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2002-2005 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 2

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Selling newspapers on the use of AxN. Continue reading →

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not returned contracts.
  7. 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.
  8. I would carefully monitor the processing of the first batch of orders. The system had never been stress-tested.
  9. 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.
  10. 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).
  11. 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.

1994-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Saks Fifth Avenue

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TSI had a long but bumpy association with SFA. Continue reading →

Saks Fifth Avenue (SFA) is more than just a store. For decades it has been a chain of high-end department stores throughout North America as well as numerous smaller affiliated stores. In the early nineties its headquarters was in its famous flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The first Saks store was opened in 1867, and for decades the enterprise was owned and operated by the Saks family. However, since 1923 Saks has been owned and controlled by outside organizations except for a two-year period beginning in 1996 when it was a public corporation. Even then 50 percent of the stock was retained by its previous owner, the Bahrain-based firm, Investcorp.

I, of course, was blissfully ignorant of most of this when, in the early nineties, TSI began pitching the AdDept system to the advertising department of Saks. In fact, my presentation to Saks may have been the first one that had a fairly serious chance of succeeding. I don’t remember the demo, but I surely gave one at the IBM office on Madison Avenue. I also definitely visited the office of the Saks’ advertising department, which at that time was on one of the upper floors of the store on Fifth Avenue to collect the requirements for the official proposal.

It did not take me long to realize that SFA was very different from Macy’s. The Senior VP at Saks was a woman, and her secretary was a man. I am embarrassed to report that I don’t remember either of their names. Theirs was an unusual setup in the early nineties. More surprising to me was the fact that around his desk were posted large glossy photographs of shirtless male models.

Saks’ advertising department was responsible for more than just the Fifth Avenue store. There were dozens of full-line stores that bore the SFA logo strategically positioned around the continent in locations with the requisite number of rich people. They also managed the little advertising done for even more Off Fifth outlet stores that sold the merchandise that had not been sold at the SFA stores. They also had responsibility for advertising for the Armani Exchange stores. I never quite understood why.

This was the OTS at 700 N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

For me the most surprising thing about Saks’ approach to advertising was its focus on New York City. Macy’s focus was somewhat similar, but their primary purpose in purchasing AdDept was to be able to hand additional markets. Saks divided their SFA stores into two groups: New York and OTS, which stood for “out-of-town stores.” Their newspaper advertising was heavily focused on the New York Times. They may have used Newsday for the Long Island store, but I don’t think that they used the other tabloids at all.

Saks also advertised very heavily in fashion magazines. In some ways the system could treat magazines as newspapers that only published one issue per month, but in other ways they were quite different. A fair amount of programming was required to handle Saks’ advertising in Vogue and other such periodicals.

Saks signed a contract with TSI in 1994, which was a banner year for the company. I made sure that all of the users of and prospects for the AdDept system knew that Saks was now on our client list by including the news in an issue of Sound Bytes, TSI’s short-lived newsletter.

At Saks Fifth Avenue, the national retailer based in Manhattan, the implementation of the AdDept system is scheduled for May 1. Advertising personnel will be connected to an AS/400 located at the company’s data center in Lawrenceville, NJ, through a Token Ring network. Both Mac and PC users in all areas of the department and the advertising business office will have access to the data. In addition to the wealth of standard features in AdDept, custom programming will provide the department with the ability to produce advertising schedules by store, to track advertising expenses (gross, vendor, and net) by merchandise vendor, and to produce change reports that conform with the way that the department is organized.

Reading this blurb again brought to mind a few unusual aspects concerning the installation.

  • I made at least one trip to Lawrenceville, which is closer to Philadelphia than to Fifth Avenue, probably at the time when the AS/400 was installed in 1994. Almost never did anyone from TSI deal with anyone from that facility, and they had never had a hardware problem. However, several years later we received a very strange phone call from someone there who requested that someone from our office dial into the system over the modem. They said that no one could remember where they had put it; they hoped that the noise produced by the modem—it never answered on the first ring—would lead them to it. Apparently it worked. In 1998 all of Saks’ computers were moved to the Proffitt’s Inc. facility in Jackson, MI. I installed a newer faster machine there.
  • My recollection is that Saks used very little of the custom programming that TSI had coded and implemented at the time of the installation until Tom Caputo arrived eight years later. They mainly used the AdDept system as an easier way to key in expenses for their accounts payable and general ledger systems, which AdDept was designed to feed.
  • The phrase “the way that the department is organized,” brought back memories of the difficulties that I encountered while training at SFA. The ROP (i.e., newspaper ads) manager, in particular, was quite uncooperative in helping me understand how she worked. She evidently considered ROP her own little fiefdom, and suspected that revealing the knowledge of how her area worked might affect her job security. This was by no means the last time that I was faced with this sort of heel-dragging.

I remember a few other details about that initial installation:

SFA on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills.
  • I heard one interesting story related by an employee at Saks. The person at the headquarters who monitored sales by store had been very concerned because the Beverly Hills store in California had in the previous few months posted much lower sales than expected. A call to the store manager revealed a simple explanation: “The princess died.” Evidently a Saudi princess had been purchasing so much so regularly from the store that her untimely demise had dramatically deflated the the store’s total revenues.
  • Once or twice I spent consecutive days in Manhattan during the installation. Saks arranged for me to stay in a luxurious room at the nearby Sheraton. It was by far the nicest place in which I ever stayed for business.
  • I remember that on one occasion SFA had asked for a day of training, for which TSI charged $1,000. I discovered when I arrived in Manhattan that no one who actually used (or had any intention of using) the AdDept system was available to spend time with me. So, for several hours I “trained” three interns. For all of them English was a second language. One was named Oscar; I don’t remember the other names.

