. It was a nightmare.

The other part of the bad dream had to do with budgets. There was an expense to leasing trailers and to altering them. When building was done you had to return trailers in their customary health or pay adjustment costs.

The cost of computers and other hardware was quite costly then. I believe that the main programmer and two assistants on and off site ate up a lot of budget space.

In the uncut task of things, me and my Pc, were the bottom rung of the ladder in terms of back office work flow.

On top of this, my Pc was next to a hole in the wall that led to the normal manager's office. On the other side of the trailer there was a hole in the wall that led to a makeshift conference room. Foot traffic between was constant. Noise came in the form of verbal fights over disputed work orders. Noise came in the form of yelling about redone blueprints being reviewed. There was the usual office politics between the head of accounting in my trailer and the normal manager's secretary in the next trailer constantly at war over turf. On one or two occasions, the yelling matches between these two trailer queens almost broke out into fist fights.

But I am a diligent worker. I love a challenge.

The Pc, its hard drive memory, and its program too small for the needed data volumes. The blueprint seller file went exponentially out of operate one day and we were only half way through construction.

They bought a cutting edge exterior hard drive called a "grasshopper". It did the computer software bit until some cement mixer came rattling and rumbling over the parking lot next to us and the computer crashed. This happened at least once a week. Luckily all the hard copies of data input could be entered into the principles again. There was a daily chore of copying, downloading the daily data input onto a magnetic tape and locking it up in the safe. Of course, any flaws on the magnetic tape meant that the download could fail half way or three quarters of the way into the hour long backup process. Start all over again at seven or eight o'clock at night.

I am a patient person. maybe too patient a person. I felt committed to this project. I was a team player. I had invested a lot of time and personal interest in it. I was also young and stupid.

You come in at seven in the morning and you leave at eleven o'clock at night every day and nobody is listening. This was such a unique situation that nobody, myself included, had a clear photograph of where this task was going. You only had past work experiences to draw upon in terms of a comparison. There were no comparisons.

You make your requests for more Pcs and more bodies on the Pcs. It fell on deaf ears. The normal manager and the accounting department did not want to hear about flaws in the pet task of the owner of the company. I think that they did not understand what I was trying to tell to them. Delaying any decisions is a managerial function that I have grown to hate.

It was the time to find someone else job. This I did.

In terms of any task or job I have ever gotten complicated with since, I learned a major part from this one single job. Know your capacity. Try to communicate. constantly negotiate for win win. undergo as best you can. If all else fails, take a hike.

Like the lyrics of the song "The Gambler":

"You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.".

Live and learn. Live and learn.

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