5
Stunned at the turn of the year when mother told me that the money
she borrowed from me was, in retrospect, money I owed her for a
'privileged childhood', I was uncertain what to do and suddenly
realized I was twelve hundred dollars poorer. Given that the bank
mother had chosen for me had started eating away what little money I
had left through 'maintenance fees', I felt I needed to get the
balance up as quickly as I could. I then remembered Al's very
positive reaction upon seeing my magnum opus game, 'Star Quest' at
Jeff's house the previous Summer and decided to give him a call,
''Did you want to buy my game Star Quest for a thousand dollars?''
While Al didn't own the start-up himself, it was just created
around him, he couldn't say ''Yes'' but he had great sway on the
owner, 'Chuck', and called him up to discuss it. It turned out the
company was on the verge of accepting a high profile contract for a
wing of the military and needed help to get the project done on a
tight schedule. He agreed to buy my game for the price I asked as
four two hundred and fifty dollar payments, in return he asked
if my services would be available for a per month fee? It
wouldn't be as an employee, more as an 'Independent Contractor'. I
agreed for four hundred dollars a month. I was thrilled; in three
months I would have made more than the one thousand I was getting for
the game I'd spent nearly three years making!
The new project was going to be based on a more universal CP/M
platform, the Linux of its day, the office's TRS-80
Model 4 was capable of running it and Jeff's own TRS-80
Model I had a special patch board he had installed so he could
run it to. So I could develop much of my code at home, Jeff and I
traded our central processing units and mine ended up running Jeff's
site with his expansion interface and disk drives while his ran on my
peripherals. I'll call the project the 'Prescription Overview
Service,' POS for short, the goal was to make a networked database to
keep track of patients' prescriptions on terminals that would be
available at the medical wards and the military pharmacy itself. In
this way doctors wishing to prescribe something could see the most
current list of medications for a patient and assess dosing and
safety concerns. In return, rather than slips of paper which
could get misplaced, be hard to read, or simply not be delivered to
the base's pharmacy, prescriptions entered at the doctor's
terminal would print-up at the pharmacy and the software would track
when the prescription request had been fulfilled and/or why not. As
part of confirming each prescription, the pharmacist would again be
presented with the patient's current medication regimen online and
serve as a second check that any additional prescription was safe.
All seemed set for a productive and financially sound first six
months of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Discussing all the needs of the system, Al broke down the file
structure and size requirements while we together figured out what
logical modules we'd need to create, such as a log-in screen with
validating logic, a patient review and update screen, a guided
prescription ordering screen, etc. I started off with the log-in
service along with some common logic routines while Al finalized the
file descriptions & breakdowns and passed them on to me. When I
looked them over, I realized there were some problems as the numbers
didn't add up and recalculated them and called Al to let him know
what the corrected figures were. This was my first mistake.
Al had some idiosyncrasies, it seemed. During my first few
years in Colorado I had tried to start-up a new Dungeons &
Dragons group and, once going, we invited Al to join us. Rather than
create his character and join the team of players, he instead
attacked the other players' characters right away before we could
even get into an adventure. This caused a quandary as, being Dungeon
Master, I was expected to honor each player's actions and figure-out
and enforce the consequences, but at the same time his doing nothing
but this wasn't what the game was about. After he had killed the
couple team mates' characters, the rest ganged-up and killed his
character. I tried to paper it over as 'fighting practice', but
Al would have none of it and demanded that the results were true
and he and the other players whose characters had been killed had
to create all new characters before we could enter the adventure.
The group grumpily agreed and half the team got to sit around while
the other half created new characters from scratch, balancing their
skills, choosing their talents, figuring out what equipment and
weapons they could afford with their initial pouch of cash. Once
done we gathered again to start the game proper and Al promptly
started attacking the other players. This time the rest of the group
didn't take it with a touch of good humor and turned to me to eject
Al from the game. As our playing day was nearly over anyhow, I
recommended that we call it a day and decide what to do later. All
agreed and we left, then the rest of us discussed what to do by phone
in the subsequent days. As I was technically working for Al, I
found myself in a bad position as being the one who would have to
enforce kicking him out of the game. We came up with the idea of
dissolving the group and reforming it without Al a few weeks later.