In subsequent years I was not a bit happy with the state of the installation at Saks. It made me realize that the success of our installations was largely dependent upon the strength of our liaison. The person needed to have the ability to grasp the intricacies of the system, a personality adaptable to working with both TSI and the users of the system, and the clout (direct or indirect) to deal with problems once they had been identified.

I very much wanted to use Saks as a reference account, but they used so little of the system that I was reluctant to mention them. I was frankly puzzled as to why it seemed so difficult to get anyone outside of the finance area interested in making the system work for them. The person with whom we worked the most was Jeanette Igesias1. She was conscientious enough, but she had neither the authority nor the inclination to involve any of the other areas more fully.

In 1998 the retail world was shocked to learn that Saks Holdings, Inc., the parent company, had been acquired by Proffitt’s Inc.2, a company that a few years earlier consisted of a set of stores in Tennessee that could have all fit easily inside the Saks store on Fifth Avenue. Almost immediately after the acquisition the parent company’s name was changed to Saks Inc.

Shortly thereafter I was in Birmingham, AL, to work with employees of the advertising department for the Parisian3, a chain of department stores that Proffitt’s Inc. had previously acquired. The corporate headquarters was also located in the same building. I happened to encounter the same Senior VP from Saks’ adverting department whom I had met in the early nineties. She was there to meet with people from what was then still called Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG). She knew that I had been frustrated with the pace of the installation at SFA. She even remarked that maybe under the new ownership they could get something done.

At about this time Ava John was hired by Saks. I think that she worked under Jeanette until Jeanette left SFA in 2002. Thereafter Ava was TSI’s principal contact for the part of the system used by the advertising business office, which included recording invoices that were uploaded to the corporate accounts payable system.

In 2008 Ava was arrested and charged with running an embezzlement scheme that netted her and her friends and relatives more than $680,000 over the course of five years. That may seem like a lot, but it was only a little over $10,000 per month, a tiny fraction of what Saks spent on advertising. I discovered a single mistake at another installation that was about as large as this.

At the time I did not hear about any of this, and, to the best of my knowledge, neither did any of TSI’s employees, but the scandal was reported in all three of New York’s major dailies. The Post‘s coverage can be read here. I was unable to discover anything posted on the Internet about the ultimate legal resolution. I also know nothing more about Ava.

In 2001 Tom Caputo, who had been TSI’s primary contact at Lord &Taylor5 for several years, was hired by Saks. He had a number of responsibilities in the advertising department, one of which was to oversee the AdDept installation. Tom’s office was not in the flagship store, but in an office building across the street. I met with him there several times. I cannot remember what projects we did for them, but I remember that Tom seemed frustrated with the situation there, or, more likely with what the world of retail had become in the twenty-first century.

Tom stayed at Saks until 2014, the same year that Denise Bessette and I decided to shut down TSI. I had one further contact with him. He asked me if I knew of any job openings that he would qualify for. I had to reply in the negative. By that time the demand for both people and software that was adept at administering the advertising for large national retailers was negligible. I felt sorry for my many acquaintances who were not able to disassociate themselves from this undertaking as smoothly as we did.

In 2007 Saks was spun off from the other department stores that were part of Saks Inc. The executive who had cobbled together this retail giant, R. Brad Martin, summarily abandoned the leadership of the rest of the stores to someone else and elected to run just SFA. His decision to remove the jewel from the crown was described in this New York Post. article.

In 2013 the company was purchased by the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest corporate enterprise in North America. The company had already purchased Tom Caputo’s previous employer, Lord & Taylor. One of the last projects that I worked on at TSI was helping with the migration of SFA’s AdDept system to the HBC computers located somewhere in Canada.

There are still many Saks Fifth Avenue stores. HBC opened a huge store in Toronto in 2014 and at least two other stores in Canada. Administration of all of the stores seems to be split between Toronto and New York.

1. Jeanette Iglesias’ LinkedIn page can be found here.

2. Much more about TSI’s relationship with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc. is available here.

3. Details about the Parisian installation of the AdDept system are provided here.

4. You can read about this major boo-boo here.

5. The history of the AdDept installation at Lord & Taylor is documented here.

1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Celebrity Sightings

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All of the famous people that I can remember spotting on my trips were on airplanes or in airports. I probably saw others that I either did not recognize or have forgotten about. After all I spent a lot of … Continue reading →

All of the famous people that I can remember spotting on my trips were on airplanes or in airports. I probably saw others that I either did not recognize or have forgotten about. After all I spent a lot of time in New York City, and I went to Robinsons-May in North Hollywood at least half a dozen times.

Sports celebrities: Once in a while I would recognize a famous person in an airport or on a plane. I only talked to two of them, and both conversations were very brief. Most of the celebrities were from the world of sports, or at least “sports entertainment”. Three of them were from ESPN, which is based in Bristol, CT. ESPN’s announcers flew out of Bradley International, the airport in Windsor Locks that I always used.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee was a passenger on one of my flights back to Hartford. She sat in coach. A few people recognized her. She had won three gold, one silver, and two bronze medals at four separate Olympic Games. Her events were the heptathlon and the long jump. Sports Illustrated for Women magazine voted her the Greatest Female Athlete of All-Time.

She was also a star basketball player at UCLA. In 2001 she was voted the greatest female collegiate athlete of the previous twenty-five years.

My recollection is that JJK was in the Hartford area for a charity event. I read about it in the Hartford Courant the next day.

