1988-2008 TSI: AdDept: Amtrak Adventures

All aboard! Continue reading

Over the course of my years at TSI I probably took Amtrak trains to and from New York City over one hundred times. The easiest way to get from Enfield to New York was by Amtrak. It was not the cheapest, but it was the most comfortable. I actually got a fair amount of work done on Amtrak trains.

During this period there was no Amtrak stop in Enfield. The closest ones were in Springfield, MA, and Windsor Locks, CT. Both places offered free parking. The Springfield station was a slightly longer drive, but it boasted an actual station with modern conveniences such as toilets and heat. Also, there was a ticket counter where one could buy a round-trip ticket. If I boarded in Windsor Locks, I had to stand in line in Penn Station to buy a ticket for the return trip. Nevertheless, because of the thirty additional minutes that I needed to spend on the train if I left from and returned to Springfield, I almost always chose Windsor Locks.

The Windsor Locks train platform was (and still is) almost certainly the least glamorous of all Amtrak stops in the entire nation. At one time there was a train station in Enfield, and an unused station in Windsor Locks still existed in 2020. You can read about the town’s plans for the site here.

My sample case.

Clothing and equipment: In the 1990’s all the males who worked at department stores in New York City wore suits or sport coats with white shirts and ties. I complied with these norms. By the time of my last few trips I may have downgraded to “business casual”.

As soon as IBM finally marketed a true laptop, I bought one. I kept it and all my other materials in a large leather sample case that was extremely durable. It was later supplanted by a large briefcase that Sue bought me.

In 1995 I bought a Thinkpad 701C, the one with a “butterfly keyboard”. You always had to fight the temptation to pick it up by the edges of the keyboard, but I loved it because it was easy to use on a train or airplane. However, I hated the tiny red ball that everyone was expected to use to place the cursor. I always brought a mouse with me. My last laptop was, I think, a Dell. I used it both on the road and as my workstation in the office, where I mounted it into a “docking station” for all of its cabling. It had a big screen, large enough to keep two windows open side-by-side. It had also a “bay” for a second battery or a CD drive. It also was very heavy.

After I bought my Bose headphones, I also brought them, my opera albums, and a CD player with me. Having them on these trips was not as important as it was for dealing with airports, but after some training sessions or vituperative meetings I needed a little Mozart.

Wi-fi was introduced near the end of my train-riding years. I tried to use it, but it was unreliable.

An interesting view of the Windsor Locks platform. Whoever took this photo was rather brave. The grating in the foreground is on a rather short and steep slope that leads directly to the Connecticut River.

The platform: Absolutely no one liked the train stop in Windsor Locks. Its only redeeming features were that the property was evidently not valuable for anything else, and its parking lot doubled as a small park-and-ride area.

The stop had two facilities. One was very important—a pay telephone. On cold winter nights only a few people disembarked at this stop. In the days before cell phones that telephone could serve as a lifeline for for those expecting to be met there and for people whose cars would not start or were absent without leave. I always made sure that I had change, but I never had to use the phone. I suspect that this one will be the last pay telephone in America if it is not already.

The other facility, the shelter, was essentially useless. It only had room for about three people, and it provided little protection for them. Furthermore, the seasoned travelers never stood on the platform in inclement weather. They stayed in their cars until the train’s light was visible under the bridge at the top of the photo. The engineers knew this, and stopped here even if no one was visible on the platform.

No masks in my era.

For some reason the platform in Windsor Locks was built lower than most. Only one door on the train was ever opened for this stop. One of the conductors had to lower the stairs so that people could enter. He/she (it was almost always a he) would then announce, “Amtrak to New Haven and Penn Station” and then assist people who had luggage or might find the climbing difficult.

After everyone was aboard, the conductors collected tickets. Because there was nowhere to buy tickets in Windsor Locks, most of us who boarded there did not have one. The conductor had to sell each of us a one-way fare. In theory they took credit cards, but often the little machine for processing them on the train did not work. In that case the conductor would need to go inside at one of the subsequent stations so that an agent there could effect the transaction. This was annoying to the conductors and to the passengers who could not understand the delay. I usually paid cash, and I tried to have exact change.

Maybe three at Christmas time.

There were usually only two cars on the train that went from New Haven to Springfield. The conductor would announce which door was opening for Windsor Locks as we pulled away from the Windsor station. We all gather up our stuff and moved toward the designated door. Sometimes I was the only person exiting.

As the train slowed down, the conductor opened the door and let down the stairs. He/she helped everyone on the last step.

