2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Mike

People have often asked me whether I was retired, and, if so, for how long. I have usually told them that I never exactly decided to retire. In 2014, however, TSI’s clients made it clear to me that it was time for me to quit.

That year was definitely a turning point in my own life. I did not rate the events and decisions of the early months of that year as a genuine crisis—unlike the four others that have been detailed in this project. During the previous several years I had seen the trends developing, I had explored every alternative that I could think of, and my financial position was good, at least in comparison with its state before the late nineties.

By late 2013 Denise Bessette, my partner, had moved from Stafford, CT, to Cape Cod. She was working from home with occasional trips to East Windsor. We could communicate by email, telephone, or through messaging on the AS/400. During this period I was 65 years old; Denise was ten years younger.

The cause: The precipitating event was a letter received in late 2013 from one of our contacts at Dick’s Sporting Goods¹, a long-time user of both AdDept and A^xN. I cannot find a copy of the letter, but it was basically an announcement that Dick’s had contracted with a media buying service to schedule and purchase its newspaper ads.

Other AdDept users had previously made similar decisions.² At RadioShack (discussed in detail here) the decision coincided with dropping the use of the AdDept system entirely. The advertising department there used it to place, manage, and pay for advertising in hundreds of papers, but it never used many of the other modules. Nevertheless, one of the employees most closely involved confided to me a few months after the outsourcing that she thought that they might have made a mistake.

A few years later Belk (described here) outsourced its newspaper buying. Unlike RadioShack, Belk by that time was using AdDept for a very large number of tasks besides scheduling and purchasing newspaper ads. Denise Podavini, the financial manager for advertising, never considered dropping AdDept. Moreover, when I explained to her that TSI would be losing a large source of revenue from Belk’s newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN³, she voluntarily authorized TSI to increase the maintenance charge to cover the difference. That reaction astounded me.

By 2013 most of TSI’s department store clients had been absorbed by Macy’s, which had then consolidated into one office in New York City. At that point that office was using neither AdDept not A^xN. Dick’s outsourcing would have little effect on the income from AdDept. It might actually have given us a custom programming assignment or two. However, it would certainly mean the loss of all the revenue from Dick’s papers that had subscribed to A^xN. There were over a hundred of them, and losing them would cost us thousands of dollars every month.

When we received the news from Dick’s my immediate evaluation was that this was the death knell for TSI. Denise was quite surprised at my reaction. We had worked together for thirty years, many of which were quite lean, and she had never seen me give up when the company faced a challenge. She spent a week or two manipulating possible projections on spreadsheets, but she finally came to the same conclusion that I had.

The plan: Denise and I met several times after working hours or out of the office in order to come up with a plan that treated our employees, Jason Dean and Ashley Elliott, our remaining clients, our vendors, and ourselves fairly. We began by making a list of things that we certainly needed to resolve:

A termination date for A^xN and support for AdDept.
A plan for the employees.
Taxes and other governmental issues.
Our lease for 7B Pasco Dr.
Letters to AdDept clients.
Notifications to vendors.
Disposition of assets.

We scheduled an appointment with our accountant, Tom Rathbun. As it happened, he was planning to retire. So, our news pretty much coincided with his plans. He provided us with a list of items that we needed to do to assure that we fulfilled our obligations to the government. We decided to terminate A^xN and software support for the AdDept product on July 31. That would provide four months to whittle down the accounts receivable and accounts payable for the final closing of the books on November 30, 2014.

The employees: Even before we met with Tom, Denise and I had decided to let the employees work until March 31 or to terminate as of January 31 and receive a four-week severance package. They both took the severance option. Denise had expected both of them to stay, but I was not too surprised when they resigned. I was amenable to either option. The severance option was actually a little better for TSI. We saved money on payroll, and it offered an immediate opportunity to sell more of the office equipment sooner.