On one of my trips (I think that it might have been on a side trip to visit my parents in Kansas City), I rode on the same plane twice in a row with the same person. That is, my first flight was from BDL to an airline’s hub airport and then from there to my destination. The person who was also on both flights was Chris “Boomer” Berman, a long-time studio host on ESPN.

I had seen Boomer on television many times. My favorite bit was when he adopted his “Swami” persona to give his predictions for NFL games.

I only saw Boomer getting on and off of the airplane. On both legs of our common journey he sat in first class while I was relegated to coach.

My all-time greatest thrill in sports viewing was when Desmond made this spectacular catch against Notre Dame.

I never purchased first class tickets, but because I flew so much, I occasionally was was upgraded. I almost never recognized anyone else in the comfortable seats. Once, however, I sat in first class with a famous sports personality. In fact, I sat right next to Desmond Howard, who was working at ESPN at the time, on a flight that terminated at Bradley. I was in the window seat; he had the aisle seat.

It took me a couple of minutes to recognize him. He did not look like a football player at all. He was only 5’10” and weighed much less than 200 pounds. His most recognizable feature was his broad smile. He had a portable DVD player with him. I was engrossed in a crossword puzzle or a magazine article or something. I had a strong feeling that I was sitting beside someone whom I had seen on television somewhere, but it was not until Desmond smiled at the flight attendant that I recognized him as the 1991 Heisman Trophy winner from my alma mater, the University of Michigan.

When we landed, Desmond quickly rose to exit. I noticed that he had left his DVD player in the magazine storage area on the rear of the seat in front of him. I retrieved it and gave it to him as he was waiting for the exit door to open. He gave me a big smile and thanked me.

The other ESPN personality whom I recognized was Jim Donnan1, the former head football coach at the University of Georgia. I enjoyed his commentary on college football teams before the games were televised. He was always seated behind a desk.

Donnan was the only “personality” whom I approached in an airport. He was dressed in a suit, but he also wore white sneakers. I asked him if he changed his shoes when he went on camera. He said that he wore the sneakers because dress shoes made his feet hurt, and they never showed his feet on camera.

In my experience celebrities generally flew in first class. It was therefore extremely surprising for me to sit across the aisle from Vin Baker2 on a flight back to Hartford. It was not a shock that he was going to Hartford. After all, he was by far the most famous person who ever played basketball at the University of Hartford. What was surprising was that he and his entourage were seated in the coach section. I had trouble finding a place to put my legs, and Vin Baker was 6’11” tall!

I don’t recall whether Baker was still playing in the NBA when he made this trip. His last year was 2006. So, I suspect that he was still playing.

On another occasion I sat next to another large man. This guy I did not immediately recognize, but I could tell from the papers that he was reading and annotating that he was on a recruiting trip as a coach for the University of Oklahoma football team. When I got home I used google to retrieve a list of the Sooners’ coaches. I quickly recognized Kevin Sumlin as the person whom I had sat beside. At the time he was the tight ends coach for Bob Stoops at OU.

In 2008 Sumlin was named the head coach at the University of Houston. He led the team to a 12-1 record and an appearance in a bowl game in 2011. Before that game he accepted the top job at Texas A&M.

In his first year at A&M the Aggies, with Johnny Manziel at quarterback, went 11-2 and beat Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. After that his teams, first at A&M and then at Arizona, seemed to get worse every year. His last game as a head coach was an ignominious 70-7 loss to Arizona State in 2020.

The other sports figure whom I recognized on an airplane was more famous than any of the others so far listed. I saved him for last because I only saw him for a few seconds. Also, he was only a “sports entertainment” star.

Many people know of two characters named Steve Austin—the Six Million Dollar Man and Stone Cold. I saw the second one on a flight from Birmingham, AL, to Atlanta. He was sitting in seat 1B, and he had a very large bandage on one of his knees. He apparently boarded early, which meant that absolutely everyone on the plane walked by him. I recognized him immediately, but I didn’t say anything. I assumed that he had received medical attention at one of the sports medicine centers in Birmingham.

I was quite familiar with a third Steve Austin, Stunning Steve Austin, a lithe young wrestler whom I had seen many times on televised WCW performances from Texas. At the time Stunning Steve had long blonde hair, was skinny for a wrestler, and was usually cast as a good guy. His finishing move was called the stunner. Unlike Stone Cold, he was well known for his speed and agility. Also, he never wore armor on his knees or crushed beer cans.

It was hard to fathom, but he was the same guy who later grew into the legendary Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Other celebrities: I saw two fairly famous political figures on airplanes. The first was my congresswoman, Nancy Johnson. One evening we were on the same flight from Washington National to Bradley. I was somewhat surprised by how short she was.

I don’t remember the other person’s name or even what his position was. My recollection was that he was head of the EPA, but I cannot find him on the list of administrators. I can picture him very clearly in my mind and even hear his voice.

Isn’t Joey’s cap dreamy?

On another trip to Hartford in 1999 or 2000 the first class section was largely populated by vivacious young men who were obviously neither salesmen nor investment bankers. They were, in fact, the boy band NSYNC, and at the time they were extremely popular with the teeny bopper set.

Halfway through the flight one of them, Joey Fatone, came back to the coach section and got down on one knee to talk with an elderly couple that was seated right behind me. They were evidently his grandparents.

My recollection is that NSYNC was going to some venue in the Hartford area to give a surprise performance. I don’t think that this gig was part of one of their tours. It might have even been a private gathering. There were no screaming girls waiting for them at the airport.

