Years and years ago my first grownup IT project was to help the City of Independence, Missouri, set up a scheduling system for its municipal court cases. Utah was the promised land, but Independence was where the Mormons expected Christ to return to earth. Competing Mormon factions had staked out claims on the spot where Christ was expected to land. Who knew there were competing Mormon factions? All the things you learn about America by travelling west of the Hudson.
When my neighbor Paula ran away from her husband, I inherited some of her furniture and used it to replace the things I'd been renting. Later, I'd tell people I'd slept in the bed of the great-great-great-grand daughter of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. What I left out of that story was that I never got to sleep in the bed while Paula was in it. Too bad for me. Paula was a really hot redhead. Imagine, redheaded Mormons. Another thing you don't know when you grow up east of the Hudson.
Harry Truman was the town's other claim to fame. Outside my office window, there was a big statue of him. Only one of two in the country. Truman's house was just down the street. He liked to take morning strolls around the town square. A simple life that I'd missed by getting hired a few years too late.
The ladies who administered the small court weren't thrilled about the computer project. "How will it change our lives? It will just be more work for us to set up and administer. There's barely enough time in the day to do the work we have now and you want us to help you? All this work to put speeding tickets and Fight Day on a computer."
Wednesday was Fight Day, the day when misdemeanor cases were handled, often domestic disputes that got out of hand and required police intervention. The nasty stuff -- murders, robberies and serious beatings -- were handled by the Jackson County Court. Even so, Fight Day drew a large crowd.
The police were more enthusiastic about the project. The scheduling part of the system would cut down the time officers spent in court (you might have been able to achieve the same thing with a more effective manual scheduling system) and it was a resume builder -- "While working for the Independence Police Department I implemented a computerized court scheduling system for my patrolman." Plus we could make site visits to St. Louis and Kansas City, which was very exotic being five miles away. Technology transfer was the buzzword of the day. Take a system from another city and make it work for yours.
The St. Louis trip was, in fact, interesting. The head clerk, a tall and courtly black man, ex-military, treated us to lunch and did a good job showing us around and explaining the mechanics and benefits of his system. I got to spend some serious face time with the police chief and his second in command. For some reason they amused themselves trying to get me drunk at dinner. You'd think they'd have done a background check and discovered that in a prior life my job, in addition to sowing mayhem among the North Vietnamese, had been herding drunken commodores at officers' clubs throughout the Far East. We ended up selecting the St. Louis system for Independence. The chief and his assistant couldn't out drink me.
The police chief had gotten his job by taking on a special assignment for the city manager. A little before I arrived, the city desegregated the public swimming pool. Chief went in undercover to finger any troublemakers. (Wearing a swimming suit at pool in a small town where everyone knows everyone, isn't exactly undercover, but that's the best I can do. If you don't like, it write your own story.) The new police chief wasn't asked to desegregate the police department. Affirmative Action consisted of the city manager hiring young black man from Kansas City to be his assistant. That was the extend of it.
The city council consisted of people who represented the best of small town America: a college professor, a newspaper reporter, the League of Women voters. They were about to be deposed. Maybe it was the pool? Maybe it was because the city manager, who was an outsider from California, raised the sewer rates by a dollar a month? Maybe it was the city manager's black assistant? It was thirty years too early for the Tea Party, but the sentiment was close.
The third project stakeholder was the municipal court judge. He had a fearsome reputation. After spending some time as observers at the court, the other systems analyst and I were certain he deserved it.
The city planned to build a new court building, but for the time being the court still used the second floor of the old jail house. There were rumors members of the Jesse James gang had once been locked up there. Possible. The building looked like it hadn't been painted since the days when the Jesse James terrorized Jackson County.
Our first Fight Day as observers, the judge walks into court and takes his seat. He eyes the crowd. "There's a lot of you folks here today. Please stand. Thank you. Now all of you line up along the far wall in front of the windows. Thank you. Very good. The reason I've asked you to line up along the wall in front of the windows is that the building is condemned. If the floor begins to collapse, I want to be sure that I'm the closest one to the door and the first person out."
