Through 2023 I have mainly played bridge with people from the Northeast in the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) and the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in Connecticut and at tournaments. There were two sets of exceptions: the two bridge cruises that Sue and I took and a few occasions in which I picked up a partner at a club game when I was on the road for business or some other purpose. Only eight out of my 144 partners through 2023 fit in these categories.
Club games: I have included one game in Northampton, MA. The other two locations were in Charlotte, NC, and the Tampa Bay area.
Dave Wroblewski was the father of Denise Podavini (introduced here). He lived in Charlotte, NC, which was the location of the headquarters of Belk stores, one of TSI’s most important users of the AdDept and AxN systems throughout the twenty-first century. Denise was TSI’s primary contact at Belk from her arrival in 2008 until the dissolution of TSI in 2014 (described here).
I learned from Denise that her family was from Massachusetts and that her father was an avid bridge player. Denise was not even slightly interested in the game, but her father was attempting to teach her daughter1 how to play. When he heart that I had become a Life Master he invited me (through Denise) to play with him at the Charlotte Bridge Club one evening when I was in town consulting and gathering specs. This probably occurred in 2010, but it may have been a little later.
Dave and I had a nondescript game together. I am sure that I made a few mistakes. In those days my assessment of my abilities was somewhat inflated.
David was still a member of the ACBL at the end of 2023. He did not receive any masterpoints in 2023, which struck me as peculiar. He needed less than 27 masterpoints to reach the Diamond Life Master level of 5,000. I had to wonder if something happened to him to prevent him from playing.
It occurred to me while writing this section that my wife Sue has played with Ann Wroblewski, who lived in South Deerfield, MA. I had to wonder if her husband John was related to Dave. The name is not that common.
A year or two before the pandemic my friend Judy Hyde was trying to promote the novice game in the Northampton Bridge Club.3 She invited me to come up and play in the Pro-Am game at a room at the Methodist Church in NoHo. It was a long drive, and Wednesday was the worst possible day for me The time of the game (1pm) conflicted with the morning game at the HBC. It did not directly conflict with the evening game in Simsbury, but working out how best to get from Noho to Eno Hall and to eat supper by 6:30 would not be easy.
On the other hand, I wanted to help Judy get the game established, and so I agreed to play with Susan Lantz
It appears that playing one round with me did not inspire her much. She stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2022, at which point she had only 26.71 masterpoints.
My wife Sue’s parents moved to Clearwater, FL, in 1982. In the subsequent years Sue and I went down to visit with them on several occasions. Occasionally Sue and I visited one of the local bridge clubs for a game. They found appropriate partners for both of us.
The Clearwater Bridge Club4 played on the second floor of the Regions Bank building. They still were playing there at the end of 2023. Occasionally local residents Eric Rodwell and his wife have been known to attend games. The one time that I played there I was paired up with Dr. Mark Goldschmidt, a retired pediatrician who was a very good player.
My recollection is that we had a pretty good session, but we did not win. In 2023 Mark was still active in bridge. He had about 1,700 masterpoints.
The other club near Clearwater is the St. Petersburg Bridge Club, which is actually in a shopping center in Panellas Park, FL. I can only remember going to this club once, but my list of partners lists two from this club, Marvin Kistler of Kenneth City, FL, and Chris Person from Tampa. Both of them were still members of the ACBL in 2023, but Marvin had earned no masterpoints all year.
I have one fairly vivid memory of playing at this club. I think that I was playing with Chris, but I could be mistaken. On a hand in one of the very first rounds we were playing against one of my partners from Connecticut, Michael Varhalamas (introduced here). Chris opened 1♣, and the opponent to my right passed. I had a very weak hand with shortness in clubs. I passed, and so did Michael. Chris had to play in 1♣ with less than half the points and less than half the trumps. We received a very bad score.
I asked Michael if he would have bid with my hand. He said that he would have because opener could have as few as three clubs. He said that if he had opened any other suit. I have remembered that advice, but I am not sure that it is the right choice in all circumstances.
Sue has much more vivid memories of this club than I do. She was there when someone drove their car through the flimsy wall and stopped just short of where Sue was sitting. Mark Smith was directing that day. He ran up to Sue and helped her out of the “death seat”. He claims that he saved her life, but Sue remembers it a little differently.
The St. Pete club is still operational in the same building in 2023. Its website is here.
Sue and I took two bridge cruises together. Both of them featured Larry Cohen. The first one was in 2012, right after Sue and I got married. I have recorded the details here. We have often referred to it as the “Honeymoon for One. ” The sordid tale has been posted here.
One of the tournament staff was assigned the job of assuring that everyone had a reasonably appropriate partner. I was originally assigned to play with a lady, but she dumped me before the first hand. Instead my partner for the entire cruise was Frank Evangelista from Boca Raton, FL.
I really liked Frank, and I communicated with him a few times in the years following the cruise. Frank stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2021. I could not find an obituary or any other clear reference to him on the Internet.
The other cruise was two years later. It was longer and had a much better offering of excursions. My journal of the trip has been posted here. My partner for this one was Marty Singer, who had houses in both New Jersey and West Palm Beach, FL. We intended to play together at an event that was proximate to both of us, but it never happened. He is still playing regularly at national and regional events.
On December 24, 2014, Marty was not available to play. I was paired up with Jacques Sopkin of Newport Beach,CA. The journal page for that experience is here. Jacques died at the age of 91. His obituary is here. His LinkedIn page is still available here. For “experience” only “007” is listed.
1. I never met her, but I think that this must be Katie Podavini, who was still an ACBL member at the end of 2023. She only had 37.71 masterpoints and none in 2083. It is incredible to me that so many people were still paying dues in 2023 but not playing at all.
2. The Charlotte Bridge Club appears to have survived the pandemic. Its home page is here. On the day that I wrote this entry (12/16/23) the club was holding a “Christmas/Holiday” party.
3. The Northampton Bridge Club was struggling in 2023. Their Tuesday night game was taken online during the Pandemic, and it never returned to face-to-face play. Judy’s Wednesday game persisted in 2023, and they sometimes had special games at Amherst. The club’s website can be found here.
4. The Clearwater Bridge Club was running seven in-house games per week and two Swiss events per month at the end of 2023. They were still playing in the bank. The website is here.
Between January of 2001 and November of 2006 I met pretty often with Denise Bessette (introduced here), who was by then my partner and VP of Application Development. I found a folder of Microsoft Word files for the agendas that I wrote up for these strategy meetings. Starting in 2003 the meetings became more regular. They occurred on many if not most Wednesdays, the day that I was most likely not to be at a client’s.
We generally ate lunch together at an order-at-the-bar restaurant on the west side of the river. It had picnic tables near a small stream. I can’t remember the name of the place. I took a drive in the area that my memory associated with its location, but I could find no trace of it. I suspect that it closed, and the land was bought by a developer who put it to another use, perhaps condominiums.
The following summaries are mostly in chronological order. Almost every AdDept client is mentioned at some point. Separate blog entries with much more details have been posted for each of them. They can easily be found using the 1948 Project’s master index program, which is available here.
Many items on the agendas are repeated on subsequent agendas. A few of them persist over years. These were issues for which we never found solutions. The most obvious examples were the efforts to find additional uses for AxN that would benefit newspapers and/or advertisers.
By 2001 the nature of and name for AxN1 had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.
By 2002 the business environment for large department stores had changed dramatically. Before listing the agenda for one of the meetings I wrote, “We need to change our attitude 180 degrees. Previously we had excess demand and were struggling to increase our capacity to meet it. Now we have excess capacity, and our customers are frugal.”
I had used Net.Data2 extensively for AxN. At the time it was the only thing available on the AS/400 that could interact with the database. By 2002, however, IBM was telling people not to use it. However, it was several years before IBM provided an equivalent tool. Java3, which I had studied extensively and had concluded was not suitable for what we wanted to do, was IBM’s solution to everything.
I was surprised to read how uncertain we were about the willingness o AdDept clients to use AxN. The meeting in March mentioned the need for a second installation. Before reading this I was pretty sure that Belk4 was the first, but maybe someone else had used it on a limited basis.
In 2003 Denise and talked a lot about what kind of programming was marketable to our clients. We investigated quite a few products that claimed to make it easier to make native AS/400 programs web-based . We also talked about what features could be added to AxN so that it would be more valuable to advertisers or newspapers. Usually one of the last items on the list was whether we should spend time converting our code from BASIC to RPG or something else.
In May Sue and I took our first vacation in Italy. I wrote a journal about that adventure and posted it here.
The meeting of November 5 was the first mention of Bob Wroblewski, who has been introduced here. The next few agendas mostly consisted of the same items.
In January of 2004 Bob and I flew to California to visit Robinsons-May and Gottschalks. Bob then started enrolling Rob-May’s papers. After that the process of getting newspapers to subscribe to AxN snowballed for several years. At about the same time our long courtship of Dick’s Sporting Goods finally paid off with a contract for AdDept. So, in only two years the outlook for TSI had improved greatly.
In February it occurred to me that there might be one dominant software company for the newspaper business. If we could create an interface with their system, it could advance the AxN project tremendously. However, I later discovered that each paper, if it had anything at all, had developed its own software or paid someone to do it. There was no uniformity. Fortunately I discovered that this was a blind alley before I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy on it.
