A client of mine just changed a 6 year old business rule. It was an insanely complex rule to code up. Now they need to change it. I have to dig into ancient FoxPro 2.6 code (thank goodness I left myself lots of comments) to try to implement this new wrench. I have absolutely no patience for this, but I have to make myself sit here and do it and it’s making me nutty. Luckily I do have Happy Hour to look forward to later tonight.

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I was thinking about this story today and thought I’d share it. Perhaps someone can get some value from it.

Once upon a time, I was a young girl of 23 or so with a new job at a company that sold advertising for newspapers around the U.S. I was hired by a really neat woman, definitely a mentor in those days, to replace a secretary and quickly began taking on more and more responsibilities as she realized that I was kindofa smart cookie. In fact, this was the place where I found a computer in the corner with dBaseIII on it and taught myself how to use it. But that’s a different story. Eventually, this boss got pushed out of her job and replaced by a guy brought in from California who quickly had the company move one of his favorite employees, another young woman about 5 years older than me, to New York to take the job I should have been given.

A few months later, it was time for my first annual raise/review. I had been hired to replace a secretary and my job had evolved to something much bigger than that. I was given a $1,000 raise. After some discussion, the offer was raised to $1,500.

Within a week, I had found another job with a 30 year-old wunderkind advertising guy (Todd Boersma, are you still out there somewhere?) who recognized my potential and hired me for a job that was waaaay over my head. He had advertised for someone with 3 or 5 yrs of experience and I had zero. Who knows why I even called about the job, but that’s just how things work out. So having been made this great offer for a cool company (associated with the American Museum of Natural History), with what I recall to be an $8,000 or maybe more increase over my current salary, I went back to my employer and gave them my two weeks notice.

(To quote a friend🙂 “And then the phone rang”. Well, not really. The president of the company, who I had thought of as a nice kind of father figure, called me into his office. He offered me a new position with a $10,000 raise to stay. I don’t know where on earth this instinct came from as I was only 23 or 24 and not fond of conflict, but I said no. I thought that it was too little too late. It showed me that in fact they *had* recognized my work and my value, but had explictly chosen to try to keep me on the cheap. I didn’t trust what may lay down the road if I stayed.

But then a very interesting (and scary) thing happened. This father-figure president of the company turned into Mr. Hyde. He totally turned on me and said “you owe us” (I did? really?) in a very threatening way. Hmmm, trying to woo me into staying, eh? I held my ground somehow, made it through the last 2 weeks and went off to work for Natural History Magazine for a grand two years.

Interestingly this happened one more time in my career. I had been at Playboy advertising for 2 years and again, evolved my job into much more than I was hired to do. When my boss left, I was looked over for his job and they hired a completely inept guy to replace him. I was basically doing his job. After four months of this, I found another new job with another brilliantly wonderful guy (David Yakir, I know you are out there :-)!) and gave my two weeks notice. Once again, I was called into the office of the biggest whig in the office. This was a guy who I liked and respected enormously and he had been a Navy Seal. I was offered a huge raise to stay, but said “thanks SO very much. I really appreciate it. But I have already made a commitment to the other company.” Rut roh. Did I forget I was talking to a professionally trained killer? Once again, I got the “YOU OWE US HOW DARE YOU LEAVE” totally frightening rebuttal that definitely made me very happy to hightail it out the door two weeks later.

I just can’t understand how anyone can think that intimidation is a benefit in the work place.

And here I sit in my home office. Though the view has changed over time, I have been happily self-employed for some fifteen years.

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Miguel de Icaza reminds me that my last minute submissions to the PDC BOFs have a cold chance of getting many votes at this stage of the game. I submitted them yesterday. Voting ends on Sunday. The sessions aren’t on the site yet as there is some due diligence that needs to be done by the BOF committee, which Miguel is seems to be unaware of.

So if you want to talk about subversive implementations of the .NET ;-), follow Miguel’s blog to find out what dark corner of L.A. he chooses to gather if his gloomy prediction comes true. If you want to vote for my totally innocuous* sessions (“Tablet PC: If you build it, will they come?” and “Going Solo”) keep an eye on the BOF sessions list to see if they show up and then you can vote for them. Otherwise, perhaps Eliot Graff can arrange another TabletPC geek gathering in a trendy art gallery/bar like he did in San Francisco during the VSLive/Windows Anywhere conference.

*innocuous \ih-NOK-yoo-uhs\, adjective:
1. Harmless; producing no ill effect.
2. Not likely to offend or provoke; as, “an innocuous remark.”

Leon Bambrick is at it again….

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Rick Strahl is trying to tie up an article on client ScriptCallbacks in ASP.NET 2.0. He’s having a rough time because .NET 2.0 is still, in some respects, a moving target. I rewrote my ADO.NET 2.0 article for MSDN Magazine 3 times based on releases between my first draft and publication date. My CoDe Mag article on Debugger Visualizers also had to be updated just before publication when the object model changed. I believe one author had to throw out an entire chapter of an upcoming ADONET 2.0 book since a namespace was removed. Oops.

.NET 2.0 is very close, but they have definitely been fixing some issues since Beta2. I know that the way that ADO.NET 2.0 works with SQL Server 2005’s Query Notification has been reworked from the inside out (on the outside it hasn’t changed dramatically though) and I’m trying to get a presentation ready (powerpoints are due 2 months before the conference) so that’s been fun.

Actually, it *is* fun. We complain and maybe spend more time than normal dealing with keeping up with the shifts, but it’s fun. I know that the changes in Query Notification have made me look much deeper into the plumbing than I might have otherwise – which only helps to make me understand it better. It’s definitely a rollercoaster ride – filled with passengers who all share a common disorder.

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