When I told him that the group had dissolved, this actually seemed to
make Al happy.
When we would occasionally go on drives for work, or sometimes share
lunch, Al and I would discuss life in general and philosophy. I was
surprised when he flat out stated that there should be a set of rules
everyone else should follow in life, but of course they shouldn't
apply to him. I took it with a laugh but then when he asked why I
had laughed... I told him I assumed he had been joking. He
assured me that he wasn't;
he truly believed he should be apart from the rules of the World. I
decided to be quiet and not ask any further questions on this and
instead kept future discussions to computer code and what modules
needed to be worked on next.
Part of Jeff's dial-up, online site adopted my Science Fiction book
reviewing software I had created the year before. People now
visiting Jeff's site could check the reviews for possible books to
read and enter their own reviews. Al took it upon himself to go
through some of the reviews and edit them into having foul language
and profanity as well as enter some bogus reviews from scratch. Once
we noticed this had happened, Jeff and I restored the files from his
most recent back up and I asked Al why he had done that. He said
he had been bored. When he was asked not to do that, he
retorted, ''So, sue me!'' This was a common response he'd give when
called on his little offenses and I decided, in fun, to change his
first name on Jeff's message base to 'Sue' with Jeff's consent.
After Al hadn't noticed for a few weeks, I pointed it out to him.
This was my second mistake.
He reacted like it was a good laugh and the next day when I went to
get onto Jeff's site I found couldn't. When Jeff went to see what
the problem was, my user id, all my eMails, all my contributions to
Jeff's site were gone. When he checked the log, Jeff found that Al
had been logged into the site and used his honorary System Operator
privileges to delete everything, even tangentially, involving me.
Unlike tweaking how someone's name was displayed for a few weeks,
this left serious damage to Jeff's site which took a few days to sort
out and repair. As it was Jeff's site Al had done this to, even
though it had been targeted at me, Jeff removed Al's enhanced
privileges leaving him the same access as any other regular user. Al
protested as he had helped Jeff upgrade the site the previous year
and he was allowed to have his full access back as long as he agreed
not to do something like that again. He did and so Jeff restored his
controlling access and Al went straight back to adding profane
language to other people's reviews in the book database. This time
his work had been extensive, ruining just about everyone's reviews.
The only solution to not burn bridges with Al was to simply take the
book review portion of the site down for good. This seemed to make
him happy and he didn't do any further damage to Jeff's site.
After the first two months on the POS project Al started to flat out,
and continuously, harass me at the office. I tried to ignore it, but
soon I took to keeping my work hours to the late night and early
morning shift when working at the office, or I would work on the code
at home during the other times I wasn't at business school taking
classes. This just meant Al had to release his pent-up bile during
the brief times I'd still see him to give him my latest completed
code or discuss needed coding or approach changes. I kept my cool as
I was able to keep these times very brief and otherwise work without
him around. Even visiting at Jeff's house, when Al would arrive I'd
stick to visiting with Jeff's girl friend in the other room while Al
was with him, then go back to visiting with Jeff once Al left.
By the end of March I had developed a bad cold and when I went in to
get that month's pay check it turned out to be two hundred and fifty
dollars short. When I asked Al about it, he replied, ''Don't worry
about it.'' Chuck, the boss, had already left for the day so I
couldn't ask him. Already fed up with Al's antics, I decided to
play it safe and finish-up any outstanding work I had that weekend
and left it at the office on a disk for Al to review when he got in
Monday morning. On my way to evening classes, I stopped by the
office to see about my missing pay and what he thought of the code.
For the pay, he had no answer and Chuck was still not around, as for
my disk with the last of my outstanding code completed on in, he said
he'd wiped it as well as deleted all of my coding from the previous
three months and I'd have to start it all from scratch. When I noted
I could just bring in copies from home, he said No, I'd
still have to start from scratch.
Short of pay, with a worsening cough, no assigned tasks outstanding
for the month of April, I just took my copy of the office key off my
key chain, put it on the desk next to Al, and left for school. My
future working at a start-up software company was over.
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