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.