I did not see many people in wheelchairs in airports, and of that small number only one (to the best of my recollection) was traveling alone. I recognized him immediately as John Hockenberry. He has been on many shows on public TV. I saw him shopping at one of the stores at the Kansas City airport (KCI).

Seeing him made me wonder what he would do if he got hungry. The food concessions at KCI are on the second floor above the stores. Maybe there was an elevator he could use, but I don’t remember seeing one.

The other person of note whom I saw in my travels was not famous in her own right. The woman sitting next to me on a flight told me that her husband, Bill Haast, had held the record for being bit by a poisonous snake the most times. He was often flown to donate blood to bite victims because he had developed immunity to many varieties of snakes.

I had never heard of Bill Haast. When I looked him up I discovered that he was even more amazing than his wife’s depiction of him. His Wikipedia page is here.

He died in 2011 at the age of 100.

1. Jim Donnan seemed to disappear from ESPN early in the teens. I recently learned that in 2011 a Ponzi scheme in which he was a partner collapsed. His partner pleaded guilty, but Donnan was acquitted on all 41 counts in 2014. The government apparently could not prove that he knew about the fraud. Donnan took a job at the American Sports Network in 2014.

2. In 2021 Vin Baker is an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks. His path has been a rocky one. A Los Angeles Times article with the details has been posted here.

2021 September: Hurricane Ida and its Aftermath

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Water water everywhere. Continue reading →

The remnants of Hurricane Ida1 arrived in southern New England on Wednesday, September 1, 2001. It rained pretty heavily in Connecticut all evening and well into the morning. I was scheduled to play bridge on Thursday at 10AM. I heard on the radio of floods in Manchester and Vernon, about fifteen miles to the south of where we lived in Enfield. I could see no signs of damage in our yard, and there was no standing water in our yard.

The southeast side of the yard.

This last bit of news was a huge relief. A few weeks earlier a weird localized storm had deluged Enfield and Suffield for a couple of hours. The rest of Connecticut seemed unaffected. For the first time in the thirty-three and a half years that Sue and I had resided at 41 North St. water had somehow seeped into the old part2 of the basement. It was not exactly flooded, but there was a little water in some areas, notably the southeast corner, which was piled high with boxes and who knows what. The new part of the basement was completely dry. It took a few days, but the dehumidifier dried up the old side pretty well.

I also walked out into the yard. I saw several inches of water in the yard that faced North St. The water disappeared when the drain in the street was cleared, but the sod remained squishy.

The feeling of relief was short-lived. Before I left for the Hartford Bridge Club on Thursday morning I checked the basement. Both the old part and the new part were dry. After I finished playing, drove back home, ate lunch, took a nap, and went for a walk, I descended the staircase to the basement to empty the dehumidifier. I was aghast to see that there was considerable water in both halves of the basement.

The litter box was near the bikes.

I could see that the cats’ litter box was sitting in a little water in the new part of the basement. My very old cat Giacomo was resting on the broken treadmill, but he was very upset about how his paws had become wet when he needed to use the litter box. I sifted the litter box and moved it, the sifting tool, and the box of Clean Paws litter to a part of the old basement that was still dry. I also dried of His Highness’s paws and carried him to the stairway, which was dry.

Meanwhile Sue made some phone calls. Someone told her that the fire department would pump out the basement if the standing water was six or more inches deep. There was probably an inch or more on the new side, but it did not look like six inches to me.

The most comfortable shoes ever.

Sue also located her Craftsman Wet/Dry Vacuum, Sears’ version of what nearly everyone calls a Shop-Vac3. It had been lent to the Somersville Congregational Church. Sue made arrangements to pick it up in the afternoon. I located two long extension cords in my garage. Sue somehow got the vacuum down to the basement. Someone must have carried it down the hatchway stairs for her. I removed my socks and put on a pair of beat-up old sneakers with a few holes in them. I walked through the water to the new side and opened the hatch to try to encourage evaporation.

The GE dehumidifier did the job in the old basement.

Sue operated the machine. I made sure that the cords were kept out of the water. We filled the machine’s barrel4 with water, and I used a fourteen-quart bucket to transfer the water to an unused washing machine. We then put the washing machine on the last dot of the spin cycle and turned it on. This step was necessary because there are no drains in the basement. I had used this same technique to empty the dehumidifier.

Sue’s initial approach was to try to create a dry path between the base of the stairs and the washing machine so that we could avoid standing in water, a good conductor of electricity. She filled up a barrel in about twenty minutes. I emptied the barrel into washing machine. As we did this we noticed that the dry space that Sue had just cleared was covered with water again.

Our weapons against the sea of troubles: the washer, the wet/dry vac, and the fourteen-quart bucket.

I suggested that we should concentrate on the new side of the basement, which was consistently covered by more than an inch of water. We were both stunned that it t took less than a minute to fill a barrel. We then had to roll it up the ramp to the old side and empty it in the washer. We were standing in water once we left the ramp, but we were careful to keep the cords dry. We did one more barrel that way, and then stopped for supper. We planned to continue after we ate, but neither of us could summon the energy. We are, after all, old.

I walked this wet path on the old side from the door to the washing machine at least one hundred times. The cord running from the wall plug at left stayed dry.

At 2 o’clock on Friday morning I woke up and went downstairs to continue vacuuming the new side of the basement. I looped the extension cord over some boxes and cabling in the ceiling of the basement to eliminate the need to disconnect the extension cord from the machine every time. I concentrated on the new side and filled four barrels with water. It took me about thirty minutes, but there was no discernible effect on the level of the water. I went back to bed and slept like a dead man.

