The Dragon Hires a Temp: No Country for Old Men

Back in the bad old days after I got a sit-on-your-butt job and before I got too old to be hirable, I ran big tech projects for a big consulting firm.  I kept my eye out for talent who could help my projects, because a few good hires could really make a software development project.  I know. You're thinking I was an old guy who just liked talking to young women, but I wasn't interested in romance.  I wanted to find people who could program and weren't on someone else's radar in the days when tech people in the US were a hot commodity.  People who weren't going to go to a strip club at lunch time and have a couple of beers  (on one project in Pittsburgh I always needed to be sure to hold all my meetings with the client programmers before lunch hour).   At vendor software training sessions I looked for unappreciated young women programmers and recruited them for my projects.  My greatest coup was discovering a temp who a client had hired to type documentation.  She was a Carnegie Mellon CS major who'd gotten into a fight with her father and didn't have enough money to finish school.  We gave her a big raise and with very little additional training she wrote all the system reports.  After the project she finished her degree work, moved to Seattle and (I hope) lived happily ever after.

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An added advantage to hiring young women -- besides them not going to strip clubs at lunchtime for beers -- was that they weren't likely to be a difficult manic-depressive ex-marine contractor who was prone to skipping his lithium and liked shooting his pet machine gun in the desert after work.

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Another drawback to hiring women in the days before Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill.  The women always seemed to be riled up about something.  I couldn't figure out what until our biggest project was nearly over and the senior partner had packed his bags and gone home, leaving me to straighten out the broken pieces.

"Everybody Loves" Grace checked in with me.
(Grace was so sweet that she never figured out until after he retired that, when she lived in Vientiane during her junior high years, her dad worked for the CIA and was head of Air America security)
Sorry if Jacq and I were grumpy sometimes.
No problem. You should work with fisherman who've been pulling nets for a week straight... or sailors who've just spent a month firing 10,000 5" rounds during all night raids on Haiphong Harbor and other scenic tropical places.
Oh... it was just that X [senior partner] kept bugging us.
I knew that.
No you didn't.  He used to walk up behind us and snap our bras and other dirt bag stuff like that.
You should have told me.  I'd have stopped it.
We were afraid you'd get mad and punch him out.
You're a good judge of character, my dear.
[Too bad, though, that Deloitte job was one I'd have loved to have left in a legendary blaze of glory.  I was disappointed I'd missed the excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway.]

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The women weren't without sin.   Sweet Grace and her pals had their "mean girls" counterparts.  They liked to gossip about everyone's sex lives and Partner X loved to personally indulge them (no wonder we were behind schedule and losing money).  In particular the ladies, even the sweet ones, liked to speculate and confirm which men were gay.  STOP.  I don't care that you saw Bob kissing his boy friend goodbye this morning.  I need Bob to lead you people, develop the specifications for the claims system and make sure you people program it according to spec.   Short of personally sleeping with the guy myself, I will do anything to keep him happy.