Some years ago my company, Deloitte, came to me and said, " We need you to work on a project. The staff is young and needs a little help." The young staff it turns out was building a new computer system for Arizona Medicaid. When I got there I asked to look at the work plan. After perusing it, I looked at the project manager. "You have 50 people working on this now. The plan says that in a month you're supposed to have 100 programmers. Where are they coming from and, by the way, you only have 50 desks and no office space for more desks."
"By the way (Darlin'), the client has chosen to implement the system in the IDEAL/Datacom database programming language (not widely used). Few of your young staff are programmers and only one of them has ever heard of this language. Fair enough you're just finishing the requirements/design phase of the project (barely on schedule and only because you've done a slapdash job), but where are the programmers coming from (since Deloitte doesn't have a cadre of programmers on the bench, especially the IDEAL kind)."
It was downhill from there. A few more months down the road an acquaintance of mine called up and said he wanted me to help him run the finance systems for a really big company in Houston: "The Smartest People in the Room." I thought long and hard about the offer, but I didn't want to leave before the job was done in Arizona, especially when the project was in big trouble. Besides I really, really didn't like the guy offering me the job. He definitely wasn't the smartest person in the room, nor the sweetest. So I toughed it out in Arizona and finished the project. Deloitte lost millions, but the system got built, very much to the firm's credit, because they continued to throw resources at the project until the job got done.
And it came to pass that the company in Houston, ENRON, failed big time. My acquaintance had managed to move from ENRON to Arthur Andersen as a partner and negotiated a deal where he and Arthur Anderson ran ENRON's internal audit department. Somehow he escaped going to jail. Everyone who worked for ENRON was ruined. But not me. I stayed in Arizona and met my beautiful and smart wife. That is how I know there is a God in heaven.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Monday, June 23, 2014
The Last Beer in the Kingdom
"Have a beer! It's the last one in the Kingdom."
I was humbled and honored, ARAMCO's bootlegger-in-chief was giving me his last beer.
"The religious police finally figured out why the supermarket was selling so much hops and they've taken it off the shelves. No more beer in the entire Kingdom [Saudi Arabia]. I should still do well selling gin [two varieties: white and brown]."
The Kingdom was an Islamic state: alcohol was prohibited and a lot of other stuff people consider fun. They actually had bureaucrats dedicated to censoring the paperback romance novels sold in the local hotel where we were staying just outside the ARAMCO gate. Racy bursting bodice on the front cover? Magic marker blacks out the problem. Something too hot inside. Magic marker again, or just remove the offending pages. Tough job, but someone needs to stand up for decency.
The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) can be summed in a few words: we provide energy to the world. In a world where Americans were not always popular, they were admired, if not loved, in Saudi Arabia. Americans might be Christian Infidels trespassing in the birthplace of Muhammad, The Prophet, but they had discovered oil in the Kingdom and made the Arabs rich. Very, very rich. Unlike the British, the Americans weren't condescending or slow to pick up a tab... Lawrence of Arabia notwithstanding. Americans got things done and the Kingdom bent the rules for them. ARAMCO headquarters was its own little American town. It had its own Little League. Women could drive and have jobs (sort of). There was even a golf course for those who could deal with playing on sand with "oiled" greens instead of grass ones. All the compound homes came with a small concrete block bunker-room in the garage. This was a practical concession to American employees who brewed their own liquor. In the early days some of the stills exploded leveling the entire home. To minimize the damage, new homes were built with bunkers for the stills to limit the damage. Some employees, like the bootlegger-in-chief, had taken brewing to the next level and were making more money from the liquor business than they made as employees (and ARAMCO employees got paid a lot).
Eventually the authorities caught up to the bootlegger-in-chief. The dilemma the authorities had was what to do with him. They couldn't just throw an American in jail. They had to give him a public trial. In the trial the details and extent of the bootlegging business would come out and embarrass the Kingdom and ARAMCO. In the end, as they often did, the Saudis pretended nothing had happened and just let the bootlegger go and told him never to return to the Kingdom. He got to keep his profits.
I was humbled and honored, ARAMCO's bootlegger-in-chief was giving me his last beer.
"The religious police finally figured out why the supermarket was selling so much hops and they've taken it off the shelves. No more beer in the entire Kingdom [Saudi Arabia]. I should still do well selling gin [two varieties: white and brown]."
The Kingdom was an Islamic state: alcohol was prohibited and a lot of other stuff people consider fun. They actually had bureaucrats dedicated to censoring the paperback romance novels sold in the local hotel where we were staying just outside the ARAMCO gate. Racy bursting bodice on the front cover? Magic marker blacks out the problem. Something too hot inside. Magic marker again, or just remove the offending pages. Tough job, but someone needs to stand up for decency.
The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) can be summed in a few words: we provide energy to the world. In a world where Americans were not always popular, they were admired, if not loved, in Saudi Arabia. Americans might be Christian Infidels trespassing in the birthplace of Muhammad, The Prophet, but they had discovered oil in the Kingdom and made the Arabs rich. Very, very rich. Unlike the British, the Americans weren't condescending or slow to pick up a tab... Lawrence of Arabia notwithstanding. Americans got things done and the Kingdom bent the rules for them. ARAMCO headquarters was its own little American town. It had its own Little League. Women could drive and have jobs (sort of). There was even a golf course for those who could deal with playing on sand with "oiled" greens instead of grass ones. All the compound homes came with a small concrete block bunker-room in the garage. This was a practical concession to American employees who brewed their own liquor. In the early days some of the stills exploded leveling the entire home. To minimize the damage, new homes were built with bunkers for the stills to limit the damage. Some employees, like the bootlegger-in-chief, had taken brewing to the next level and were making more money from the liquor business than they made as employees (and ARAMCO employees got paid a lot).
Eventually the authorities caught up to the bootlegger-in-chief. The dilemma the authorities had was what to do with him. They couldn't just throw an American in jail. They had to give him a public trial. In the trial the details and extent of the bootlegging business would come out and embarrass the Kingdom and ARAMCO. In the end, as they often did, the Saudis pretended nothing had happened and just let the bootlegger go and told him never to return to the Kingdom. He got to keep his profits.
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