We wrote letters of recommendation for both employees. Here is the one that Denise wrote for Jason Dean:

To Whom It May Concern,
TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., is a small company that has provided intricate and extensive software systems to businesses large and small since 1980. Jason Dean joined our staff on October 15, 2007 as a programmer analyst and quickly became an integral member of our programming and support team. In 2010 he was promoted to lead programmer analyst. Jason worked on the development of new systems and the modification of existing systems in free-form RPGLE, SQL, BASIC and CL on IBM midrange business systems. Development was focused on a comprehensive data base system for retail advertising clients. His responsibilities also included program testing and documentation, client support, and a myriad of in-house support tasks.
Jason’s performance on the job has been uniformly excellent. He is well-organized and has extremely high standards for the quality of work produced. You can depend on him to consistently deliver sophisticated applications that meet those standards, and within or well in advance of project deadlines. He quickly and easily comprehends new strategies and technologies. He is an outstanding quality control tester. His methods steadily test both the functionality and logic of the program with robust data sets. His diligence has called out a number of subtle issues during the development cycle. Jason also had the opportunity to train and impart those standards on a new programmer, the results of which were outstanding.
Jason’s ability to handle client support is impressive. He is very adept at posing the necessary questions to extract information required to resolve client issues. He consistently maintains a positive, professional and helpful attitude even when dealing with a difficult caller. He won consistent praise from our clients.
Jason’s termination had nothing to do with his job performance. Business conditions necessitated that we take steps to close the business.
I unhesitatingly and without qualification recommend Jason Dean for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about his work at TSI. I can be reached at Denise_Bessette@cox.net or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 508 760-2847 (home).

The letter that I wrote for Ashley was posted here.

The clients: I composed a short letter to the AdDept clients and mailed it on February 28, 2024, at which point I was the only person left in the office. Here is the text:

Denise Bessette and I have worked together for almost three decades. During this time we have taken great pride in our ability to provide first-class software and service to our clients at a reasonable price and first-class treatment of our employees and vendors. We have changed the business radically a few times to respond to various circumstances, but we have never sacrificed our basic principles.
Recent events now necessitate another change, one that we definitely regret. Two factors have made it impossible for us to continue doing business in the way that we have in the past. The first is the consolidation of the retail business. In one case thirteen of our installations collapsed into one and then, ultimately, none. The second is the trend toward outsourcing. The latter has led to the collapse of our Internet insertion-order business, on which we have come to rely. We were already running a very lean operation. There is nothing left to cut.
Therefore, we both feel that we have no choice but to shut down TSI as of July 31, 2014. We will do our best to provide the very best support of the AdDept system’s day-to-day operations through that date and even implement whatever programming changes are required on the same basis that we always have. We are definitely willing to act as consultants to help design a transitional process and to fill whatever other roles you feel are appropriate. If you wish to use AdDept beyond the above date, you are, of course, free to do so, and if you want one of us to provide some kind of support, it may be possible to make arrangements on an individual basis.
We both think that TSI has had a great run. We wish that it could continue forever because we really have enjoyed working with our clients to provide a system that provided them with what they needed to prosper.
Best wishes for the future.

As far as I know, no one asked for help designing a transition process. Some users may well have asked Denise for help. I have occasionally wondered how they coped with the situation.

Hundreds of papers received the orders for ads like these through AdDept and AxN.

After receiving the letter someone from Dick’s called us to assure us that they had not intended to drop the AdDept system. We explained that the problem was not AdDept; it was the imminent loss of revenue from the many newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN. Evidently no one at Dick’s had ever considered this ramification.

I have no information about how long any of the companies that were still using AdDept in 2014 continued to use it after July 31.

I did not write to any of the newspapers, but I did stop billing them for the subscriptions to A^xN after July 31. I was still receiving checks from a few of them through November. At that point I wrote off everything that was outstanding.

The lease: We had arranged with our landlord, Rene Dupuis (introduced here), to stay in his company’s building until July 31. Because a lot of equipment and furniture remained in the office in the middle of July, I asked Rene if we (i.e., I) could stay one more month. He said that because TSI had been an ideal tenant for such a long time, he was happy to accommodate us. Our section of the building was empty by August 31.

During the last month or two Rene brought one or two people up to TSI’s office to examine the property. I do not remember the name of the company that ended up renting it, but the lease was signed while I was still working there.The company even purchased TSI’s antiquated telephone system for $500.

Tax issues: TSI had been paying sales or use taxes to several jurisdictions. I found a copy of the Letter of Good Standing signed by a machine for Deborah Chandler, the Tax Collection Supervisor of the Compliance Support Unit. It stated that TSI owed the state of Connecticut nothing.

I also found a copy of a letter that I wrote to the state of Mississippi that stated that we had done no business there and that TSI was closing. No one replied to the letter.