On one memorable occasion there was a hitch. It was bitterly cold that night, and the door was frozen shut. We were all required to exit on the other side. At any other stop this would have been a minor inconvenience. However, the east side of the tracks in Windsor Locks was covered with gravel, and that gravel was covered with ice that night. It was also on a steep slope toward the frigid Connecticut River, which was only a few yards away. To make matters worse, it was pitch dark on that side. We all descended onto the gravel,. The conductor went aboard, drew up the steps, and closed the door. After the train had departed, we all managed to clamber up over the tracks to the parking lot.

No harm; no foul, I guess.

The conductors: The conductors on Amtrak seemed to me to be both professional and competent. I made a genuine effort to avoid making their life more difficult. On one occasion I did get into an argument1 with one of them, but his partner resolved the situation in a friendly and reasonable manner.

The seating: The seats were all reasonably comfortable, and there was always room aplenty in the overhead racks. I always tried to sit on the starboard side of the car on the way to the city and on the port side on the return trip. The sun was thereby always on the opposite side, and there was much less glare on my computer screen.

Four seats in every car had electrical outlets. Since Windsor Locks was the morning train’s first stop, it was usually rather easy to grab one of those seats for the first leg. It was much more difficult in the evening and if we had to change trains in New Haven. However, the cars all had the same layout, and I knew which seats had them. As soon as one became available, I would grab my ticket from the luggage rack and moved there.

The stop in New Haven: After we arrived in New Haven in the morning, we usually had to await the arrival of a train from Boston. It would usually park across the platform from our train, and our passengers were ordered to move to the other train. This was necessary because the engines on the Hew Haven-Springfield line were diesel powered. The tracks along the shore used electricity.

In the evening as we approached New Haven the conductors would move those of us going on towards Springfield (as opposed to Boston) to the last two cars, which would then be decoupled from the remainder of the train. The train to Boston would then leave, and a diesel engine would be brought in to transport us the rest of the way. This process took about twenty minutes, during which the train had no heat or light.

The passengers: When I first started to ride to Macy’s a group of eight or ten buyers from Casual Corner, which then had headquarters on South Road in Enfield, rode to New York on the first train every Tuesday. Most of them got on with me at Windsor Locks. Others boarded in Windsor or Hartford. Most people on that train said nary a word. These people, who were mostly women, were very talkative.

For some reason their bosses evidently put a stop to this practice while I was still going to Macy’s on a regular basis. The trips were less lively after that.

For many years a man who was about my age commuted from Windsor to the city. I never talked with him, but whenever I rode Amtrak in the morning I saw him get on at the station in Windsor every day. He often was also on the same train that I took home in the evening. I wondered to myself how he could bear that schedule. In his place I would have been very tempted to move closer to my place of work. If he could cut his commute down to an hour, it would free up twenty hours per week!

This is similar to what Amtrak had in the nineties, but there was always a line.

Train food: No food or drink was available between Springfield and New Haven. There was almost always a “café car” between New Haven and Penn Station. It contained four tables, two at either end. They were usually occupied by conductors or no one.

In the middle of the car was a small bar or, if you like, counter. There was always a line at the bar. For sale were coffee, soft drinks, snacks, beer, hot dogs, pastries in the morning, and a few other things. I would usually buy a cup of coffee and a muffin or a pastry in the morning. The coffee always tasted very bad, but it was hot, wet, and full of caffeine.

In the evening I always tried to buy food before I boarded. A deli and a Roy Rogers with tolerable fried chicken were right across the street from Penn Station. I also found the mini-pizzas at the Pizza Hut inside Penn Station to be edible. If I was unable to get any food before boarding, I might by some chips and hope that leftovers were available at home. After a rough trip I might buy a beer if the person at the counter guaranteed it was cold.

Tracks: There is only one set of tracks on the New Haven-Springfield line. There were so few trains that this was almost never a problem. Once, however, we encountered another train. We didn’t collide, but it took about thirty minutes to resolve the conflict and back up one of the trains to a side-track.

The track from New Haven to the city was owned by Metro North. The track around Bridgeport was banked so steeply that the engineer had to slow down to about ten miles per hour to keep the train on the track. This was still not fixed by the last time that I rode.

The bigger problem was that the Metro North trains had right of way. In the morning the Amtrak train usually had to pull over to a side-track to allow a Metro North express train zoom past. One or two of these could easily cause me to be late for an appointment, and there were no cell phones.

Joe D.

Celebritiess: The closest that I came to seeing a celebrity on Amtrak was when I was in the same car as Joe D’Ambrosio, the voice of the UConn Huskies. I first became familiar with him in the seventies when he was on WPOP. I knew his face from TV, but I would have recognized his voice anywhere. He told sports stories to his travel companions all the way to New York.

T.C. Boyle.

I didn’t talk to Joe. All right; I didn’t really talk to anyone. It is difficult for me to recall a single conversation that went beyond “Is that seat taken?” I do recall that on one return trip from New York someone who was probably two decades younger than I was asked me about The Tortilla Curtain a novel by T. Coraghesson Boyle, that I was reading. I told him that the first half was so-so, but it seemed to be improving. Actually, I did not end up liking it very much.