The agenda for the February 18 meeting made it clear that the AxN project was about to take off. Most of the long-time AdDept users had at least been contacted. Stage Stores was enthusiastic, and they had just acquired another chain named Peebles. Finally, Dick’s Sporting Goods had finally signed the contract to purchase AdDept. To deal with the expected increase in use of the Internet by the newly subscribing newspapers Denise was arranging for installation of a T-1 line from AT&T with the Cox Cable connection as backup.
The March 3 agenda closed with a mention of the NAA, which was the abbreviation for the Newspaper Association of America (changed to News/Media Alliance in 2016). I eventually talked with someone at its headquarters, but I foresaw that it would take a lot of time and effort to build a productive relationship with the organization. It might have been a good project for Doug Pease (introduced here) or Jim Lowe (introduced here), but at that point they were in the rear-view mirror. I never thought that this would have been a good fit for Bob. Besides, he was busy talking to newspapers, or at least soon would be.
It took me a few minutes to decode this entry on the entry for March 24: “Robinsons: Lower price for LANG?” LANG was the Los Angeles Newspaper Group,.5 a company that printed and distributed tabloids in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Advertising for all those papers was managed from one central location. TSI agreed to send them one bill. We treated them like one large paper with several editions.
In April we were waiting for Dick’s to begin the solicitation for AxN before we approached Macy’s West and RadioShack. The April 21 entry contained positive news about Filene’s use of AdDept for accounting, including the monthly closing process. The next week Denise and I discussed the proposed trip to talk with Hecht’s main paper, the Washington Post. I ended up visiting them on May 14. It gave me quite a thrill, but I don’t think that they ever agreed to use AxN. Apparently we also considered a press release about being in business for twenty-five years, but I am pretty sure that we never did it.
The agenda for May 26 poses this question about Filene’s: “Have they made a big mess?” Bon Ton agreed to send letters to its newspapers about AxN.
In June we discussed various methods of emailing claims. I don’t recall that we ever took any action on this. There was ominous news from Federated that they put all quotes on hold. The total number of orders in AxN exceeded 100,000. The June 30 agenda announced that Dick’s was moving into its new building over the subsequent weekend.
The first item on the July 21 agenda was “Denise’s three issues”. I wonder what they were. Item #10C talks about a follow-up meeting with the Washington Post that never happened. The next week’s agenda explained that they did not respond to my email. A second e-mail was sent on August 4. On August 25 (my dad’s eightieth birthday) I called the Director of Advertising Services.
Something distressing was evidently going on at Parisian, but I don’t remember what it was. That disclosure was somewhat offset by the following good news: “RadioShack: 34 active; 39 testing; 22 Macy’s West; 15 L&T; 4 Parisian; 56 other.” RadioShack did one of its four geographic divisions at a time. The last two entries brought up new subjects: “How can we make better use of my time and Lucia’s6?” and “5-year plan”.
The August 4 agenda was the first to mention SQL7. I used SQL for all of the AxN programs, but the AdDept programs mostly created temporary indexed output files that were populated by one program and read by another using IBM’s recommended approach, ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).
Marshall Field’s (introduced here), the last big installation of the May Co. version of the AdDept system, was first mentioned in the agenda for September 8. We were very excited about the meeting scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s advertising department in Arlington VA. By this time the work for the Peebles installation at Stage Stores was operational enough that we were ready to solicit their newspapers for AxN.
I was serious enough about contacting companies that sold software for ad agencies that I spent $35 to buy the booklet from the AAAA. I questioned whether we should write to each of them to propose an interface with their system and AxN. I don’t remember ever doing so.
The agenda for November 1 mentioned that Field’s used an ad agency for both broadcast and newspaper. My recollection was that they started using AxN almost immediately and dropped Haworth, the agency that bought newspaper space. However, later entries seem to contradict this. The same agenda mentions that TSI was carrying $55,000 in questionable receivables in the last month of its fiscal year.
I never had to make an onsite visit to our AxN client in Guam.
The November 10 agenda mentioned that—after months of foot-dragging—Federated Systems Group was finally going to “cut over” to their new AS/400 system. During this period we were worried about providing support for AxN for Macy’s West’s newspapers in Hawaii and Guam. This was needless. The papers subscribed for years without any problems. This was also the last agenda that included a mention of a press release about TSI’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
A major issue early in the year was how to handle the process for installing changes that Dick’s had forced upon us. There were other issues, too. The first agenda of the year ends with the question: “How can we get this installation on the right track?”
Two minor enhancements to AxN for the advertisers had been completed: custom emails and downloading of email addresses. However, I had apparently given up on the possibility of interfacing with computer systems used by the newspapers. There was also a process for reconciling the orders on AxN with the schedule on AdDept.
By March 10 we had a big programming backlog because of the large number of difficult jobs for Marshall Field’s. Denise controlled this process. I simply asked, “How can I help?” In the same meeting we discussed for the first time what, if any thing, we should do to forestall Macy’s from replacing AdDept with the system known then known as FedAd that had been developed by Burdines. Our contact at Macy’s West stated that “it did not exist”.
At the March 25 meeting we talked about Macy’s East for the first time in many months. For the April 28 and May 4 meetings there is separate agenda for AxN. For some reason I seemed worried about using it at Foley’s and Stage Stores.
The first item on the regular May 4 agenda was one word: “Lucia”. Lucia was able to handle much more challenging projects than our other administrative employees. The problem was trying to come up with things for her to do. Another issue on the same agenda posed some interesting questions:
We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.
How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
IBM (like Federated)?
TSI
Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
On the net?
Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
VPN: PC to AS/400?
High availability?
Disaster recovery?
A third party?
We did not spend a great deal of effort on trying to provide “cloud” computing for our customers. It would have involved a great deal of expense and risk. Just seeing that term “disaster recovery?” item gives me the chills.
Later in May Sue and I took our second Italian vacation with our friends Tom and Patti Corcoran. I wrote a journal again, but this time I had a camera. The results are posted here.
The agenda for June 2 began with the surprising news that Chuck Hansen at Marshall Field’s had asked me to back off on AxN. It also mentioned the agenda for a meeting with Macy’s Marketing on 5/17. It probably intended to say “6/17”. The next agenda, dated July 8, only stated, “Follow up with …” I must have forgotten the name (Robin Creen) of the lady with whom I met at Macy’s Corporate Marketing. There is also a reference to Bloomingdale’s. I suspect that this was in response to information from Tom Caputo, who worked with AdDept at both Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, that Bloomies had never taken the FedAd software out of the box.
The July 11 agenda has some detailed information about a proposed newsletter publicizing how AdDept handled inserts. Some of these enhancements were done for Dick’s.
The August 26 agenda has a new and somewhat mysterious major topic called “AdDept ideas”. The two subtopics are “SpooliT8 ($9K) or other Excel” and “Service Bureau”. I think that SpooliT made .csv files out of spooled output files. It may have had a few other features.
Throughout this period there were references to The Oregonian, the major paper in the Portland area that stopped paying invoices for AxN without canceling and never responded to attempts to find out why.
The agenda for September 14 mentions the long letter that I sent to Robin Creen. Its contents are posted here.
The agenda for October 12 had several tantalizing references. It began by stating that IBM’s VPN9 product, which TSI used for communicating through the Internet, with clients’ AS/400s would be activated on the following Saturday. It also reported that a newsletter had been sent out.
Robin Creen topped the October 24 agenda, but there were no details. The second item referred to renewal of iSeries News, a magazine.that catered to the AS/400 community. It had undergone many name changes, and the content had also evolved. We kept all of the back copies in the shelves that in 2023 are in my office. When we closed down the company (details here), I threw all of them away.
The third item was “SBC Contract”. I don’t remember SBC, but I suspect that it was an IBM Business Partner that had sold more systems than we had or had somehow managed to deal directly with IBM. During this period TSI was not allowed to quote or sell any IBM products. We had to go through a Super-VAR.
The fourth item was “Lucia” with no details. The fifth was “AT&T Global: do we need it?”. I am pretty sure that this product allowed me to get my email when I was on the road. In the days before Wi-Fi I had an AT&T product installed on my laptop that allowed me to use a phone line in my hotel room to sign on to AT&T and look at my email.
We must have received an inquiry from Sport Chalet10 a chain of stores in California that was similar to Dick’s. Until I saw this entry again I had completely forgotten about them. Evidently I wrote them a letter and sent them a newsletter, but nothing came of it.
The last agenda for 2005 was dated December 6. The #1 item was the blitz to get an AdDept system for Macy’s South up and running in time for the season that started at the beginning of February. The second item was an inquiry from Circuit City11. This was another dead end.
The “My disk recovery” entry brought back some really bad memories. I think that I recovered everything on my computer’s hard drive, but it was costly and painful. The best part was that I got an external hard drive12 that made it very easy to back everything up.
There are no entries for 2006 until June. I remember being under extreme pressure to bring the two huge AdDept installations at Macy’s South and Marshal Field’s up to speed. Meanwhile we received the crushing news that Macy’s and the May Co. had merged, and Macy’s would be the dominant player.
The agenda for June 13 began with the word Corum. I am pretty sure that it referred to broadcast buying software. Based on the date it was probably associated with Macy’s South.
That agenda also contained a major item that simply stated “Modernizing and marketing AdDept”. We never did find a feasible way to transform the AdDept screens into something that looked modern. We made more marketing attempts after this, but they did not amount to much. This was the peak period for AxN. More than four hundred papers had subscribed. TSI’s administrative person spent a good deal of time printing and mailing invoices and depositing checks from newspapers.