When I awoke again and checked the basement, both sides seemed worse. The water level on the new side was considerably higher, and the entire old side now had at least a filmy coating of water. I could see no dry spots. Where was the water coming from?5 I had to move the cats’ litter box upstairs. I was afraid to move the open box of litter because I could see that the bottom would fill out. I left it where it was and resolved to buy a new box at Shop-Rite.

I worked all day on the basement—not counting a few naps. In all I sucked up about forty-five barrels of water, which produced a notable difference in the level in the new side, about as much as I expected—an inch or so. I kept the hatch closed because I remembered that this was mosquito season, and I had heard warnings about West Nile virus. The mosquitoes that carry the virus like to breed in standing water.

Several avalanches blocked parts of the path from the ramp (bottom) to the hatch door (top). At this point there was at least three inches of water.

When I awoke on Saturday morning there was quite a bit more water than was there before. I checked the new side. The level was a little higher than when I started on Friday. So, more than an inch of water had seeped back in overnight. This was very discouraging. In fact, I decided to abandon vacuuming until the amount of water stabilized. I checked several times a day when I emptied the dehumidifier

I did figure out that I could move the cardboard box of cat litter upstairs if I tipped it sideways. Once I got it upstairs I split a large hold in the middle of what was now the top side. I could then scoop out dry litter with a ladle. In fact, I was able to salvage the entire contents of the box.

On Tuesday September 7 I decided that the water levels had finally stabilized. The dehumidifier seemed to be doing a good job of drying out the old part of the basement, and the newer side was no worse than on Monday evening. I therefore set to work. By 5 o’clock in the afternoon I had sucked up fifty barrels of water from my position on the ramp. I could definitely see the effect on the water level on the ramp itself.

I bought these shoes for the Hawaii trip in 1995, but I did not wear them for 26 years.

By this time I had refined my technique pretty well. I positioned the machine on the flat part of the wooden ramp with two wheels on the cement floor of the old basement. When the barrel had filled, I detached the top part of the vacuum and rolled the barrel the fifteen or twenty feet to the washer. I straddled the barrel, bent at the knees, held the handle of the bucket in my left hand, and placed my right fingertips in the indentation on the bucket. I then filled the bucket as much as possible and lifted it up to the washer. This method was the easiest on my back. It also minimized the splashing.

I could do the entire process in four or five minutes. I also saved a little time by only running the spin cycle on the washer every other time. The tub of the washer could hold a little more that two of the vacuum’s barrels. This spin cycle lasted longer than it took the vacuum to fill with water. So, I had a short break every other barrel while I waited for the washer.

On Wednesday I played bridge with Eric Vogel. Afterwards I sucked up another twenty barrels.

On Thursday I was up early enough to run the vacuum through another twenty barrels before playing bridge with Jeanne Striefler at 10 AM. Between rounds Lesley Meyers asked me what had happened to my elbow. I had no idea what she was talking about.

I did another twenty barrels when I arrived home.

Friday was an epic day. I filled and emptied thirty barrels in the morning. The water level near the end was low enough that I had to abandon the ramp for the afternoon session. I added the second extension cord and change the looping of the cords so that I could walk all the way to the hatch and still keep the cords dried.

I vacuumed up seven more barrels in the afternoon, but because the water was now not nearly as deep, it took as long as the morning session.

Most of my time in the afternoon was in two places—right before the hatch and about halfway between the ramp and the hatch. These areas, which were evidently low points, were frustrating because as soon as I would get an area dry, it would fill back up with water seeping in from areas that were filled with some kind of junk that belonged to the other resident of the house. I went back and forth between the two areas.

When I unplugged the vacuum’s cable from the extension cord, I noticed that the vacuum’s male plug was hot. I had already noticed that one of the two prongs was shorter than the other. I could now see that the short one consisted of two pieces of metal that had a slight gap between them. I reported this to Sue. She said that it was a definite fire hazard.

I went back the next two days to work on those two areas. On Saturday I was surprised to find the other cat, Bob, lying on the cement on the path in the new side. There were also a few cat prints near the puddle in the middle. I carried Bob to the staircase, and he easily made his way up. I then extracted about a half barrel.

This is the right setting on the washing machine.

Much less than that came out on Sunday. When I had finished, the new side was pretty much dry. I could see a few small puddles, but there was no way to get at them with the vacuum.

In the afternoon Sue and I were scheduled to go to a picnic for her cousins on the Locke side. As we were about to leave, she exclaimed, “Ooh! What did you do to your elbow?” I asked her what she meant. She drew my attention to a golf-ball-sized lump on the point of the left one. I had to twist my arm around to see it. I then recalled Lesley’s remark on Thursday. I must have already had it then.

The knob was twice this size on Sunday and Monday.

After the picnic Sue and I drove to the to Urgent Care clinics on Hazard Avenue. Neither was open.

On Monday morning, September 13, I drove to the PhysicianOne Urgent Care, the one on the north side of the street. I had been to this location once before, but I am pretty sure that in the interim it had closed and reopened under new management (Yale New Haven Hospital). I arrived at 10 o’clock, with hopes of being home by noon.

I did not know that one made appointments at Urgent Cares. The lady at the desk told me that it would be at least two hours until they could see me. Although most people were required to wait in their cars for a text message, she let me sit in the lobby, where there were only a few usable chairs. The rest of the chairs were Xed off to prevent them from being used. So, I did not get within ten feet of any other patients. That is a good thing because most of them were there to get Covid-19 tests or treatments. The delta variant was still quite active.

