An idiot by any other name

Many years ago I moved from a shop that was VM/VSE based where I was a systems programmer to a much larger shop running MVS and multiple mainframes, where I was a CICS Systems Programmer – part of a 16 member Systems Programming staff. I already had 12 years in the business. The firm that I joined had just been taken over, and management changes seemed to be occurring semi-hourly. The perception of the incoming team was that we were all idiots, capable of no decision-making on our own, and it didn’t matter that the way of the new guys involved modifying IBM source code — they had answers even where there were no apparent questions.

At any rate, the incoming bosses had no family or personal lives (one even told me that if I needed a family with which to spend time, the company would have made it part of the contract). Everything was subordinated to the Needs of the Three Letters – and on a weekend that I had had planned for several months, when I was to travel about 300 miles, sing at my only marriageable cousin’s wedding, meet his new wife, and visit with family (some not seen in years), I was notified at the last minute that I wasn’t to leave town because we were doing CICS 1.7 that weekend (I know, this dates me….). I arranged for a substitute soloist that I had to pay, and waited at home for the call to come in. None came. Monday morning I was greeted by many CICS regions that were not behaving, many parameters that had been changed by someone else who was somewhere else, and I was told to make it all work, without being told what had been done to screw it up. It didn’t go well, and at some point we pulled the upgrade back.

The next day in an early morning meeting, someone asked me when CICS 1.7 was going up. I was at this point less than thrilled with the happenings of the weekend, the treatment I had received, the results, and the fact that I, who had made none of the changes, was apparently going to catch all of the blame. So, honesty struck me and I responded with words to the effect that I wasn’t the person to be asked since I wasn’t consulted, did not observe, and was not part of the planning or execution effort and apparently was to be involved only when it was hopelessly screwed up and there was nobody around to start scraping up the poo from the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. I should have stopped there, and would have, but the VP sitting next to me asked me why I was grumpy, and I responded that some idiot at his end of the world (he was part of the victor organization, located some distance south of Baltimore) had screwed up yet another family weekend and left me holding a big bag of poo.

The VP didn’t know me and assumed that he was the idiot I referenced (he might well have been, but had I known that, I would have named names – my style was never to be generic when there were specifics available). He called his boss down south and demanded that I be fired.

His boss came back to my boss and delivered the message, and I was hauled into a room and given a resignation letter to sign. I refused to sign it as I believed myself to have done nothing wrong — the worst I had done was call events as I had seen them. The VP involved demanded that I go, so I was going, but I wouldn’t sign the letter, and nobody knew what to do. Apparently someone actually allowing a firing to be called a firing had never before occurred. If I recall aright, my words were something like “I may have loaded the gun for you, and I might even have cocked it – but if you want me shot you have to do it yourself.”

My boss appealed to me to think of my reputation. I responded that I was well known enough around the city and didn’t think my reputation would suffer much. I pointed out that folks got fired all the time and not always for incompetence. I also wanted this whole scenario on the record. Nobody knew what to do, so I was sent back to work, where I finished what I was working on and then let friends in the organization in on what was going to be happening. One whole team of programmers went to lunch at a pub across the street and never came back that day. Later I was called over to HR to sign the same letter, and made the same refusal. I was ushered out that evening without a badge or anything else, but learned several days later that I was still in the system for remote access, and still had all my RACF credentials, so I called the security manager to get myself taken out. I had the tools and the knowledge to do many bad things but did none of them.

I was cut loose with no severance, save for the few vacation days I had accumulated. I never did see the records of what transpired, but because I was the oldest systems programmer, I had the EOE folks give them a fit about age discrimination, called some higher-ups within the organization, and rattled a few cages. Eventually someone decided that my treatment had been shabby, and paid me to stop calling people and raising a ruckus.

So if you ever heard a funny story about a guy in Baltimore who got fired for calling the wrong person an idiot, believe it – it’s true, I was there, and I’m that guy.

And I’m still in IS more than 20 years later.