The agenda for October 11 was startlingly different. It mentioned two AS/400 models, a 170 and a 270. My recollection is that we did development and ran the business on the 170, and the 270 was devoted to AxN. It also mentions recruitment. I am not sure whether that referred to the administrative position or programming. The agendas have gotten shorter and shorter.
This agenda also mentioned the C compiler for the 270. Denise was upset at me for even investigating the possibility of converting TSI’s code to C, which was widely used in the Unix world.
In the agenda for October 18 the scary term “Macy’s North” appeared several times. It referred to the company that was formerly called Marshall Field’s. Evidently the marketing (never called “advertising”) department there had never bought into using AxN for insertion orders. They may have still been using Haworth.
“Maintenance” was often mentioned in the agenda for November 1. We probably never charged as much as we could have for the kind of service that we provided our clients. I was evidently still spending quite a bit of time at Belk.
I was surprised to see Circuit City mentioned again on the agenda for November 8. We must have received another phone call. The term “Foley’s project” also appeared. I am pretty sure that that was the code name for the long and frustrating effort that Denise and I undertook to sell the company.
The last agenda that I have was dated July 10, 2007. It contained only four items:
Trip to Macy’s West
515
Dick’s quotes
Foley’s
Never even a nibble.
Denise and I continued to meet, but not on a formal basis. By then I had almost given up on selling more AdDept systems. There had been so much consolidation in retail that the number of good prospects for the system had shrunk to almost nothing. Nordstrom and Dillard’s would have looked nice on our client list, but it was hard to think of anyone else that was worth pursuing.
We still did quite a bit of custom programming during the next five or six years, but managing the list of open jobs did not require the juggling act that had characterized the previous decade.
The AxN business decreased for a few reasons. The big stores no longer trusted newspaper ads to bring in customers as they once did. Newspaper readership was way down. Some of the AdDept clients outsourced their buying to agencies or media services. That always meant a drop in the number of papers.
I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.
1. The history of the development of AxN is posted here. The system design is outlined here. The description of the process by which it was brought to market begins here.
2. Net.Data was a scripting language written by IBM for the AS/400. It was quite popular, but IBM for some reason decided to drop it in favor of the open source scripting language php, which required implementation of the Zend php engine.
3. Java is an object-oriented language that was developed by people at Sun Microsystems. The company released an open-source version. Java was almost the only thing that IBM talked about at the PartnerWorld convention that Denise and I attended in 2000. It is described here. On the AS/400 applications written in Java required a lot more resources than programs written in the native languages. If run on the same box the Java programs were slower, a lot slower.
4. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.
5. In 2016 LANG merged with the Orange County Register and a few other papers. The new organization was called the Southern California Newspaper Group. The third item under the Federated topic was “AxN letter to four divisions”. Since “Bloomingdale’s” was the second item it mus refer to Macy’s East, West, South, and Florida (Burdines).
6. Lucia Hagan was TSI’s administrative person during this period. She was introduced here.
7. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It was invented by IBM, but the company did not endorse its use on the AS/400 until 2004.
8. SpooliT is still on the market in 2023! Its website is here.
9. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. The Wikipedia entry is here.
10. Sport Chalet was sold to Vestis Retail Group in 2014 and was liquidated in 2016.
11. The sad story of Circuit City ended with its liquidation in 2009.
12. I still have that hard drive in 2023. However, I recently discovered that I no longer can find the cable that was used to attach it to a computer, and the company that made it was no longer in business.
People have often asked me whether I was retired, and, if so, for how long. I have usually told them that I never exactly decided to retire. In 2014, however, TSI’s clients made it clear to me that it was time for me to quit.
That year was definitely a turning point in my own life. I did not rate the events and decisions of the early months of that year as a genuine crisis—unlike the four others that have been detailed in this project. During the previous several years I had seen the trends developing, I had explored every alternative that I could think of, and my financial position was good, at least in comparison with its state before the late nineties.
By late 2013 Denise Bessette, my partner, had moved from Stafford, CT, to Cape Cod. She was working from home with occasional trips to East Windsor. We could communicate by email, telephone, or through messaging on the AS/400. During this period I was 65 years old; Denise was ten years younger.
The cause: The precipitating event was a letter received in late 2013 from one of our contacts at Dick’s Sporting Goods1, a long-time user of both AdDept and AxN. I cannot find a copy of the letter, but it was basically an announcement that Dick’s had contracted with a media buying service to schedule and purchase its newspaper ads.
Other AdDept users had previously made similar decisions.2 At RadioShack (discussed in detail here) the decision coincided with dropping the use of the AdDept system entirely. The advertising department there used it to place, manage, and pay for advertising in hundreds of papers, but it never used many of the other modules. Nevertheless, one of the employees most closely involved confided to me a few months after the outsourcing that she thought that they might have made a mistake.
A few years later Belk (described here) outsourced its newspaper buying. Unlike RadioShack, Belk by that time was using AdDept for a very large number of tasks besides scheduling and purchasing newspaper ads. Denise Podavini, the financial manager for advertising, never considered dropping AdDept. Moreover, when I explained to her that TSI would be losing a large source of revenue from Belk’s newspapers that had subscribed to AxN3, she voluntarily authorized TSI to increase the maintenance charge to cover the difference. That reaction astounded me.
By 2013 most of TSI’s department store clients had been absorbed by Macy’s, which had then consolidated into one office in New York City. At that point that office was using neither AdDept not AxN. Dick’s outsourcing would have little effect on the income from AdDept. It might actually have given us a custom programming assignment or two. However, it would certainly mean the loss of all the revenue from Dick’s papers that had subscribed to AxN. There were over a hundred of them, and losing them would cost us thousands of dollars every month.
When we received the news from Dick’s my immediate evaluation was that this was the death knell for TSI. Denise was quite surprised at my reaction. We had worked together for thirty years, many of which were quite lean, and she had never seen me give up when the company faced a challenge. She spent a week or two manipulating possible projections on spreadsheets, but she finally came to the same conclusion that I had.
The plan: Denise and I met several times after working hours or out of the office in order to come up with a plan that treated our employees, Jason Dean and Ashley Elliott, our remaining clients, our vendors, and ourselves fairly. We began by making a list of things that we certainly needed to resolve:
A termination date for AxN and support for AdDept.
A plan for the employees.
Taxes and other governmental issues.
Our lease for 7B Pasco Dr.
Letters to AdDept clients.
Notifications to vendors.
Disposition of assets.
We scheduled an appointment with our accountant, Tom Rathbun. As it happened, he was planning to retire. So, our news pretty much coincided with his plans. He provided us with a list of items that we needed to do to assure that we fulfilled our obligations to the government. We decided to terminate AxN and software support for the AdDept product on July 31. That would provide four months to whittle down the accounts receivable and accounts payable for the final closing of the books on November 30, 2014.
The employees: Even before we met with Tom, Denise and I had decided to let the employees work until March 31 or to terminate as of January 31 and receive a four-week severance package. They both took the severance option. Denise had expected both of them to stay, but I was not too surprised when they resigned. I was amenable to either option. The severance option was actually a little better for TSI. We saved money on payroll, and it offered an immediate opportunity to sell more of the office equipment sooner.
We wrote letters of recommendation for both employees. Here is the one that Denise wrote for Jason Dean:
To Whom It May Concern,
TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., is a small company that has provided intricate and extensive software systems to businesses large and small since 1980. Jason Dean joined our staff on October 15, 2007 as a programmer analyst and quickly became an integral member of our programming and support team. In 2010 he was promoted to lead programmer analyst. Jason worked on the development of new systems and the modification of existing systems in free-form RPGLE, SQL, BASIC and CL on IBM midrange business systems. Development was focused on a comprehensive data base system for retail advertising clients. His responsibilities also included program testing and documentation, client support, and a myriad of in-house support tasks.
Jason’s performance on the job has been uniformly excellent. He is well-organized and has extremely high standards for the quality of work produced. You can depend on him to consistently deliver sophisticated applications that meet those standards, and within or well in advance of project deadlines. He quickly and easily comprehends new strategies and technologies. He is an outstanding quality control tester. His methods steadily test both the functionality and logic of the program with robust data sets. His diligence has called out a number of subtle issues during the development cycle. Jason also had the opportunity to train and impart those standards on a new programmer, the results of which were outstanding.
Jason’s ability to handle client support is impressive. He is very adept at posing the necessary questions to extract information required to resolve client issues. He consistently maintains a positive, professional and helpful attitude even when dealing with a difficult caller. He won consistent praise from our clients.
Jason’s termination had nothing to do with his job performance. Business conditions necessitated that we take steps to close the business.
I unhesitatingly and without qualification recommend Jason Dean for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about his work at TSI. I can be reached at Denise_Bessette@cox.net or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 508 760-2847 (home).
The letter that I wrote for Ashley was posted here.
The clients: I composed a short letter to the AdDept clients and mailed it on February 28, 2024, at which point I was the only person left in the office. Here is the text:
Denise Bessette and I have worked together for almost three decades. During this time we have taken great pride in our ability to provide first-class software and service to our clients at a reasonable price and first-class treatment of our employees and vendors. We have changed the business radically a few times to respond to various circumstances, but we have never sacrificed our basic principles.
Recent events now necessitate another change, one that we definitely regret. Two factors have made it impossible for us to continue doing business in the way that we have in the past. The first is the consolidation of the retail business. In one case thirteen of our installations collapsed into one and then, ultimately, none. The second is the trend toward outsourcing. The latter has led to the collapse of our Internet insertion-order business, on which we have come to rely. We were already running a very lean operation. There is nothing left to cut.