Penn Station: If I did not already have one, my first responsibility upon entering the station in the evening was to buy a one-way ticket to Windsor Locks. There was no way to jump the line.

No, no, no. Check the ARRIVALS board first.

The next step was to check the Arrivals board in the gate area to determine the number of the train and its status. The worst possible news was to see the word DELAYED. That meant that the train was still a long way from New York City or there were known problems on the track.

If I had enough time, and I had not already purchased food for supper, I stopped in at one of the fast food places in the station—usually Pizza Hut, Nathan’s, or an establishment that sold sandwiches. I also always bought a large Diet Coke. The fountain drinks were a much better deal than anything on the train. I would then usually find a relatively secluded seat in the waiting area and read and/or eat.

I sometimes visited the stores that sold books and magazines. I was surprised to find copies of Oggi and Panorama. In my trips after 2002 I always carried my Italian dictionary with me. I purchased a few issues of these magazines and did my best to translate the articles in them. Fortunately there was always an abundance of photos.

The northbound trains in the evening were often late. Some started the day in Florida. I frequently had to kill time in the station, which sometimes led to situations that annoyed me then but amuse me now. I found the following account in my notes for a trip to Lord and Taylor in November of 2007:

Penn station encounters: As I was waiting for my train and holding a Roy Rogers bag, a woman asked me for a piece of chicken. A little later a guy asked me for a cigarette, then two dollars, then one dollar, then a quarter. On Tuesday morning a guy tried to sell me a tourist guide to New York, which he said cost $11, for $10. I was wearing a dress shirt, tie, sweater vest, and dress overcoat and was consulting my laptop at the time. Evidently the guy’s tourist radar was on the blink. He asked me where I was going. I said, “work,” which was the only word other than “no” in any of these conversations.

One evening I heard over the loudspeaker a request for someone who spoke Italian to come to the information desk. I considered volunteering my very questionable services, but then it occurred to me that this was the Big Apple, not Dubuque. There must be at least a dozen people here who could really speak Italian. Besides, my hand gestures were not advanced enough for conversing with a real Italian.

One of my favorite things about Penn Station was the man who made the announcements over the loudspeaker, Danny Simmons2. He had an unmatched style. I can still here in my mind his incantation ringing in my ears: “… with station stops of Wallingford, Meriden, Berlin, Hartford, Windsor, Windsor Locks, and Springfield is now boarding on track …” You can listen to some of his calls here.

Someone should certainly have told him that in Connecticut the city “Berlin” is accented on the first syllable.

Train tips: The goal for the return trip was to snag the best seat possible.The priorities were:

  1. On the port side;
  2. Window;
  3. Both seats unoccupied;
  4. With electricity;
  5. Near the café car.

I almost always succeeded at finding a seat that met the first three criteria. I strove to be one of the first ten or so people in line at the departure gate, which was identified by a number and E or W. This was relatively easy. I always monitored the ARRIVALS board. Most people were assembled under the DEPARTURES board. They seemed unaware of two rather obvious facts about through trains: 1) They must have arrived before they could depart. 2) They always departed on the track on which they arrived.

So, if the ARRIVALS board listed the gate as 7, I went and stood by the escalator down to 7E. This pretty much assured me a good position in line no matter how many people eventually congregated there.

It was equally important to find the right car. The trains always went from west to east. I always walked toward the rear of the train until I found a car that met most of my criteria. I then entered and selected the seat by the port-side window. If the aisle seat was unoccupied, I placed my sample case or briefcase on it, opened it up, took out a book or a folder, and lay it beside the case.

I then pulled down both tray tables. If I had food with me, I lay it on the tray table in front of me and took a bite out of something. I inserted the straw into my large Diet Coke, and placed my drink on the tray table for the aisle seat. My objective for all of this was to make the aisle seat seem as undesirable as possible. It would have worked even better if I sat in the aisle seat and put my stuff in the window seat, but I found that that was not really necessary. I almost always was left to myself.

There was no reason to worry about people entering at subsequent stops. On the eastbound evening trains at each stop after Penn Station far more people exited the train than boarded it.

If I wanted to purchase something from the café car, it was necessary to do it before the train reached Bridgeport. The café car closed down well before the stop in New Haven, and there was always a line. In fact, it was usually a good idea to make any purchases before the first stop in New Rochelle. The selection in the café car got worse fairly rapidly.

Distressing events: Uneventful train rides were delightful. Any disruption of the routine was, at best, annoying.