I was not able to follow all of the dealings with the IRS, but in June of 2015 I definitely received two checks with income tax refunds for payments that TSI had previously made.

Tom provided me with all of the forms that I needed to file with state and federal agencies. None of them were difficult or time-consuming.

Furniture and equipment. I wore many hats in my time working at TSI. The most ill-fitting was probably the last one: used furniture salesman. I took photos of everything and placed ads on Craig’s List. To my great surprise I rapidly disposed of nearly everything. I probably should have charged more, but we had bought almost all of it second-hand many years earlier.

I found a list of the major items that I sold and their prices:

The desk in my office with one of the phone units.

Item	Price
Conference table	80
Black cabinet	50
Kitchen table, chairs	80
Three cabinets	133
Sales office desk	25
Twelve side chairs	125
Four trash cans	2
Cabinet	40
Black desk	25
Cubicles	100
Denise’s desk	25
Phone system	500
4-drawer cabinet	125

The biggest coup, aside from the sale of the telephone system, was the fact that I was able to get rid of the five-foot high⁴ dividers that were used to form cubicles. I was thrilled when a man whose wife (or maybe mother) was opening a dance studio in Windsor Locks almost directly across the Connecticut River from TSI’s office in East Windsor offered me $150 for all of the hardware. On a Saturday he drove a pickup towing a very long and flat trailer to the office. He and another fellow came upstairs, disassembled the cubicles, carried the individual sections down the stairs, and strapped them to the trailer. He thought that he got a bargain. I was afraid that I would end up needing to pay someone to take the dividers away.

The total that I received was $1,310, which I split with Denise.

I also remember giving out two very large plants to one of the guys who purchased the trash cans and some other mundane things. He took the plants that Eileen Sheehan-Willett had nursed from near-fatal neglect to monstrosities and put them in his truck. He was thoughtful enough to wait until he was out of sight to throw out the plants and save the pots.

I found the following notes in an Excel spreadsheet called equipment.xls:

The 515 server was sold to Saks Inc. for $2500 on 7/31/14.
The 270 server, color printer, Dell PC, scanner, and backup hub were taken by Mike on 7/31/14. The 270 will be scrapped when the company is closed. It has no market value.
The black & white laser printer was taken by Denise on 7/31/14.
Fax machine and copier were donated to a local church on 7/31/14.
Two dot matrix printers with no market value were donated to the New England Bridge Conference on 8/31/14.
All other equipment was scrapped on or about 7/31/14.

The 270 and 515 were iSeries (i.e., AS/400) models. The 270 and the other equipment were transported to our house at the end of August (not July) in a truck that my wife Sue borrowed from her friend and bridge partner, Jan Bailey.⁵ The equipment resided in my office for a few months until TSI’s books were closed, and I was pretty sure that I would not need the server. It, the backup hub, a twinax display, and a snake’s nest of cables have rested peacefully in the basement and are still there in 2024. The color printer, which supported two-sided printing, the scanner, and the PC lasted for quite a few years before they were scrapped or recycled somewhere.

A few other things made their way to our house. The kitchen at 7B had a microwave and a small refrigerator. The former is still in use in 2024. The latter was given to David Basch, the grandson of another of Sue’s bridge partners, in exchange for doing the heavy lifting in the move. A small shelf and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase now live in my office at the house in Enfield. A good many smaller items also made the journey back to Enfield.

The largest item that I neither sold nor brought back to Enfield was the Uninterruptible Power Supplu (UPS). The UPS was a large battery with outlets for several power cables. Our AS/400 and a few other devices were attached to it. The UPS could provide enough electricity to last for a few hours.

Power failures are not unknown in Connecticut. Denise and I discussed purchasing a generator, but we could never justify the expense. We only experienced a couple of power failures in the nearly fourteen years that TSI’s headquarters was in East Windsor, and the UPS was sufficient to to get us through them.

The UPS was very heavy. I carried it out to my car and transported it to a nearby dumpster. It was all that I could do to lift it to shoulder height and drop it in.

The one-man show: From February through August I drove into East Windsor every morning. Every evening I drove back to Enfield. When I arrived at work I checked to make sure that all the equipment was working. I encountered absolutely no hardware problems. Once a month I sent out invoices for software support and for A^xN subscriptions. I usually ate lunch in the office by myself.