Therefore, we both feel that we have no choice but to shut down TSI as of July 31, 2014. We will do our best to provide the very best support of the AdDept system’s day-to-day operations through that date and even implement whatever programming changes are required on the same basis that we always have. We are definitely willing to act as consultants to help design a transitional process and to fill whatever other roles you feel are appropriate. If you wish to use AdDept beyond the above date, you are, of course, free to do so, and if you want one of us to provide some kind of support, it may be possible to make arrangements on an individual basis.
We both think that TSI has had a great run. We wish that it could continue forever because we really have enjoyed working with our clients to provide a system that provided them with what they needed to prosper.
Best wishes for the future.
As far as I know, no one asked for help designing a transition process. Some users may well have asked Denise for help. I have occasionally wondered how they coped with the situation.
Hundreds of papers received the orders for ads like these through AdDept and AxN.
After receiving the letter someone from Dick’s called us to assure us that they had not intended to drop the AdDept system. We explained that the problem was not AdDept; it was the imminent loss of revenue from the many newspapers that had subscribed to AxN. Evidently no one at Dick’s had ever considered this ramification.
I have no information about how long any of the companies that were still using AdDept in 2014 continued to use it after July 31.
I did not write to any of the newspapers, but I did stop billing them for the subscriptions to AxN after July 31. I was still receiving checks from a few of them through November. At that point I wrote off everything that was outstanding.
The lease: We had arranged with our landlord, Rene Dupuis (introduced here), to stay in his company’s building until July 31. Because a lot of equipment and furniture remained in the office in the middle of July, I asked Rene if we (i.e., I) could stay one more month. He said that because TSI had been an ideal tenant for such a long time, he was happy to accommodate us. Our section of the building was empty by August 31.
During the last month or two Rene brought one or two people up to TSI’s office to examine the property. I do not remember the name of the company that ended up renting it, but the lease was signed while I was still working there.The company even purchased TSI’s antiquated telephone system for $500.
Tax issues: TSI had been paying sales or use taxes to several jurisdictions. I found a copy of the Letter of Good Standing signed by a machine for Deborah Chandler, the Tax Collection Supervisor of the Compliance Support Unit. It stated that TSI owed the state of Connecticut nothing.
I also found a copy of a letter that I wrote to the state of Mississippi that stated that we had done no business there and that TSI was closing. No one replied to the letter.
I was not able to follow all of the dealings with the IRS, but in June of 2015 I definitely received two checks with income tax refunds for payments that TSI had previously made.
Tom provided me with all of the forms that I needed to file with state and federal agencies. None of them were difficult or time-consuming.
Furniture and equipment. I wore many hats in my time working at TSI. The most ill-fitting was probably the last one: used furniture salesman. I took photos of everything and placed ads on Craig’s List. To my great surprise I rapidly disposed of nearly everything. I probably should have charged more, but we had bought almost all of it second-hand many years earlier.
I found a list of the major items that I sold and their prices:
The desk in my office with one of the phone units.
Item
Price
Conference table
80
Black cabinet
50
Kitchen table, chairs
80
Three cabinets
133
Sales office desk
25
Twelve side chairs
125
Four trash cans
2
Cabinet
40
Black desk
25
Cubicles
100
Denise’s desk
25
Phone system
500
4-drawer cabinet
125
Denise’s desk.
The biggest coup, aside from the sale of the telephone system, was the fact that I was able to get rid of the five-foot high4 dividers that were used to form cubicles. I was thrilled when a man whose wife (or maybe mother) was opening a dance studio in Windsor Locks almost directly across the Connecticut River from TSI’s office in East Windsor offered me $150 for all of the hardware. On a Saturday he drove a pickup towing a very long and flat trailer to the office. He and another fellow came upstairs, disassembled the cubicles, carried the individual sections down the stairs, and strapped them to the trailer. He thought that he got a bargain. I was afraid that I would end up needing to pay someone to take the dividers away.
The total that I received was $1,310, which I split with Denise.
I also remember giving out two very large plants to one of the guys who purchased the trash cans and some other mundane things. He took the plants that Eileen Sheehan-Willett had nursed from near-fatal neglect to monstrosities and put them in his truck. He was thoughtful enough to wait until he was out of sight to throw out the plants and save the pots.
I found the following notes in an Excel spreadsheet called equipment.xls:
The 515 server was sold to Saks Inc. for $2500 on 7/31/14.
The 270 server, color printer, Dell PC, scanner, and backup hub were taken by Mike on 7/31/14. The 270 will be scrapped when the company is closed. It has no market value.
The black & white laser printer was taken by Denise on 7/31/14.
Fax machine and copier were donated to a local church on 7/31/14.
Two dot matrix printers with no market value were donated to the New England Bridge Conference on 8/31/14.
All other equipment was scrapped on or about 7/31/14.
The 270 and 515 were iSeries (i.e., AS/400) models. The 270 and the other equipment were transported to our house at the end of August (not July) in a truck that my wife Sue borrowed from her friend and bridge partner, Jan Bailey.5 The equipment resided in my office for a few months until TSI’s books were closed, and I was pretty sure that I would not need the server. It, the backup hub, a twinax display, and a snake’s nest of cables have rested peacefully in the basement and are still there in 2024. The color printer, which supported two-sided printing, the scanner, and the PC lasted for quite a few years before they were scrapped or recycled somewhere.
A few other things made their way to our house. The kitchen at 7B had a microwave and a small refrigerator. The former is still in use in 2024. The latter was given to David Basch, the grandson of another of Sue’s bridge partners, in exchange for doing the heavy lifting in the move. A small shelf and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase now live in my office at the house in Enfield. A good many smaller items also made the journey back to Enfield.
The largest item that I neither sold nor brought back to Enfield was the Uninterruptible Power Supplu (UPS). The UPS was a large battery with outlets for several power cables. Our AS/400 and a few other devices were attached to it. The UPS could provide enough electricity to last for a few hours.
Power failures are not unknown in Connecticut. Denise and I discussed purchasing a generator, but we could never justify the expense. We only experienced a couple of power failures in the nearly fourteen years that TSI’s headquarters was in East Windsor, and the UPS was sufficient to to get us through them.
The UPS was very heavy. I carried it out to my car and transported it to a nearby dumpster. It was all that I could do to lift it to shoulder height and drop it in.
The one-man show: From February through August I drove into East Windsor every morning. Every evening I drove back to Enfield. When I arrived at work I checked to make sure that all the equipment was working. I encountered absolutely no hardware problems. Once a month I sent out invoices for software support and for AxN subscriptions. I usually ate lunch in the office by myself.
The highlight of the day was when the mail came. If there were any checks, I processed them in our home-grown accounts receivable system and then deposited them in the bank. I was often amazed that newspapers that I was fairly certain were no longer using AxN continued to pay for the service. I attributed this to the fact that so many newspapers had outsourced their processing of accounts payable to an outside service. TSI’s bills seemed to slip through the cracks of the approval process.
I spent most of the rest of my days sitting at the PC. I already had a pretty good command of HTML, JavaScript, php and MySQL. I did a lot of work on the NEBridge.org website, and it was also during this period that I got the idea of maintaining a database of ACBL members who resided in District 25 (New England). Allan Clamage (introduced here), who served as the editor of the website, told me how to download roster files from the ACBL and set it up so that I had the authority to do so. The details of the database are described here.
Don’t ask for Ben 9 and B&N.
The other major project that I worked on was my historical novel about Pope Benedict IX. The story of its genesis and why it was posted on Wavada.org but was never at Barnes & Noble is described in some detail here.
In some ways I wished that I had been a history major and gotten a PhD. Then I probably would have found someone with whom I could discuss my ideas about eleventh-century papal politics. On the other hand, I should remember that I only became interested in the popes in the twenty-first century, and I finished grad school in the seventies. Moreover, my interest in the eleventh century was a byproduct of a rather random introduction to a somewhat obscure ninth-century pope named Formosus.
I did not take a vacation in 2014, but I did go to quite a few bridge tournaments. This was the period when I implemented a system of posting photographs of winners of regional events on NEBridge.org webpages. I called those pages “Winners Boards” because the background that I used looked like boards. I kept that feature up through 2021.
At about the same time I also began sending emails promoting the regional tournaments in New England. At first I composed the emails myself and sent them through my Wavada.org account. When I got blacklisted as a spammer, Bob Bertoni came to my rescue. That harrowing situation was described here.
The regional tournaments in 2014 were the first to include meetings of a committee that was known as “The B’s Needs”. It was initially chaired by Ausra Geaski, the president of the district. I attended every meeting.
The initial purpose of the committee was to recommend ways to make the tournaments more enjoyable for Flight B players, those with too many points to play in the “Gold Rush” events that were limited to less than 750 masterpoints. These people found themselves up against people with many thousands of points and years of experience. It was not generally a pleasant experience.
Over the next few years the committee produced a large number of suggestions for making the tournaments more attractive to B players and to everyone else. Many of them were implemented, and there is very little doubt that they had, for the most part, a profoundly positive effect on the tournaments. I took great pride in what we did as a group and what I personally implemented. This activity provided a purpose to my life at a time when I really needed one. It made me feel that I was using my time and skills to make life more enjoyable for people who shared one of my principal interests. Most of my contributions were cast aside done in the post-Pandemic environment, and it saddens me greatly.
I found some materials about this committee. I have posted Ausra’s minutes of the meetings in Newton, MA, in January (here), Cromwell, CT, in February (here), and Nashua, NH, in September (here). I have also posted here the notes that Allan wrote up about the groups first few ideas.