One day the line behind me at the gate was unusually long, and the people in it were mostly college-aged. It was a Friday. Perhaps it was spring break, or the end of a term. In any case, every seat on the train was filled, even the aisle seat next to mine. Furthermore, a dozen or more people sat on the floor in my car. I presume that the situation was similar in all the other cars.

This could not have been legal, could it? It was the only time that I saw this happen. Evidently Amtrak had no way of determining that more tickets had been sold than there were seats.

I can only imagine what the café car was like. I did not dare to abandon my seat just to buy a can of Diet Coke for $2.

A more distressing event occurred on one of my last trips in 2006. I was returning from Macy’s, and I evidently left my Cascio point-and-shoot camera3 on the train. It must have fallen on the floor at some point. I had used that camera on the glorious Village Italy tour that we took in 2005. It is documented here.

In my notes from trips to Lord and Taylor in 2007 and 2008 I twice reported that I had almost lost the small Canon camera that I had purchased as a replacement for the Cascio.

The nightmarish return trip: On many of the trips home I arrived late, sometimes very late. One of them, an extremely hot evening in the summer, I will never forget.

The Hell Gate Bridge.

The Hell Gate bridge, which connected the Astoria section of Queens with Randalls and Wards Islands, was only used by freight trains and the “Northeast Corridor” Amtrak trains on which I rode. One summer evening the bridge had reportedly caught on fire (!) and was unusable, at least for the nonce.

So, on the DEPARTURE board appeared the dreaded phrase: SEE AGENT. The good people at Amtrak addressed our group, which by then included everyone who had already been on the train. They divided us up into groups that were determined by our destinations. I was in the group that included all of the stops north of New Haven.

A/C would have been extra.

Amtrak, we were informed, had chartered tourist-type buses in Europe) to transport us to our destinations. After about a two-hour delay in which all these arrangements were made, our group was herded onto our bus. The first thing that we noticed was that it did not have air conditioning. The second was that our bus was very crowded. A foul mood prevailed.

The usual route.

Our bus driver cheerfully announced that he had information that the usual route north through Manhattan was experiencing heavy traffic. He had exercised his initiative to plot a route through the Lincoln Tunnel to I-95 in New Jersey. We would then cruise across the George Washington Bridge toward Connecticut.

Our driver’s route.

This news elicited some smiles and giggles of schadenfreude among the passengers. We would get home very late, but we would avoid that horrible Manhattan traffic that would probably drive the other passengers crazy.

And we did indeed drive through the tunnel at a reasonable pace. Similarly, our passage through the Garden State proceeded at a good clip. We could not actually see the poor saps on the other buses inching their way north on the other side of the Hudson, but we could easily imagine their frustrating situation.

However, our collective optimism crashed when we encountered traffic on our own highway just before we reached the George Washington Bridge. In fact, we were not moving at all. Our driver announced that there had been an oil spill on the highway on the New York side of the bridge. It took us more than an hour to cross the bridge. Everyone—including myself–was suffering from the heat. It was surely over 100° inside our conveyance.

After the bus finally crossed the bridge we were required to exit the highway in the northern part of Manhattan. It was dark by then as the bus driver piloted us through hostile-looking side streets of the worst parts of Gotham. I don’t know what the other passengers were thinking about, but I could not keep the first few chapters of Bonfire of the Vanities out of my mind.

Five stops.
No stops.

At long last we got back onto the interstate. Imagine our relief to see the “Welcome to Connecticut” sign. We passed by our usual stops at New Rochelle, Stamford, and Bridgeport stations and turned north onto I-91. I was familiar with the drive from there to Windsor Locks. it could easily be completed in an hour.

We might have made it that quickly, too, but we had to exit the highway to stop at each of the five Amtrak stations—Wallingford, Meriden, Berlin, Hartford, and Windsor. All of these stations were conveniently located near the railroad tracks. None, however, was easily accessible from I-91 especially by an oversized vehicle like our bus. Of course we also had to wait for the passengers to get all of their gear together. Of course, they had to wait for the bus to stop. Then the exiting passengers had to fight their way up the narrow aisle to the door and climb down.

I did not leave that wretched bus until 3AM, and I still had to make the bleary-eyed drive to Enfield. Of course, the people who went all the way to Springfield had it even worse. I thought with glee of one of them discovering that someone might have broken into his—no, make it her—car while we were on this forlorn journey from hell.


1. The story about the run-in that I had with an Amtrak conductor concerning my book of discounted train tickets has been recounted here.

2. Danny Simmons retired in 1994.

3. I replaced the Cascio with a Canon that was much easier to use. When I upgraded for our Africa trip, I gave the Canon point-and-shoot to Sue, but I don’s think that she ever used it.

1988-2014 TSI: The Programmers

Supporters and coders. Continue reading

TSI’s first, last, and best programmer was Denise Bessette. For three decades she was one of the most important people in my life. More details about her relationships with TSI, me, and the rest of the crew can be found here.