The highlight of the day was when the mail came. If there were any checks, I processed them in our home-grown accounts receivable system and then deposited them in the bank. I was often amazed that newspapers that I was fairly certain were no longer using A^xN continued to pay for the service. I attributed this to the fact that so many newspapers had outsourced their processing of accounts payable to an outside service. TSI’s bills seemed to slip through the cracks of the approval process.

I spent most of the rest of my days sitting at the PC. I already had a pretty good command of HTML, JavaScript, php and MySQL. I did a lot of work on the NEBridge.org website, and it was also during this period that I got the idea of maintaining a database of ACBL members who resided in District 25 (New England). Allan Clamage (introduced here), who served as the editor of the website, told me how to download roster files from the ACBL and set it up so that I had the authority to do so. The details of the database are described here.

The other major project that I worked on was my historical novel about Pope Benedict IX. The story of its genesis and why it was posted on Wavada.org but was never at Barnes & Noble is described in some detail here.

In some ways I wished that I had been a history major and gotten a PhD. Then I probably would have found someone with whom I could discuss my ideas about eleventh-century papal politics. On the other hand, I should remember that I only became interested in the popes in the twenty-first century, and I finished grad school in the seventies. Moreover, my interest in the eleventh century was a byproduct of a rather random introduction to a somewhat obscure ninth-century pope named Formosus.

I did not take a vacation in 2014, but I did go to quite a few bridge tournaments. This was the period when I implemented a system of posting photographs of winners of regional events on NEBridge.org webpages. I called those pages “Winners Boards” because the background that I used looked like boards. I kept that feature up through 2021.

At about the same time I also began sending emails promoting the regional tournaments in New England. At first I composed the emails myself and sent them through my Wavada.org account. When I got blacklisted as a spammer, Bob Bertoni came to my rescue. That harrowing situation was described here.

The regional tournaments in 2014 were the first to include meetings of a committee that was known as “The B’s Needs”. It was initially chaired by Ausra Geaski, the president of the district. I attended every meeting.

The initial purpose of the committee was to recommend ways to make the tournaments more enjoyable for Flight B players, those with too many points to play in the “Gold Rush” events that were limited to less than 750 masterpoints. These people found themselves up against people with many thousands of points and years of experience. It was not generally a pleasant experience.

Over the next few years the committee produced a large number of suggestions for making the tournaments more attractive to B players and to everyone else. Many of them were implemented, and there is very little doubt that they had, for the most part, a profoundly positive effect on the tournaments. I took great pride in what we did as a group and what I personally implemented. This activity provided a purpose to my life at a time when I really needed one. It made me feel that I was using my time and skills to make life more enjoyable for people who shared one of my principal interests. Most of my contributions were cast aside done in the post-Pandemic environment, and it saddens me greatly.

I found some materials about this committee. I have posted Ausra’s minutes of the meetings in Newton, MA, in January (here), Cromwell, CT, in February (here), and Nashua, NH, in September (here). I have also posted here the notes that Allan wrote up about the groups first few ideas.

The version with a possible career in mining was the best.

While I was occupied with closing down TSI Sue had knee-replacement surgery on both legs. Afterwards she spent several days getting rehabilitated at Suffield House. I went to see her every evening. On one evening my friend Tom Corcoran joined us, and we played a game of Careers. Sue had to remind me of this event while I was in the process of writing this entry.

September.through December: For the last three months I ran what was left of TSI from my office at the house. I still received payments from newspapers almost right up to when I closed the books for good at the end of November.

I still had some communications with Tom Rathbun in December of 2014, but after that TSI has been nothing but a source of incredible memories. The process of closing it down was somewhat complicated, but I don’t remember making any serious mistakes.

1. Details of the installations at Dick’s Sporting Goods have been posted here.

2. I am not sure why these companies made the decisions. It is possible that the media buying services claimed that the fact that they represented several large advertisers would give them more clout in negotiating with newspapers. They may also have been able to claim more expertise in choosing between papers in the few markets that had more than one.

3. In theory it would have been possible for TSI to construct an interface that could be used by media buying services. We had written many interfaces to both send and receive records in other modules. However, the information that A^xN required from AdDept contained four different types of records: headers for ads, special instructions at the header level, individual ads, and special instructions for individual ads. Could we persuade the buying service to send records in that format? I considered it unlikely in the extreme even if we did not charge them for using the service. Even if they were persuaded, we would have had to devise foolproof ways of dealing with errors in their files. Moreover, the process of fixing errors would need to be very efficient. Time could be of the essence. It appeared to me to be a nightmarish situation.