The version with a possible career in mining was the best.
While I was occupied with closing down TSI Sue had knee-replacement surgery on both legs. Afterwards she spent several days getting rehabilitated at Suffield House. I went to see her every evening. On one evening my friend Tom Corcoran joined us, and we played a game of Careers. Sue had to remind me of this event while I was in the process of writing this entry.
September.through December: For the last three months I ran what was left of TSI from my office at the house. I still received payments from newspapers almost right up to when I closed the books for good at the end of November.
I still had some communications with Tom Rathbun in December of 2014, but after that TSI has been nothing but a source of incredible memories. The process of closing it down was somewhat complicated, but I don’t remember making any serious mistakes.
1. Details of the installations at Dick’s Sporting Goods have been posted here.
2. I am not sure why these companies made the decisions. It is possible that the media buying services claimed that the fact that they represented several large advertisers would give them more clout in negotiating with newspapers. They may also have been able to claim more expertise in choosing between papers in the few markets that had more than one.
3. In theory it would have been possible for TSI to construct an interface that could be used by media buying services. We had written many interfaces to both send and receive records in other modules. However, the information that AxN required from AdDept contained four different types of records: headers for ads, special instructions at the header level, individual ads, and special instructions for individual ads. Could we persuade the buying service to send records in that format? I considered it unlikely in the extreme even if we did not charge them for using the service. Even if they were persuaded, we would have had to devise foolproof ways of dealing with errors in their files. Moreover, the process of fixing errors would need to be very efficient. Time could be of the essence. It appeared to me to be a nightmarish situation.
4. I am pretty sure about the height because I remember being just barely able to kick my right foot up and rest my ankle on the top of one to stretch my quads before running.
5. Jan Bailey, Ginny Basch, and Sue were regular participants in an unsanctioned bridge game that was held on Thursday evenings in Somers.
AxN was an Internet-based product developed and marketed by TSI. It allowed advertisers to send insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) to newspapers. It also managed communication between the two parties that culminated in the newspaper rep confirming the order. The process that Denise Bessette and I employed in designing and creating AxN, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.
Part 1 of the marketing of AxN is posted here. The narrative concludes with the signing of a contract by representatives of Belk1, the department store chain based in Charlotte, NC, to purchase AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for advertising departments of large retailers. Part of the plan for the installation was to use AxN for insertion orders. At the time none of the other AdDept retailers were using AxN yet.
In the previous thirty or so AdDept installations the scheduling of newspaper advertising in AdDept had almost never been very difficult. It was always the first part of the project that we got to work smoothly.
I encountered an unexpected problem in that area at Belk. The company had recently consolidated the administration of four of its divisions into the office in Charlotte. Each of the four previous newspaper coordinators was now working in the office there and managed the advertising for the same papers that they had before. Usually, I trained the manager of the coordinators or just the AdDept liaison about how the programs worked. He or she trained the individual coordinators. In this case there was, at least initially, no manager. I was expected to train each of the coordinators separately. Most of them had been scheduling ads manually and ordering them over the phone. Some had never even worked on a computer before. Worst of all, all four soon realized that there was no way that Belk would need four coordinators when AdDept was up and running. There was not much incentive to cooperate.
Eventually these issues were all resolved, but the delays that the process caused meant that the rollout of AxN would be postponed for a month or two. That was a headache, but it actually proved to be something of a blessing for TSI. It gave Denise and me some time to develop a plan for getting the newspapers aboard. Here is a list of the most important items:
TSI’s accounting system would needed to be changed to accommodate the newspapers as customers. Because the client file used a three-digit number as the identifying field, this task involved a significant amount of programming.
Belk would provide TSI with a list of its newspapers. For each we needed the contact name, phone, email, and address. These would be entered into TSI’s accounting system as (potential) customers. The three-character codes organized them by state. We also needed the name and contact information of the advertising rep at the paper.
I wrote a letter to be sent to the newspapers. It would be signed by someone at Belk but mailed by TSI. The purpose was to ask them to participate in a three-month test period of AxN with no charge. Afterwards they would be asked to continue to use the system with a monthly fee roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising. One full-page ad in a broadsheet contained over 120 column inches.
Each newspaper would be sent the AxN: Handbook for Newspaper Users, a copy of which is posted here. TSI would also provide telephone support, but we hoped that it would seldom be needed. We knew how to make systems that were easy to use.
At the same time the newspapers would be sent a contract for the test period. It emphasized that there was no charge for three months and that TSI was not acting as an agent for Belk. It also limited TSI’s responsibility to making a good-faith effort to address all reported problems in an expeditious manner.
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not returned contracts.
As soon as signed contracts were received, a TSI employee would activate the papers on the company’s accounting system and on the AxN database. Then he/she would notify the appropriate coordinator at Belk to change the field on each variation of the newspaper’s record on the pub table in AdDept.
I would carefully monitor the processing of the first batch of orders. The system had never been stress-tested.
A second letter (from me) and a permanent contract would be sent to the paper after two months. It emphasized that either side could cancel the contract at any time with one month’s notice. The language about agency and responsibility was the same as in the contract for the test period. The starting date was at the end of the test period. There was no ending date.
When the contracts were returned the client records in TSI’s accounts receivable system were marked as active, and the newspapers were billed for the first month or quarter (their choice).
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not yet returned contracts.
This was by and large a good plan, but it had one rather obvious flaw. None of TSI’s current employees was suitable to play the role of “someone representing TSI” in steps 6 and 11. The programmers, including Denise, were far too busy with request for custom work in AdDept. The slot of marketing director at TSI was empty. I did not trust the administrative person to do this. That left only me, and I was notoriously bad at interactions by telephone. I have always hated talking on the phone, and people can often sense my discomfort. Besides, I wrote all of the new code. It was unquestionably a bad idea for the developer and the sales rep to be the same person. The sales person needs to know how to work with the potential customers, not the machine.
Denise devised a great solution to this problem. She informed me that one of her husband Ray’s cousins, Bob Wroblewski, sometimes did similar work for companies on a commission-only basis. She also came up with a sliding scale of commission rates. It was high in the first year and decreased in subsequent years. After three (or maybe five—I am not certain) years, there would be no commission.
We invited Bob, who lived in Rhode Island, to come to TSI’s office in East Windsor to discuss the matter with us. He liked what he heard, and I was favorably impressed with his experience and communication skills. He agreed to take on the job for Belk’s papers. After that we would assess how well the arrangement worked for both parties.
In reality it worked very well indeed for all of us. Bob was able to persuade all of the papers to agree to the test period. On that fateful day that Belk sent its first batch of insertion orders to TSI my recollection is that more than one hundred papers were involved. The AxN programs flawlessly handled the orders and wrote the appropriate records on the data files. Emails were then sent to all of the newspaper reps. Very little time lapsed between the sending of the emails and the reps signing on to look at the orders. That surprised me a little.
Then a terrible thing happened. TSI’s trusty AS/400 locked up! No one—not even TSI employees—could do anything. I signed on to the system console, for which the operating system always reserved the highest priority. I was able to examine several job logs, and I determined that one of the steps that was being executed as soon as a rep looked at an order was performing an unexpectedly high amount of disk processing and using an inordinate amount of memory. I killed the interactive jobs for all of the newspaper and made sure that no one else could start a new session until the problem was addressed.
This was one of the tensest situations that I had faced in my career. I had to fix this problem, and fast. The step that I had determined was jamming the system would not be necessary until the rep decided to print the order or maybe it was the option to download the order as a csv file. I changed the code on the fly so that the onerous step was postponed until it was necessary. I hoped that that would spread out the activity so that the system was not overwhelmed right after a new order was processed.
There was no time to test what I had done. I removed the routine from the initial opening of the order and installed it in the routine that might be executed later. We then sent an email to the papers with an apology and a request that they try to sign in again. This worked much better, and, in fact, AxN never had any notable performance problems again.
After Belk had been running successfully on AxN for a few months, we decided to take our show on the road. Bob and I flew to California to meet with employees from two AdDept clients, Robinsons-May2 and Gottschalks3. We enjoyed a pretty good relationship with both of them, and I wanted them to feel comfortable about working with Bob. I think that we spent only one afternoon at each location.
I don’t remember the details of the travel arrangements. We must have rented a car and driven from the L.A. area to Fresno. I don’t remember where we stayed or what we ate. I only remember that I was limping when I got off the plane, and I explained to Bob that I had tendinitis in my IT band. He said something like, “Don’t we all?”
Robinsons-May was quite interested in what we were doing with AxN, but they did not go crazy over it. When I later asked them to let us approach their papers, however, they quickly agreed, and Bob was eventually able to sign up almost all of their papers, including the L.A. Times and the Los Angeles News Group, which included the Daily News and a group of suburban papers.
Some IT guys attended our demo at Gottschalks. They uniformly thought that our approach was great. However, the newspaper manager in the advertising department, whose name was Stephanie Medlock, had never used the faxing feature, and I never persuaded her to use AxN either.
The trip was worthwhile. The people in both advertising departments had an opportunity to meet Bob, and he had a chance to see what it was like in an advertising department. Bob I got to know each other a little better, and Bob got a better idea about how AxN fit into the process. However, I don’t think that he ever comprehended why it would be very difficult for us to approach advertising departments at places like Home Depot or Walmart—who did not have AdDept—about using AxN.
Jenifer, Ali, Denise, and Bob at L&T’s office in Manhattan. This was the only photo of Bob that I could find.