One Hispanic lady came in with two children. The boy was about 2’6″ tall. His sister was a little taller. The lady’s mother had a third infant in her arms. They never checked in or entered the treatment area. The lady seemed to be busy with some papers or something. Then the whole family suddenly departed. On the way out I noticed that she was pregnant again.

he physician’s assistant finally saw me after I had been there for nearly three and a half hours. I had spent the time proofreading and rewriting my blog entry concerning 9/11 (which is now posted here). She quickly diagnosed my problem as bursitis. Some other young ladies x-rayed my elbow and wrapped it for me. The P.A. then advised me that if the swelling had not gone down in a week that I should see a physician who specialized in joints. She provided me with the business card of one and a CD that contained my x-rays. .

  • The hatch.
  • Clean Paws litter carton.
  • Litter Box.

By Sunday, September 17, the old side was also nearly completely dry. I opened the hatch again to try to air out the new side of the basement. The dehumidifier on the old side shows a reading of 60 percent humidity. It was consistently at 75 or 80 when the water was at its highest.

The knob on my elbow had shrunk a lot. It never did hurt or hinder me in any significant way. I did not plan to call the doctor, but a couple of weeks later the bump was still significant. I tried to schedule an appointment with the doctor recommended by the Urgent Care clinic, but he was out of the office until the end of October, and he only saw patients in Rocky Hill and Farmington, which are both more than thirty minutes away. Fortunately, his receptionist referred me to a doctor who has office hours in Enfield.

My elbow sleeve.
Dr. Bontempo.

On Wednesday, October 6, I had an appointment with Dr. Nicholas Bontempo. He told me essentially what the P.A. had told me earlier. He gave me an elastic “sleeve” to wear over the elbow. It was much more comfortable, but it seemed to provide less compression. So, I applied the wrap over the sleeve.

They scheduled a follow-up appointment for me for November 3. I canceled on October 11. By then the bump was negligible.

Although there had never been standing water in the basement since we had moved to Enfield in 1988, the new (northern half) of the basement was flooded again in April of 2024. My efforts in dealing with that mess have been described here.

1. Hurricane Ida described a very unusual path. It first hit land in Venezuela. It then turned northwest, crossed the Caribbean Sea, a tip of Cuba on August 27, and the Gulf of Mexico before landing again near New Orleans on August 29 as a Category 4 hurricane.

From there it headed northeast, losing strength but dumping a huge quantities of rain everywhere it went. On September 1 it reached the New York City area and caused widespread flooding. It finally petered out in the maritime provinces of Canada.

2. In 2007 Sue and I began the process of refinancing the house and building an addition that was approximately the same size as the original house. A description of this activity was posted here. The addition also had a full basement, which could be reached through an external hatchway in the lawn north of the house. It could also be reached through a door in the northwest corner of the old basement.

3. I had never heard of a Shop-Vac until I ate lunch with Barbara Schane Jackson, TSI’s liaison for the installation at Hecht’s (described here). For some reason she mentioned that she needed to use one. I nodded sagely even though I had no idea what she was talking about. Johnson County in Kansas, where I grew up, is not exactly prone to flooding.

4. If there was ever an indication on the machine of Shop-Vac’s capacity, it had long since been lost. I estimated the size of the barrel at fifteen or sixteen gallons based on the number of fourteen-quart buckets required to empty it.

The new side of the basement was approximately fifty feet by twenty feet—one thousand square feet or 144,000 square inches. One gallon is equivalent to 231 cubic inches. So, each inch of water on the new side contained over 623 gallons. If the barrel contained fifteen gallons, about 41.5 barrels would be required to lower the water level by one inch (assuming no replacement).

5. An admittedly biased description of the process of flooding from the water table is posted here. Perhaps our contractors did not do a perfect job when they installed the new basement.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Clients: May Company

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As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central … Continue reading →

The G. Fox & Co. store in downtown Hartford.

As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central Connecticut was—by far—G. Fox, a traditional department store similar to Macy’s that was based in Hartford. They even had a store that was within walking distance of our new house in Enfield.1 I was well aware that G.Fox was part of the May Company and that the May Company was largely responsible for the development of the mall.

I had purchased a book from somewhere that contained marketing information on large retailers. In it I learned that the May Company, which had been in business since 1877, operated the following divisions in 1989:

  • G. Fox & Co. based in Hartford.
  • The Hecht Company with headquarters in Arlington, VA.
  • Filene’s, a former Federated division based in Boston.
  • Foley’s, a former Federated division based in Houston.
  • Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh.
  • Famous-Barr in St. Louis
  • J. W. Robinson Co. in Los Angeles.
  • May California in Los Angeles.
  • May D&F in Denver.
  • May Ohio in Cleveland.
  • Lord & Taylor in New York.
  • Meier & Frank in Portland, OR.
  • Venture, a chain of discount stores based in O’Fallon, MO.
  • Payless, a chain of shoe stores based in Miami.

That’s fourteen independently run divisions that were, except for maybe the last one or two, good prospects for the AdDept system. I figured that if we could persuade the parent company to commit to using AdDept in all of its divisions, TSI would be set for life. Maybe they would even buy us! That was the way that small software companies thought (and dreamed) in the late eighties.

In fact, the May Company during that period was busy acquiring other department stores, and that attitude put a lot of stress on the advertising departments of the divisions that acquired the new stores. There is no doubt that the May Company’s acquisition of thirteen Thalhimer’s stores in 1992 was the impetus for Hecht’s to purchase the AdDept system that year.2 Hecht’s advertising department had been using a PC-based system for producing corporate reports. It was completely incapable of handling the extra load. Similarly, when May D&F was folded into Foley’s in 1993, the Houston division suddenly was facing a greatly increased workload. That caused them to call TSI for help, and we installed an AdDept system for them.3 Capacity was never an issue for AdDept; we always proposed hardware near the lowest end of the available AS/400 models. If a client outgrew its hardware, it could migrate to a more powerful model.