During the years that Denise worked only part-time most of the programming burden fell on my extremely narrow shoulders. By 1987 it had become too much. We needed to hire a full-time programmer. I placed ads in the Hartford Courant and the Journal-Inquirer. It was not a good time to be hiring. The state’s unemployment rate was heading toward a record low of 2.8 percent, and the demand for programmers far exceeded the supply. I understood that a small firm like TSI would be at a disadvantage when competing with giants like the insurance companies. Besides, our office was in a converted barn, and we were not able to offer any benefits to speak of.

Sandy in the kitchen in TSI’s East Windsor Office.

A few people responded to our ad. The only one that I had any interest in hiring was Sandy Sant’Angelo, whose name was Sandy Scarfe when she started at TSI. She had taken a few programming classes. She worked for the Springfield (MA) Public Library system. A major part of her job there was helping to set up the new computerized system for keeping track of the books. This was not very close to anything that we did, but at this point my choices were to hire her or start the recruiting process over. I chose the former.

Sandy turned out not to be a great coder, but she had other traits that I valued highly. She learned how to use the computer systems rather quickly, and if a project was well-defined, and I provided her with a somewhat similar program to use as a model, she was eventually able to save me a little time. What I liked the most about her were her dependability and her attitude.

Harry Burt, Lucia Hagan, Chris Bessette, Sandy, and Denise at the summer outing in Old Saybrook.

Unfortunately, the great bulk of our work in the nineties was quite complicated, and it became more and more difficult for me to find appropriate projects for her. One thing that I had noticed was that she was good at talking to the users at our clients’ installations. She had a cheerful demeanor, and she was pretty good at getting to the bottom of problems.

At the time TSI’s office had two telephone lines1, a generic number that we published in our promotional materials and a support line that we provided to our clients. I decided that Sandy’s primary responsibility should be answering calls on the support line. If they were simple questions, she could deal with them immediately. Otherwise, she recorded them. At first we kept track of the problems on paper, but soon we devised a simple system for recording them in a database available to all the programmers.

Denise, Sue, me, Sandy, Lucia, and Harry. Chris or a restaurant employee must have taken this photo.

This system worked pretty well. The key question that we asked was whether the problem was holding up the client’s work. If it was, the problem was automatically escalated. In nearly all cases these problems were addressed the same day.

I did not often work closely with Sandy. Actually, no one did. Her telephone voice sounded fine on the other end, but for some reason it really carried inside the office. I had to move her desk away from the programmers’ area.

Although I had hired Sandy, when Denise took over application development, she became the boss of all of the programmers. After a few years, Denise, who knew Sandy’s limitations, decided to eliminate her position. The meeting in which she was the terminated was very hard for me to witness. Sandy broke down and cried. I understood that Denise had made a business decision, but I doubt that I could have done it. By then I thought of Sandy as part of the TSI family. Nevertheless, I never considered overruling Denise’s decision.

Sandy, me, and Harry at the door to the TSI office in East Windsor after a blizzard.

I don’t have a lot of vivid memories of Sandy. She got married after she came to work with us, and she seemed happy. Her attendance record over the years was nearly spotless. She also attended all of TSI’s summer outings and Christmas parties.

I only recall her expressing a strong opinion about one thing. She loved the Harry Potter books. Her endorsement, however, was not sufficient to prompt me to dip my literary beak there.

Sandy was the person who alerted the rest of the office about the attacks on 9/11/2001. Everyone else in the office was shocked at this, but I had spent more time in airports than the rest of them put together. The airport security by that time was unbelievably lax. I had concocted in my mind at least three ways of sneaking a gun aboard a plane. It was also no surprise to me that plenty of people in the world who despised the United States for its arrogant and interventionist foreign policy and its unquestioning endorsement of anything done or said by Israel.

I find it personally embarrassing that I know so little about Sandy, a person with whom I worked for more than a decade. I just let her live her life as she wanted to and expected her to come in every morning. I can never remember her asking for anything.


After assigning Sandy to answering support calls, I reckoned that we needed another programmer. The Internet was still in its infancy, and so the process again involved expensive want ads in the local papers. Before finding someone who fit the bill I hired two different people, neither of whose names I remember.

The first was a woman in her twenties or maybe early thirties who already had programmed in BASIC at another company. I hired her. I was pretty excited about the prospect of working with her. It seemed likely that she might be able to get up to speed in record time. On the first day she appeared in the office at 8:30, TSI’s starting time. I immediately put everything aside to help her understand how we programmed and to go over some of the peculiarities of the hardware and operating systems.

If I had a sick pet, I would also ask permission to go home, but I don’t think that I would quit my job.