Bob also accompanied Denise and me on a trip to Lord & Taylor4, the May Company division with headquarters in New York City. We took Amtrak and a taxi. I did not have any recollection of that trip at all until I found the photo that Bob appeared in. I don’t know when we went, but it must have been before 2005, the year in which I purchased my Cascio point-and-shoot camera for our second trip to Italy and stopped purchasing disposable cameras.
We met with Jennifer Hoke and Ali Flack, the two newspaper coordinators. I know this because I wrote their names on the reverse side of the photo that I found.
On the morning of October 14, 2003, I served as a pall bearer at a funeral in Passumpsic, VT, for Phil Graziose, the husband of my wife Sue’s good friend, Diane Robinson. After the funeral I drove to Providence, RI, for the wake of Bob’s wife. I have only attended perhaps a dozen wakes and funerals in my adult life. It was stunning to do it twice in one day.
Bob continued to represent us in dealings with newspapers until we ran out of prospects. From the beginning it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Bob earned a good amount of money in commissions, and the AxN product complemented AdDept very well right to the end.
Over the years Bob and I had very few interactions other than the ones that I have described. Neither Denise nor I ever monitored his conversations with the newspapers. I always suspected that he may have overstated how important AxN was to the retailers who paid for the newspaper ads, but what do you want? He was a salesman.
1. The people and events involved in the installation of AdDept at Belk and TSI’s relationship with the company are described here.
2. Robinsons-May was the May Company division based in North Hollywood, CA. My adventures in Tinsel Town are recounted here.
3. Gottschalks was an independent chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. The company’s AdDept installation—including one of the worst experiences of my life—is discussed in some detail here.
4. The twenty-year relationship between TSI and L&T is explored in the blog entry posted here.
In the fall of 2002 I received a call from Bob Bowden, the IT Director at Belk, a chain of department stores that was (and still is in 2023) based in Charlotte, NC. He said that the company was closing its four regional divisions and bringing all the administration into Charlotte. He also told me that Belk was an AS/400 shop, and he was very happy to learn that we had developed software on that platform. He asked me to schedule a trip to Charlotte to demonstrate the system and to talk with the people in the advertising department. One of those people was Ellen Horn. I already knew Helen from the time that she was employed at Hecht’s (introduced here), but that was nearly a decade earlier.
A direct flight to Charlotte to 2 hours and 5 minutes.
This call was a godsend for TSI. The pool of prospective AdDept users had shrunk dramatically over the dozen or so years that we had been marketing the product to large retail advertisers. Moreover, our existing clients had at that point curtailed their desires for custom programming. TSI’s programmers were still busy, but the future did not appear as bright as before. Furthermore, we were without a marketing director, and our most recent efforts at mailings had turned up nothing. Best of all, Belk already had AS/400’s. Hardware costs would therefore be minimal, and we did not need to worry about convincing anyone of the critical importance of a relational database or the viability of the AS/400.
The AmeriSuites Airport hotel in Charlotte. I am pretty sure that it is no longer in business.
I immediately made arrangement in late October for a trip to Charlotte, a city with which I was somewhat familiar because of the time that I had spent there working with the Cato Corporation (introduced here). There were several direct flights on US Airways between Hartford and Charlotte.
I stayed—because of Bob’s recommendation—at the AmeriSuites hotel that was directly across the street from the headquarters building. Belk had a discounted rate there. The hotel had a shuttle service to and from the airport, and so I did not need to rent a car. That was fine for the first trip, but after the installation and the contract I rented a car so that I did not feel imprisoned.
I sent them a tape of the AdDept system and the sample data that I would use in the demo. Bob had told me that Belk had a nice theater in which I could make my presentation. People from the IT, Advertising, and Accounting departments would be in attendance. As usual, I spent the first day talking with users. In the morning of the second day I made adjustments to the demo system and tested everything that I planned to show.
Travel to Belk was easy. US Airways had several direct flights daily from Bradley International to Charlotte. Belk’s headquarters was a short drive from the airport.
I have been able to locate copies of fewer of my notes written for TSI’s employees, especially Denise Bessette, TSI’s VP of Application Development than I thought likely. I discovered notes from fifteen trips, as well as many outlines of programming projects. However, there are two big gaps in the notes that I brought back to TSI’s office. There are no reports dated between March of 2003 and December of 2006, and the last set is for February of 2009. I am almost certain that I made trips in 2004 and 2005, and I am absolutely positive that I visited Belk several times after 2009. Unfortunately, I have needed to rely on my memory for both of those periods.
Belk was unlike any other AdDept installation. The spacious and modern headquarters that stood in the midst of dozens of trees was about to be deluged with employees transferred from the other four divisions. It would undoubtedly be true that many of them would be superfluous in the consolidated setting. After all, cutting expenses, especially payroll expenses, was the usual motivation for the move. In the case of the advertising department, at least, the introduction of AdDept was bound to streamline many tasks.
AS/400 model 720.
One thing about the AS/400 setup at Belk really surprised me. Here is what I wrote:
AdDept resides on an AS/400 model 720 running V4R5. The system is also used for the Lawson accounts payable and general ledger systems and J.D. Edwards systems that are used for co-op billing and job costing. They hope to eliminate the J.D. Edwards system. They plan to upgrade the system in 2003. Dean Hajnas, who works for IBM, is the system operator for the AS/400. IBM manages the system for them. All requests for new user profiles and changes to user profiles must go through IBM. Belk employees are not allowed to touch the hardware.
That’s right; the Belk IT employees had absolutely no control over their own hardware. They had outsourced the management of the system to IBM. Quite a few IBM employees worked full-time in the Belk complex.
I met with a large number of people on the first visit, most of whom were new to me.
Ellen Horn’s title is media manager. Greg Case1 and Jennifer Lennon2 are ROP coordinators. I think that Bob Alexander3 is, too, but he was out. Debbie Edwards does broadcast, but I think that she works for Ellen. Steve Kelly4 is the Business Manager. Steve Yeager5, who is responsible for the massive network of spreadsheets, and Jan Adams work for him. I am not sure who is responsible for what. Tim Scott6, Miriam West (print production), Sherry Webb, and Amy Petrone attended the direct mail meeting. The last two run the data base marketing (Harte Hanks) system.
Ellen, Greg, Jennifer, and Steve Yeager have usable user profiles. They use PComm (like the May Company). They have one printer, which is everyone’s default – PRTA209. It was out of toner on Thursday.
The project manager for the AdDept installation worked in the IT department. Her name was Pat Cagle.7 If we needed something fixed in the system specs, the operating system, or the hardware, we dealt with her. She knew next to nothing about advertising.
I am pretty sure that this is Ellen Horn.
I remember that on one of the first visits Pat gave me a form on which I was asked to describe the AdDept system. I tried to get out of it, but she insisted. I composed a few paragraphs and gave them to her. I never heard about it again. What we ended up doing probably bore little resemblance to my essay.
The headquarters building had quite a bit of security. Passage through some doors required an employee badge; others required special badges. When visitors first arrived, the receptionist made a badge for each person who had an appointment, but the visitor’s badge did not allow them to go through the secure doors, and they still had to wait for an employee to come down to the reception area to escort them. Anyone who went out had to go through this again.
The alternative—which I admit that I sometimes employed—was to wait for an employee to come in or out and sneak through before the door closed. I occasionally just stuffed my badge in my pocket. Nobody ever demanded to see it. I always turned the badge in at the security desk before going back to New England.
Mt. Airy.
I learned a little about the company’s history. Belk at the time had more than 200 stores and used 180 newspapers. Their biggest markets were Charlotte and Raleigh. Their stores were also in a large number of small markets, including Mt. Airy, NC, Andy Griffith’s home town and the model for Mayberry. I later learned from Steve Yeager, who kept a copy of a book about the company’s history on his desk, that it was a privately-owned corporation dominated by men named Belk. Over the years they made partnership deals with other retailers, most of whom they eventually bought out. That part of the operation, which began in 1888, had ended, but there were still a sizeable number of high-ranking executives in the building with same four-letter last name. Belk had that, but almost nothing else, in common with the Cato Corporation.
I can find no notes for it, but I must have made another trip to Belk after the one in which I collected specs for the Design Document and the detailed proposal. I remember another meeting in the theater in which I demoed the AdDept system. It was attended by a Vice President in the Accounting Department. Although I no longer recall his name, he made quite an impression on me. When I mentioned that I would not be able to come to Belk on a specified date because I had minor dental surgery scheduled, he said that I could come anyway, and he would do the job in the evening. I asked him if amateur dentistry was one of his hobbies. He only smirked.
Later, when I talked about using a fax card on the AS/400 for insertion orders, he volunteered—with no prompting—a question about whether the Internet could be used for transmission of the orders. That was how the subject of AxN was first mentioned at the first retailer to use it in an operational setting! The design of AxN is described here. The story of its marketing begins here.
I undoubtedly stayed at the AmeriSuites that day as well. It might have been on that occasion that I had my first opportunity to eavesdrop on Italians speaking their native tongue. There were very few people at the hotel. When I went to breakfast, the hotel’s restaurant was empty except for a small group of Italian men. I was not very far along in my study of the Italian language (introduced here), but I was delighted at my success at following a substantial portion of the conversation of my fellow diners. My wife Sue and I by that time had already scheduled our first trip to Italy for May of 2003. That journey has been described here.
The first Belk store was called New York Racket.