Filene’s store in Boston.

In 1993 G. Fox was absorbed by the Filene’s division. Having a pretty good idea of the problems that this would cause for the advertising department of Filene’s, we tried to interest them in using AdDept. However, for reasons that I have never completely understood, we were unable to get our foot in that door for many years. Filene’s advertising department never took advantage of a significant portion of the system productively enough that we were able to use them as a reference.4

Instead, our third May Company installation was at Lord & Taylor5, where I learned that L&T did not play by the same rules as the other divisions. In some ways that caused headaches; in other ways it was delightful.

Doug Pease: In 1993 Sue and I hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. One of the primary reasons that we selected him was because he had formerly worked in G. Fox’s advertising department in Hartford. He was looking for a job because the G. Fox stores had been converted to the Filene’s logo, and the advertising for those stores was planned and purchased from the office in Boston. Doug was quite familiar with the work flow of an advertising department that was similar to the ones that TSI was targeting, and he also had some contacts in the industry. Our hope was that he could grab the brass ring of the May Company for us while I was busy trying to get the systems for the three divisions—and a few other retailers—that we had sold up and running.

This was a very important time for TSI. My image of those days resembles a hockey stick. Until that time TSI had experienced rather flat earnings. We were basically just getting by. By contrast, in the last seven years of the twentieth century we had as much work as we could handle, and our financial statements were much better.

Unfortunately, I have almost no notes for that entire period. I talked with Doug on a regular basis, but my focus was on the current installations. I depended on him to establish a relationship with prospective customers. As soon as we hired him we did a mailing to prospective customers, and Doug took to the phones. He talked with several people at the May Company.

The main liaison person between the May Company and the advertising departments of its divisions was named Fred Christen. I never heard anyone say a bad word about him. He had, of course, heard about our work at our three installations, and he seemed to be impressed.

I am pretty sure that we had another “guardian angel” at the corporate headquarters. I often seemed to be at an advertising department at a division at the same time as a corporate auditor whose first name was Linus. His job was to assess the way that divisions were reporting their advertising expenses and income from co-op programs for their vendors. He seemed to be impressed with the way that AdDept handled these things.

May D&F store in Denver.

Fred Christen left the May Company shortly after Doug arrived at TSI. I heard that Fred left to manage his family’s business. Doug established a relationship with Fred’s successor, Dennis Wallace. I am pretty sure that Doug made at least one trip to St. Louis, but I don’t remember the details. At any rate, at some point the May Company decided that AdDept should be installed in all of the department store divisions. At that point Robinsons and May California had merged, May D&F had been folded into Foley’s, Kaufmann’s had taken over the May Ohio stores6, and the May Company had divested the Venture stores. So, we learned about five new clients in one swell foop: Famous-Barr7, Filene’s, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Kaufmann’s.

In retrospect I find it rather incredible that I have so little recollection of the details of how or when this decision came about. It was definitely a momentous occasion for TSI, but I remember no fanfare or celebration at all. I don’t think that the deal was finalized until 1996 or 1997. In the interim I installed quite a few AdDept systems at other retailers.

Employees at the May Company treated us fairly from day one right up until the time that the company was purchased by Federated in 2006. Most of TSI’s dealings with the May Company were at the division level. The following is a summary of my notes of our dealings with the corporate entity after all of the systems had been installed.

Notes: The first note that I have is dated October 18, 1999. It makes reference to a “sales tax fiasco”. I think that this must be about whether it was necessary to charge sales tax on our software and services. Because all of our AdDept clients were in other states, we were generally able to avoid doing so. However, there is an Excel file with a similar date that lists three invoices for Robinsons-May, which was in California, and three for Filene’s, which was in Massachusetts. Massachusetts and Connecticut had an agreement by which each collected taxes for the other. So, we definitely needed to charge Filene’s tax.

We also had a problem with California. TSI’s second accountant, whose name I do not remember, was hired in the early days of the AdDept system. She advised us to register with every state in which we had clients. This was poor advice, and we changed accountants shortly after that. However, there is no way to take back a company’s registration.

I vaguely remember an issue from several years earlier that involved an arrangement that my partner (and later wife) Sue Comparetto had made with Gottschalks, another store in California. In this case, the invoices were probably sent to St. Louis and paid by the May Company. We had never registered in Missouri, and we never paid sales tax there.

On January 2 of 2000 I wrote the following email to my other partner, Denise Bessette:

I think that we need to get something established as soon as possible with the May Co. to get compensated for your time and mine. Do you have any suggestions? I also think that it might be time for one or both of us of us to go to St. Louis and talk turkey with them. I am serious about this. I really am tired of not knowing where we stand.

I found a six-page document dated February 7, 2001. It concerned the specs for a Planning System Interface. Evidently they had an application called WD that they wanted to feed. They provided me with a document describing the system that had at least sixty-seven pages. Evidently we had been talking about this for at least two years. The document lists my questions and their incredibly vague responses. No one could conceivably quote an interface based on the responses that we received. I only vaguely remember this whole process. “WD” sounds familiar, but I am pretty certain that we never quoted it, much less coded it.

Denise and I went to visit the May Company together, but I think that it was in 2002. I went to St. Louis in 2001 to install AdDept for use by Filene’s on an AS/400 in the Midwest Data Center. I stayed in the Adam’s Mark Hotel. I did not like where they told me to stay. This is what I wrote to Denise.