At some point she must have received a phone call. It only lasted a couple of minutes; I thought nothing of it. However, just before lunch she told me, “I’m sorry, but this won’t work. My dog is sick, and I need to be with him.” I don’t remember what I replied, maybe nothing.

I immediately initiated another job search. This time I hired a guy in his twenties who claimed to have done some programming for a previous employer. I spent a couple of weeks training him, and he seemed to be making little or no progress. I began to doubt that he had ever written a program, or at least one that did approximately what was required.

I have only a vague recollection of what he looked like or anything about his personality. I do remember that he was into the martial arts and worked out. He was in very good shape.

I probably would have worked with him for another week or two before deciding, but we had a twinax connectivity problem. As is explained here, the individual terminals and PC’s were connected to the server via twinax cabling. Each station was dependent upon the cabling, pigtails, and settings of the other devices on the line. Some of our cables were very long. We ordered these custom-made from a company in New Britain. They were expensive. Moreover, the company needed a little time to make them, and it was located forty or so miles from TSI’s office.

It was an “all hands on deck” situation until we got the situation resolved. Everyone was checking connections. I asked the new programmer to connect one of the cables to one of the devices. I showed him how their were two holes on the “pigtail” and two pins on the end of the cable. The pins, of course, fitted into the holes. Once the connection was made, a cap on the end of the cable could be turned so that it was impossible for the cable to come loose. I honestly thought that it was impossible for anything to go wrong. I had done this many times, and nothing had ever gone amiss.

Those two pins are not supposed to lie flat next to each other.

We spent an hour or so trying to get the line to work, but we had no success. I eventually examined the connection that this new fellow had made. The pigtail was tightly attached to the cable. I unfastened it and looked inside the head of the cable. Both pins were bent at a 90° angle, one to the right and one to the left. They resembled a pair of arms stubbornly crossed on someone’s chest. I would have bet that no one was strong enough to do this. To this day I had no idea how he accomplished this feat.

I was so angry that I had to retreat into Denise’s office for a few minutes so that no one could see me. I decided on the spot to fire him, but I waited until the end of the day to do it.

I thought at first that we would need to order another custom cable. However, we found a spare cable, and with a few adjustments to our wiring scheme, we were able to get the connectivity resumed within a half hour.


Casual Corner’s headquarters as viewed from South Rd. The pond was usually full of geese.

Twice when I advertised for a programmer, I received applications that I could not believe. One was from the lady who was IT director at Casual Corner3, a large retail chain. Their home office was in Enfield. My customary jogging route took me right past their complex. The IT department even had an AS/400! Casual Corner did not advertise much, but with and “in” we might even get an AdDept installation out of it. I tried to contact her, but she never scheduled an interview.

The other guy was retired. He had been an IT director at a large company. He came in and talked with me. He said that he would work cheap. He just wanted to write code. I don’t know whether he would have been a good programmer or not, but my primary interest was elsewhere. At the time we were just beginning to try to work with IT departments, and the process always left me frustrated. I thought that having this guy on TSI’s team might help me learn how managers of IT departments made decisions.

It was a close call, but I decided not to make him an offer.


I think that Steve might be setting up TSI’s F10.

Instead I hired a much younger guy, Steve Shaw. He had been an RPG programmer at Riverside Park4 in Agawam, MA. He picked up BASIC pretty quickly, and I was able to give him reasonably challenging projects. I really liked working with him. When he started his coding was a little sloppy, but the quality improved quickly. When I told him this, he seemed slightly insulted.

While he was working at TSI Steve acquired a multi-unit property in Massachusetts. I could not understand why he wanted to be a part-time landlord. To each his own.

Steve was something of a daredevil. He purchased a jet ski while he worked for us. At some point he disclosed that he had been in a motor cycle accident in which he lost a number of teeth. I wrote a little song to cheer him up. My sister Jamie and I performed it for him in the office. It was a smash hit.

I found a copy of the lyrics:

Home, brain, nerve, heart (teeth not in photo).

On corn cobs I’d be gnawin’.
I could graze upon your law-n.
It is my firm belief.
My dentitions would be so neat.
I’d devour piles of roast beef,
If I only had some teeth.

Oh, I could eat a pie.
I’d chew up all the steaks that you could buy.
I’d masticate on pork chops bye the bye.
If you object,
I’ll bite your thigh.

From ear to ear I’d be grinnin’.
Young girls’ hearts I’d be winnin’.
I’d steal them like a thief.
I would floss away my tartar,
and stop actin’ like a martyr,
If I only had some teeth.

Music by Harold Arlen; Words by Mike Wavada
TSI’s Christmas party with the Edward Owen Company at the Nutmeg House: Jamie Lisella, Steve, Doug Pease, Ken Owen, Denise, Sandy, someone, me, someone else.