I remember trying to train the four ROP ladies from the divisions that had been discontinued. There might have been a fifth person supervising them. I made the long trek from the Advertising Department to the area that had been set aside for them. I have no records of any of their names, but I was required to give personalized training to each of them one at a time.
What is wrong with this picture? No, not the old photo; I mean the scene I depicted in the above paragraph. In the first place it surely would have been more cost-effective to have me conduct an ROP class that included all of them or, if that was not feasible, to train one person and let that person train the others. What kind of business pays an outsider $900 per day plus expenses to provide individual training for inexperienced clerks?
That was not the worst part. All of these ladies had moved to Charlotte so that they could continue doing the jobs to which they were accustomed. My training emphasized how fast ads could be entered and how fast and easy everything else was after that. The unfortunate result was that they all had to be comforted and assured that there would still be a place for them in the Belk organization. Maybe so, but I don’t think that it was in ROP.
I remember that shortly after these training sessions someone, perhaps Steve Kelly, asked me how many employees were required to manage ROP in other AdDept installations. I told him that it was hard to say because some also produced advertising schedules and some also verified charges from newspapers. However, I could think of no installation that had more than a couple of people.
By the time of my trip to Belk in February of 2003, data entry was in full swing, and I needed to make sure that everything was going smoothly.
It was sleeting on the evening that I arrived in Charlotte. I must have rented a car because I remember that the short drive from the airport to the hotel was horrendous. The roads had not been treated at all, and everyone was driving at less than 15 mph (and could not get up hills) or more than 50 mph (and was skidding this way and that). I was one of the few drivers on the Billy Graham Parkway who was doing a safe moderate speed. This kind of weather occurred at least once a year in New England. The temperature was above freezing; if the roads had been treated, they would only have been wet. Even if they weren’t, most New England drivers would compensate in a reasonable manner.
This is what a “state of emergency” looks like in Charlotte, NC.
I made my way around all of the idiotic drivers to the hotel. There I found out that my reservation had been moved to another AmeriSuites hotel several miles away in Arrowood. When I protested, the lady informed me that the entire city was in a state of emergency. I got in my car and drove south to Arrowood.
The next morning I drove to Belk. I reported in my notes what I found: “Belk did not open until 10:30 on Monday because of ice on the roads. Many people came in later than that. Some key players did not make it in on Monday at all.”
I mused to myself that I should have driven down to Charlotte in a truck filled with salt. I could have made a fortune on the black market.
I accomplished very little on that trip. The only good thing about this trip was that I found a better hotel for future trips.
The first priority in 2003, of course, was to get all of the ads entered into the AdDept database for the season that started in February. The people in the Advertising Business Office tried to run parallel financial closings for February and March. I spent a lot of time creating queries for them/ I worked most closely with Russ Taylor8 and the controllers, Karen Pardue9 and Debbie Morris10.
Eventually this installation included many interfaces with other applications, most of which also running on AS/400s. The implementation of the first interface involved the uploading of quantities for their direct mail and insert pieces. There were several disconcerting entries about it in my notes from the March trip:
I wrote a program for handling the direct mail quantities file, a sample of which I did not receive until Tuesday. It is DN172, which is option 1 on BELKDM.
I wrote instructions for uploading the quantities file and sent them to Steve Kelly, Steve Yeager, and Pat Cagle. Steve Yeager forwarded his copy to Tim Scott.
Tim Scott said that it takes six hours to run the query to produce one file for a month which shows direct mail quantities by store by month. Tim and his two employees cannot use the system while the query is running! As of Friday, there were still no quantities.
Belk must come up with a process for getting the store quantities file to the IFS. They do not have Client Access.
One of the early finance meetings at Belk. The short woman at the far end of the table is Karen Pardue. On her left are Steve Yeager and Steve Kelly. I think that the blonde with the big red mug is Debbie Morris. I don’t recognize the others.
Client Access was an IBM program that provided both terminal emulation and the ability to transfer files from or to a PC client. IFS stands for Integrated File System. Version 4 of the AS/400 operating system provided for storage of several types of files, including PC files, on the system. I cannot imagine a query on the native file system of an AS/400 taking hours. This is what the system does best. I wonder what system Tim Scott’s program was on.
I found nine files that contained lengthy outlines of closing issues that were dated April 15 through 17 of 2003. I evidently spent a week at Belk trying to close to close February and March in AdDept. There were still a lot of open issues on both files for Friday.
In May there are five .prn files (probably output files from queries on some system) that are labeled “Your CoQuery Mabelk”. They appear to have one line per store. I have no recollection about any of them, and the formats do not look familiar.
Denise Podavini.
There are no other files of my notes until 2006. I cannot explain the gap, but there was a huge change in attitude when Denise Podavini11 took over management of the Advertising Business Office in December of that year.
My notes from the visit in December of 2006 are fragmentary, but I also found several documents dated in that month in a folder called “Month End” in the Belk folder. Two of them were FAQs. The first, which was less than a page in length, explained the steps involved in setting up store allocation percentages for each pub in every media. The second, which was a little longer, explained how AdDept approached the challenge of allocating costs to stores. I have posted it here.
The others were specific “game plans” for Belk. One was a nine-page document that outlined the procedures for allocating all advertising costs at Belk. It had five “tracks”: I have posted this impressive document, which includes a few action items, here. The other two dealt with the difficult but critically important (but uncomfortably complex) process of making sure that all of the systems and processes involved were in sync. They have been posted here and here.
I should emphasize two things. 1) The processes described in these documents required that all ads in all media and all expenses and credits be recorded in AdDept. 2) All of the interfaces between AdDept and the other systems must have already been designed, constructed, and at least to some extent tested. Therefore, a great deal of interaction between Belk and TSI must have occurred in the years between 2003 and 2006.
At any rate the pace definitely picked up speed under Denise’s leadership. The January 2007 meeting involved a new project called the Printer-Shipper Report. Vee Hefney12 and Kari Bates13 produced this report in order to indicate to the printers and/or shippers the quantity of copies of each direct mail or insert piece to be produced and delivered. TSI had already delivered AdDept’s version of this report, but on this trip I gathered specs for changes to it, for a method of automating delivery of the information to the advertising records area, and for several related projects.
Special events was usually the last area of an advertising department that I dealt with. The people there managed unique in-store promotions like celebrity appearances and trunk sales by vendors. During the July visit to Belk I met with Leigh Ann Lyle, Rochelle Franklin15, and Bridgett Barbee15, who were involved with this area. Sixteen years later I can summon forth only a dim recollection of these meetings.
I also spent a lot of time with Denise Podavini on this and every other visit. I returned to the office with a fairly long list of requests. By this time we had produced forty-two programming quotations for Belk in addition to those listed in the Design Document and initial proposal. Most of the quotes had been accepted, delivered, billed, and paid for.
The October trip was notable for two things. It was the first mention of the application that someone had developed for managing vendor contracts in Lotus Notes17. Sanjay Singh18, an IT employee, said that he would provide the layout of a file that we could import into AdDept. The other notable item was that the top item on the to-do list was Belk’s fifty-ninth request for custom programming.
My visit in May of 2008 centered on co-op. The fact that I still needed to do setup work in this area five years after the installation puzzled me when I researched it. Perhaps the use of the Lotus Notes program for co-op contracts affected the progress. Although several problems were uncovered, we must have dealt with them. The last line on my update report is “Everyone was very appreciative of the work. They can definitely see the value of this project.”
We did not receive requests like the following every day:
The Lotus Notes database will at some point in the not too distant future be replaced with something. So, they would like the BELKLNI menu to be called BELKCOOPI, and they would like all references to Lotus Notes to be changed to co-op contract database or something like that.
By this time Belk had acquired most of the Parisian (introduced here) stores. TSI had to deal with several problems involving the transition.
I made two trips in June. The first one dealt mostly with issues in the interface with the co-op contract database. I also spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the co-op transactions and reconciling the co-op accrual entry for May. Denise P. and I had to make several changes to the .csv file for the journal entry to be uploaded to Lawson. The last entry in the notes for this trip had very good news.
I ran the actual cost accounting by store for February through May in order to check the results of DACAJOBST. I could not find any problems. In all cases the total media and production costs seem to match and the store breakdowns seemed reasonable.
I came back later in the month to help with the reconciliation of co-op for June. The list of open issues after that visit contained only five items, and three of them were requests for new programming.
The topic for the first visit in September was the merchandise cost accounting system, which required another interface with the sales system. This one was for sales by department by month. It was very challenging to try to reconcile the results of the merchandise allocation program with the results of the program that allocated costs to stores. I don’t think that I ever attempted this at any other installation. Nevertheless, after quite a number of adjustments, I reported that “July matched the store cost accounting in media, production, and co-op.”
The last entry on the Issues page of my notes was short but powerful: “I got the specs for a gigantic use tax/sales tax18 project.” My write-up of the project’s specs can be found here.
I came back the next week to help finish the cost accounting reconciliations and discuss the details of the use tax project. Denise P. needed something to address the immediate problem of calculating the use tax liability in each jurisdiction.
I wrote five queries in ADVQRY for Denise P. so that she could estimate their use tax liability for this season.
BOOKS092 creates a file with all direct mail and insert ads that have printing costs. It must be run first.
BKMED092, BKPOST092, and BKOTH092 calculate the costs for media, postage and other for all the ads in the file created by BOOKS092. The results are stored in files.
BKALL092 ties the four files together to print the report.
I think that this was the first time since the Amtrak rides to Macy’s East back in the eighties that I visited an AdDept client on two consecutive weeks.
