What Comes Around Goes Around

One of the things I noticed is how little teamwork in being fostered in this country right now with the economy in shambles and people being laid off and downsized all the time. And those problems don't seem to be getting any better.

Years ago (June of '88 to April of '94) I was a computer programmer for AT&T. I went through a lot of things in the company. My uncle spotted the ad the company ran for computer programmers. He told me that AT&T was a lifetime deal when I got the job but my gut instincts told me it wasn't.

Sometimes I had a hard time handling the work but I persevered and stayed there for a long time. I had problems with quite a few co-workers and superiors.

The first system in worked on was a piece of trash that generated information that was not "robust" meaning it didn't have the correct picture of what was going on. When I took over the project, I called up the analyst and we mutually decided to trash it and move on to better systems.

I wound up in arguments over politics and religion like the Palestinian problem in Israel and people kept trying to tell me what the Jewish religious books are about when they were wrong and I am very much knowledgeable about what they say. One of my bosses said, "I'm not talking about modern Hebrew, I'm talking about ancient Hebrew." IF I had my wits about me, I would have said, "I went to ancient Hebrew School." Four nights a week and 3 hours per night no less, being immersed in Judaism's ancient rituals laws and customs.

One of my bosses said, "I'm better than you!" and a second person looked at me and smirked when he said that he was "right-sizing" a project knowing full well that I would not survive the cut.

One District Manager at AT&T told me that I had quality once. Then a while later he said that they were going to send the computer specifications (commonly called "specs" is computerese) to Korea. From what I know some of these specs went to India.

All of this is water under the bridge. All the aforementioned people also were downsized, laid off or outsourced to other companies. So their antics rebounded on their own head.

When I was at AT&T, the company had 300 thousand employees but years later it only had 57 thousand until it merged with SBC.

One person told me that her husband was good at his job and wouldn't lose his position but that means nothing in this day and age of modern business. I made the systems I had jump through hoops and I was out the door.