Steve only worked with us for about four years. I appreciated that he might see it as a dead-end job. However, the work was, I think, potentially very exciting. We were solving problems that no one had addressed before for large corporations that everyone has heard of. I tried to talk him into staying, but there was no way for me to argue that he could ever climb the corporate ladder at TSI. We did not have a ladder.


The next programming hire was Harry Burt2, who was almost exactly my age, forty-something. He had a degree in math, and he had programmed in BASIC. He had been a vice president at a bank in Simsbury (I think) that had had closed under fairly suspicious circumstances that did not involve Harry. I hired him and terminated the job search at the end of my interview with him.

Harry mostly did programming projects for us. However, I also assigned him to monitor the work of Fred Pease in the huge Y2K project, which is described here. Fred was a college student who had never had a job before. The plan was for him to work part-time at TSI for the summer. He wanted to set his own schedule. By his own omission he tended to stay up late playing video games. Sometimes he stayed up all night.

That much was OK, but Fred constantly changed his schedule without telling Harry or anyone else. Harry had to ask him every morning how long he was going to work. He usually said “Until 11:30” or “Until 12:30”. The last straw was when he said “Until something-thirty”.

Fred’s work was also slipshod. I decided that I needed to take the project more seriously. If I was going to need to check every program anyway, I decided to do it all myself. Frankly, I did not want to assign such a tedious and unrewarding task to any of my good programmers. I did not want risk losing them. I took it on as a sort of penance; I should have seen it coming back in the eighties.

Sandy and Harry are on the left. Myself (hat), Denise and Chris are on the right. This photo is from our cruise on the Connecticut River.

Harry (who was NOT hairy—I thought of the Fuzzy Wuzzy rhyme whenever I saw or heard his name) was a great fit for TSI for at least a decade. After a couple of years I began to worry that Harry might realize that there was no path for advancement at TSI and decide to look for work elsewhere. After all, he was definitely overqualified for his job.

I decided to give Harry a small percentage commission on our software sales every month. I think that this was probably a good idea. He could see that he was profiting from our delivery of new software.

While he worked for us he also taught college-level math classes in the evenings. At some point in the twenty-first century Harry quit in order to become a full-time teacher . He told Denise, who was his boss, that he was having trouble dealing with the pressure at TSI. The environment did not seem pressure-packed to me, but from my office — even with the door open — I could not hear any conversations.

I liked Harry a lot. For a time we were the only two males in the office, and it was very nice having someone with whom I could discuss a football game. Also, since we were almost exactly the same age, we had many of the same cultural landmarks.

Harry is between Doug Pease and Denise. A little bit of Sandy is visible on the right. I think that this was the day of our Christmas dinner after the trip to Hawaii.

Harry’s best friend was Vinny, his barber. Harry often told amusing stories about Vinnie or recited humorous quotes. I devoted a fair amount of effort to buying appropriate (and usually light-hearted) Christmas cards for the employees. One year I actually found one that featured a barber named Vinny.

Harry had a 24/7 tan. I assume that he went to a tanning studio. He did not seem like the kind of person who would do that, but you never know. One of my proudest achievements was to compare tans with him on my return from Hawaii. For the first and only time, my arm was darker than his.


Denise recruited and hired all of the new programmers who worked in our office in the twenty-first century. By this time we were using Monster.com for hiring. It was cheaper and better than newspaper ads, but it was still a time-consuming practice that tied up TSI’s most productive employee.

August 16 is National Airborne Day.

Brian Rollet was the first person that Denise hired. I remembered that he started while I was in Hawaii for the sales/vacation in December of 1975 (described here). I brought everyone back souvenirs for the employees. For Brian, whom I had never met yet, I purchased a hula-dancing bobble-head doll.

Brian was an Army vet. In fact, he was Airborne. Had I been doing the hiring, this would have given me pause in two different areas. 1) Why would anyone with a marketable skill like programming ability volunteer for three years in the Army? 2) Why would anyone jump out of a perfectly good airplane?

He also had a pretty long commute. He lived in Ware or Belchertown — one of those towns near the Mass Pike. There is no way to get to East Windsor from that area without driving through Springfield.

Denise was most upset about one of Brian’s most unprofessional traits — dozing off in the afternoon. She asked me what I would recommend. I told her that the obvious solution was caffeine. Who ever heard of a programmer anywhere who did not consume immense amounts of caffeine at work?

Brian, Harry, Denise, and Sandy at Mystic Seaport.

My second choice was to advise Brian to work something out with Harry, who was in the adjoining cubicle. If I were in Brian’s situation, I would have asked Harry to throw an eraser at me whenever he saw me nodding off. That would have worked, wouldn’t it?