The use tax project was installed in January of 2009. It seemed to go pretty well. One issue that was reported exemplifies how complicated this project was.
Request #9519 stated: “At month end, if the ad ran in that month or a previous month, the sales tax amount will be moved to the (liability) account specified on the sub-account. Thus, sales tax will be treated like every other sub-account.” This is not quite correct. They will have one sales tax sub-account, but there are sales tax liability accounts for each store. One store’s account will be associated with the state. The amount should NOT be allocated to stores when the month end program is run. Instead, a store should be specified on the sub-account, and 100% should go to that state.
I also spent more time reconciling the store and departmental cost accounting. At this point they were using both of them extensively.
Of course, they needed to project the cost of use tax when they were planning. The last entry for the visit was this question to Denise B.: “Denise P. needs the projected use tax for her reports. Is that ready? She hopes to have the projected costs by store the first week of February.”
The last file of notes that I have is dated at the end of February, 2009. I am almost positive that I returned to Belk several times after that, but I have no record of any of those trips.
At some point after this Denise P. told me that Belk planned to outsource the buying of newspaper space. I told her that this would have a dire, perhaps even catastrophic, effect on TSI’s financial position because most of their papers subscribed to AxN, and very few of them were used by any other AdDept client. She asked me how much money we would be losing. I told her. I was shocked when she promised to make up the difference. Evidently they expected to save a lot of money—most presumably in payroll—by outsourcing.
I didn’t think of it at the time, but this demonstrated quite a different point of view from when Belk promised to keep all five of its ROP coordinators back in 2003 and gave each of them personalized training in how to use AdDept to schedule newspaper ads.
Life in Charlotte: I happened upon a restaurant that I really liked called Skyland Family Restaurant. It was near one of the major north-south streets, South Blvd., but it was facing a side street. I drove past it once or twice even after I knew where I was going. After I discovered Skyland, I went there at least once on each trip. I am happy to report that it still seemed to be open for business in 2023.
The restaurant was owned by a Greek family. Everything that I ever ordered there was abundant, good, and inexpensive. My favorite was the pork chop meal. They also provided free refills on iced tea.
Several interior walls of the restaurant contained large water-color paintings that depicted unusual things. I am sure that I took some photos with my Canon point-and-shoot camera. However, I could not find them. The photo at the left is from the Internet.
I always ate by myself, and it was never very crowded. I suspect that they did more business at lunch time than in the evening. While waiting for my order I usually read something, usually the latest issue of Acquerello Italiano.
One occasion in 2008 stands out among my memories. A group of men were meeting in the back room, which was to the left of the area visible in the above photo. They were discussing in a serious and energetic manner what they could do to help Congressman Ron Paul of Kentucky win the Republican nomination for president. I had heard of Ron Paul, of course, but I did not take him seriously. Subsequently, I came to understand that he was a heroic figure to many Libertarians.
I went to several other restaurants. I have no complaints about any of them, but for me the experience at Skyland was both unique and very enjoyable.
After the first trip I always rented a car. I stayed at the AmeriSuites a couple of times and at Hyatt Place—also within walking distance of Belk’s headquarters—at least once. I went for a run almost every evening that I was in Charlotte. On the occasions that I was near Belk’s headquarters I ran around the park-like complex in which Belk was located and along the major road to the southeast of it, West Tyvola.
For most of my later visits the Hampton Inn in Arrowood, a neighborhood about five miles south of Belk, was my base. Even if it had not offered both free breakfasts and Hilton Honors points, I would have preferred it. The rooms were nicer, the service was better, and fairly often they had some free food in the evenings. It only took me ten or fifteen minutes to get to Belk, and there were some good places to eat in the vicinity.
I ran around a business park that was less than a block from the Hampton Inn. It wasn’t as nice an experience as running in a real park, but it sufficed for my purposes.
The only other type of recreation in which I participated was bridge. On one evening I played with Denise’s father20 at the Charlotte Bridge Club. I am pretty sure that it was in 2010 because I remember that I had just become a Live Master. We had a mediocre result. I made a few mistakes.
He told me that Denise never had any interest in the game, but he was teaching her daughter how to play. He also mentioned that he knew Simon Kantor, whom I had once played against back in New England.
The Work Environment: The headquarters building was spectacular. The most annoying thing, as I described above, was dealing with security. The parking lot was huge. I usually got there early enough to take one of the slots reserved for visitors, but if they were full, I might need to walk quite a distance from my car to the front door.
It was also a pretty good hike from the advertising area to the cafeteria and the IT area, but I did not need to make those trips more than once per day. The cafeteria was worth the trek. The food was quite good, as was the selection. The prices were quite reasonable.
The Dragon Buffet
Once on nearly every trip Denise P. and I would go out for lunch. I always paid and billed it back to Belk. Her two favorite places were O’Charley’s and a Chinese restaurant called Dragon Buffet.
O’C’s was OK, but DB was my favorite because they allowed diners to serve themselves and take as much as they wanted. I generally had consumed two bowls of Won Ton soup and then some ginger chicken wings. I think that there were also free refills on iced tea.
These were all legitimate business lunches. There was no booze, and Denise and I talked about almost nothing except business. As soon as we had finished eating we returned to the office.
Back in 2003 I cannot say that I had a lot of respect for the people with whom I worked at Belk. However, after Denise P. was brought in, my opinion improved a lot. It may be that she sheltered me from some people who might frustrate me.
One peculiar thing that I remember about the advertising department was the fact that Ellen Horn always had a Golden Retriever in her office. Evidently she was training them to be emotional support dogs.
There also seemed to be a paucity of printers. I remember that on quite a few occasions I walked a considerable distance to pick up a report and then had to wait for someone else’s job to finish. When I was doing reconciliations, I often needed small reports fast. This was frustrating.
The beautiful headquarters building is vacant in 2023.
Epilogue: Belk survived intact longer than almost all of the regional department store chains with whom TSI dealt. However, in 2016, a few years after my last trip to Charlotte, the company had redesigned its headquarters. Because I always thought of Belk’s digs as better than any of the other department stores, this news surprised me. Imagine my shock when I read that in 2021 Belk decided to close this location entirely. Evidently they expect most people to work remotely and some to be stashed away in stores. I don’t understand how this could possibly work. Where, for example, are the computers?
That last decision was not made by the Belk family. In 2015 the company was acquired by Sycamore Partners. For the first time ever it would be run by someone not named Belk. The new CEO was not even a man!
On January 20, 2021, Belk declared bankruptcy, but the next day it emerged with an approved plan. This website claimed that in May of 2023 Belk still had 294 stores. That seems incredible to me. I wonder how many of those are “outlets”.
Greg Case.
1. According to LinkedIn Greg Case still was working for Belk in 2023, as were quite a few of the people whom I could locate on LinkedIn. His profile page is posted here.
5. For the first part of the installation I worked with Steve Yeager a lot. I remember that he said that he was originally from somewhere in Massachusetts. I am not sure how he ended up in Charlotte. I also remember that he had a fancy car of some sort (as opposed to my ten-year-old Saturn). He told me that he liked the way that he looked in it. I found Steve’s LinkedIn page here.
8. I had not encountered anyone like Russ Taylor. Someone once asked him if he had graduated from the University of South Caroling. He answered solemnly, “Yes, I am a cock!” He also used to sneak out every so often for a cigarette break. His LinkedIn page is here.
9. I worked with Karen Pardue on virtually every trip until she moved to another position. Her LinkedIn page is here.
10. Debbie Morris assisted Karen Pardue. In 2008 she assumed management of co-op. Her LinkedIn page is here.
11. TSI had a long and productive relationship with Denise Podavini, who was born and raised in New England. I found her LinkedIn page here. It still lists her as directing the financial aspects of the advertising department, but I wonder if, given the drastic changes at the company, that is still accurate.
12. I remember Vee quite well. I briefly met with her on several trips. Her LinkedIn page is here.
Kari Bates.
13. Kari Bates eventually took over Vee Heffney’s job. Her LinkedIn page is here.
14. Rochelle Franklin’s LinkedIn page can be found here.
Bridgett Barbee.
15. Bridgett Barbee’s LinkedIn page is available here.
16. I was mildly amused to hear at one of the later meetings that the IT people, or more likely employees of an ambitious software vendor, were investigating the feasibility of replicating in Lotus Notes what AdDept did. IBM had purchased Lotus Development Corporation in 1995, primarily to get its hands on Lotus Notes, a product designed to make it easier for workers to collaborate. I had done a little research on that software. I could have told them that they would be crazy to try to use it as a comprehensive multi-user database. They would be sending a boy to do a man’s job. After a few months they came to the same conclusion.
18. According to Denise P., nearly every jurisdiction expected Belk to pay use tax on certain aspects of the cost of creating a direct mail catalog or an insert. The rates and what portion was taxable varied by jurisdiction. It seems incredible to me in retrospect that this had never been an issue in the previous six and a half years of the installation at Belk, and—even more mind-boggling—no other AdDept client had ever mentioned this issue. I have no idea how this could be possible. Almost all of the AdDept clients were in precisely the same business as Belk, and most used direct mail as much as Belk did.
19. I am pretty sure that we quoted and delivered more programming requests for Belk than for any other client. The request numbers were well into three digits when we closed TSI in 2014.
20. I think that Denise P.’s father’s name is David Wroblewski. I searched the American Contract Bridge League roster for players in Charlotte with lots of masterpoints and a Polish name. His was the only one.