My hotel room in St. Louis is absurd. It is a huge suite. I located a microwave and refrigerator inside what looked like a chest of some kind. For some reason it is much easier to find these two features in places where it is impossible to buy food (because I am downtown). The bathroom is right by the door, about a quarter mile from the bed. There are two TV sets, but no Jacuzzi, at least not in the room. The thermostat is out of whack. You have to set it to nearly 80 to keep the room from being frigid. I fear that they may not offer free breakfast here. They did not mention anything when I checked in.

It is supposed to rain all day here. There may even be thunderstorms. I was too lazy to run on Sunday. I will probably regret it today.

I hope that the May Co. has a comfortable nap room. I have become quite accustomed to the two-hour post-breakfast naps.

I think that the guy on the phone is Dennis Wallace. I don’t recognize the other two.

I remember that room and the rain much better than I remember what I did at the May Company. On subsequent visits I stayed at a nearby Hampton Inn. Incidentally, more than two decades later I still take lots of naps.

I found an agenda for a meeting with the May Company dated August of 2002. This must be the trip that Denise and I took together. Here it is:

  1. TSI
    1. People
    2. History
      1. Founded in 1979.
      2. Advertising in 1981
      3. Retail in 1988.
      4. First May division (Hecht’s) in 1991
    3. Custom programming
      1. Good at diagnosis.
      2. Incredibly efficient system of delivering custom code using BASIC.
      3. Two principles:
        1. There should be one version of the truth;
        2. Everyone should be able to take advantage of work done by others.
      4. People capable of completing difficult projects within parameters.
  2. AdDept
    1. Intent
      1. All administrative aspects.
      2. All media.
      3. Easily customizable.
      4. Require a minimum of local support — AS/400.
    2. Retail advertising is difficult.
      1. All the difficulties of retail — stores, merchants, accounting, A/P, and co-op
      2. All the difficulties of advertising
        1. Multiple media, each with almost completely different structure
        2. Media scheduling, production scheduling, estimating, loan room, etc.
    3. System design
      1. Scheduling:
        1. Every media represented in the ad file.
        2. Open on-line database works best when each person updates the system with information as soon as it is available.
        3. One main program, many well-normalized files.
        4. History of significant changes:
          • Production.
          • Financial.
      2. Financial:
        1. One main set of files (header and detail).
        2. Many front ends with supporting detail files.
        3. Two months, three amounts.
        4. Interfaces
      3. Cost accounting (data warehouse)
        1. Detail at the department level using May Company rules.
        2. Can also be used for other purposes:
          • Planning
          • Store-level analysis
      4. Add-ons
        1. Productivity
        2. Competitors
        3. Loan room inventory and transactions
        4. Photo studio
  3. May future plans
    1. Filene’s
    2. Uniformity
    3. Best practices
  4. Technology
    1. Explain CFINT
    2. Explain performance of 5250 v. browser-based
    3. Why “web-facing” doesn’t help
    4. Explain V5
      1. BASIC compiler.
        1. Should we convert to C?
        2. Should we convert to Net.Data?
        3. Should we convert to WAS/Java?
        4. Should we look to Wintel?
      2. Can’t save back very far.
      3. InfoPrint server allows output as .pdf files.
    5. Browser-based programming requires VPN or the equivalent for support.
  5. Other things
    1. AxN.
    2. Peggy Southworth labels.
  6. What else?

Some of this has fled my memory. I do remember that CFINT was a program that regulated performance. Prior to version 5 of the operating system the users could allocate priorities for jobs between “interactive” jobs (5250 sessions on terminals or PCs) and “batch” jobs (everything else, including jobs that relied on something between themselves and the operating system, such as a Java server). IBM wanted to show that the Java jobs had good performance. To do so it slowed down all jobs that were running as interactive. Nothing that IBM had previously done was as hated as this tactic.

I also remember the Peggy Southworth labels. Every division was required to create these labels for each print media job in a precisely specified format. We wrote a program for one of the divisions to do this for them.

The notes indicate that Denise and I met with Rob Cole and Mike Henry. I only vaguely remember them. I have a more vivid memory of Lew Allder, who was a Vice President in the IT department. He showed us around the machine room and assured us that the small size of our organization was not an issue with him or anyone else at the May Company. Everyone with whom we talked was very supportive of what we had done and what we were planning for the future.

Don’t take the bridge across the river.

I also remember one incident that occurred when we were driving either from or to Lambert, the St. Louis airport. I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves on the bridge that goes across the river to East St. Louis, IL. I had no interest in taking a tour of that town. When there was a break in the traffic I jerked the rental car’s steering wheel to the left, made a clean U-turn and headed back to St. Louis. I think that this maneuver shocked Denise, at least a little.

I tried to find information on what became of the May Company employees mentioned in this entry. However, I was not able to find any information on the Internet about most of them. After a good bit of digging I found Dennis Wallace’s LinkedIn page, which is here. In 2022 he appeared to be working for a company in Houston that provides technical assistance to the hospitality industry.

1. All right, I never actually walked to G. Fox’s store in Enfield Square mall, but I could have.

2. The Hecht’s installation is described here.

3. The account of the installation for Foley’s is provided here.

4. The troubled AdDept installation at Filene’s has been documented here.

5. The Lord & Taylor installation is described here.

6. Doug and I made a strong pitch to Debra Edwards at May Ohio, but the division was eliminated before we could close the deal. That “whiff” is described here.

7. I think that Famous-Barr may have already committed to getting AdDept before Doug arrived on the scene, but their decision was probably made because of the May Company’s commitment to the project. The installation at Famous-Barr is described here.