When Denise called him on the carpet about it, Brian’s solution was to eat only salads at lunch. That might have helped a little, but Denise finally had to let him go. I don’t think that she was too satisfied with what he produced while he was awake anyway.

She confided to me that she would never again hire anyone who had been in the military.


Denise’s second hire, Michael Davis, worked out much better. He got up to speed very rapidly, and Denise really enjoyed working with him, and she definitely got to depend on him. Unfortunately, he did not stay at TSI very long. He moved to Pittsburgh, where he had family or a girlfriend or something.

Lucia Hagen, Harry, and Michael.

The good news was that he liked the work at TSI well enough to work for us remotely for a period after he moved away. So, the transition was not too difficult. Of course, he could not answer the support line from Pittsburgh.

Michael’s boat.

My most vivid memory of Michael was on our summer outing at (I think) Rocky Neck State Park. He took me out on his small sailboat. People from Kansas do not often get opportunities like this. Of course, he did all the sailing. My only job was to duck my head down by my knees when he decided to swing the sail around.

I remember that after Michael had been at TSI for a year or so he decided to buy a new car. Well, not a NEW car, but a NEWER car. He chose a Volkswagen; I don’t remember the model. The few times that I shopped for a car I never considered buying a used one. I would be too afraid that I was just buying someone else’s problems. Nevertheless, Michael seemed satisfied with his purchase.

Sean Finnegan.

I don’t remember much about Sean Finnegan7. In fact, I had to ask Denise about him. He worked for TSI for two months in 2010. He was apparently a pretty good programmer, but he had difficulty talking with clients on support calls.


Jason Dean8 lived in the Springfield area. Before coming to TSI he had worked in Friendly’s IT department. He joined us in October 2007 and was still employed when we closed down the company in 2014.

Denise got along with Jason nearly as well as she did with Michael. She was very satisfied with his attitude and performance.

I did not really get to know Jason too well until Denise started working remotely in 2013. One thing that I quickly learned was that he was a terrific bowler. He had bowled at least three 300 games, which blew my mind. He had quite a few bowling balls. He told me that getting the ball to spin correctly depended on both the surface of the ball and the surface of the lane. So, different balls were needed depending on the condition of the lanes..

I was very surprised to learn that Jason’s bowling balls had only two holes. He did not have a hole for his thumb.

Jason knew my bridge friends Bob and Shirley Derrah from bowling in Springfield.

Jason and his wife were, in my opinion, fanatical about coupons, Groupons, and all other ways of obtaining discounts. They were always shopping for bargains. They switched their cell service from Verizon to T-Mobile to save on phone charges. However, the T-Mobile phones got no signal in their apartment. They got their money back, but it was a big hassle.

Jason had a son when he started working at TSI. His second son was born quite prematurely, and it was touch-and-go for a while, but he pulled through and was quite healthy the last that I knew. The family also had three rescue cats who were too eccentric for my tastes.

In his middle school in Springfield Jason had twice been a spelling champion. He was the only other person whom I have ever met who competed in the national spelling bee.

Jason and his family loved Disney World. They spent every vacation there, and they always stayed in the same Disney hotel. They monitored the situation very closely and always made reservations on the first day that the discounted fares were offered.

Jason had an older brother who lived at home with his parents. He spent most of his time in the basement playing Worlds of Warcraft. Although he had never worked, Jason insisted that he was a brilliant guy. He urged Denise to consider hiring him. I don’t remember the details, but he never came to the office. I am not sure that he could drive.

Jason actually contacted the Dr. Phil show to try to get them do do an intervention to help his brother get out of his shell. His parents vetoed the idea.

Jason and his parents were very conservative. He could not believe that Obama had defeated Romney in 2012. He told me that he suspected that there had been voting fraud, but he readily admitted that he had no evidence.


1. By the time that we moved the office to East Windsor, CT, in 1999 TSI had eight phone lines.

2. In 2021 Harry Burt is teaching math at Naugatuck Community College. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Casual Corner closed all of its stores in 2005. Since then the headquarter building in Enfieldhas been used by Brooks Brothers, which also is now in bankruptcy.

4. Riverside Park was acquired by Premier Parks in 1996, a couple of years after Steve started at TSI. The name was changed to Six Flags New England.

5. Steve Shaw sent me emails a couple of times. In the one in February of 2000 he reported that he was working at the Phoenix, and they had sent him to classes on Websphere and Java. However, we never got together. Because he has such a common name, It was difficult to locate him, but I finally found his LinkedIn page. You can see it here.

6. I think that Brian Rollet lives in the Ware, MA, area in 2021.

7. Sean Finnegan’s LinkeIn page is here.

8. Since TSI closed in 2014 Jason Dean has worked at ESPN as Application Support Analyst III. His LinkedIn page is here.