4. I am pretty sure about the height because I remember being just barely able to kick my right foot up and rest my ankle on the top of one to stretch my quads before running.

5. Jan Bailey, Ginny Basch, and Sue were regular participants in an unsanctioned bridge game that was held on Thursday evenings in Somers.

2021 The Rebirth of the Simsbury Bridge Club: Part 2

Posted on November 8, 2021 by Mike

SBC 2.1. Continue reading →

Wednesday evening, March 11, 2020, was the date of the last game of the Simsbury Bridge Club at Eno Hall before the shutdown necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Fred Gagnon played with my wife Sue. He regaled us with the story of how the week before he had played an event in Colorado Springs¹ that Colorado’s “patient zero” also attended. He said, quite correctly, that he was very lucky that he had not played against her or in any other way associated with her. In those very early days the treatment methodologies were mostly guesswork. Dozens of other bridge players were not as fortunate as Fred.

At the time my wife Sue and I were scheduled to start a riverboat cruise on the Danube River² the next week. We had heard that a few people had already canceled, and we half-jokingly asked Fred if he wanted to sign up.

The club’s usual director, Ken Leopold, could not attend on March 11. Margie Garilli substituted for him. As a result I ended up with all of the club’s bridge equipment during the pandemic.

Unless you were lucky enough to be stuck in New Zealand, you probably did not give much thought to face-to-face bridge for the next year or so. A few clubs in Florida reopened rather quickly, but some of them had to close because of transmission of the virus.

The Hartford Bridge Club resumed play on June 15, 2021. Several people asked me when the SBC was going to reopen. I told them that it was up to Ken, who was the director and proprietor. This was his response:

I’d like to see how live playing goes at HBC for a while. When we restart (probably sometime in July), I’m going to ask people to sign up on Mondays to see if we have enough people for a game. I think people should be vaccinated to play.

July was a bad month for Ken, and so I was not too surprised to receive on August 3 this email from Sally Kirtley, who had been the director before Ken took over in Simsbury and who had directed regularly for the Hartford Bridge Club before and during the pandemic:

I got an email from Eno that they are accepting reservations starting in the fall. I forwarded it to Ken, who responded that he is not going to be able to run it this fall. I don’t know if that means that he won’t be playing at all either. Just wondering if you think that it makes any sense for me to try to start it up again? Do you think that we will get enough players? Will you play if we start up again?

I replied that I definitely would play, but I thought that we should try to gauge how much interest people had in the game. I brought my mailing list (described in Part 1, which is posted here) up to date, and sent an email indicating that Sally and I were hoping to get the game going again in September. I asked people to respond if they thought that they would play, and I received over forty positive responses. Quite a few players indicated that they would play often.

The next email that I received from Sally on August 14 included the following:

I will see how quickly we can get into the space, and will definitely ask if we can require vaccinations – it being a public building, I don’t know. As a private club, we certainly could, but I will make sure.
As to masks, I think that we need to listen to the experts at the time. I am personally okay with people not masking if they are vaccinated, but I do think that they are probably a good idea.
I am also planning a vacation in October and will be gone 10/13.

Jeanne Striefler, a long-time member of the Simsbury Club reported to me that masks were definitely required in public buildings in Simsbury with or without vaccinations. Moreover, other groups that used public facilities had had problems with attempting to require vaccinations. I did not want to be involved in something that caused even one person to get Covid-19. I was therefore adamant that we require vaccinations.

The missive from Sally dated August 23 contained great news.

The town has reserved the room for us starting September 9. As of right now, masks are required in town buildings. We can require vaccinations.

I wasn’t exactly sure how we could check for vaccinations, but I thought that we should agree on a schedule and publish it as soon as possible. We had pretty much decided on starting play on September 15 when I received this email from Sally on August 27:

Eno Hall says we can’t require vaccinations on town property. I think that means a no-go for us – unless we just ignore them and request proof of vaccinations anyway?

So, I was forced to send out an email to everyone on my list that we would not start in September. Here was the text:

I wrote in the last email: “I am assuming that Eno Hall will allow us to verify that all players have been fully vaccinated. I, for one, will not play in a game that does not do this.”
Unfortunately, my assumption was wrong. The people who run Eno Hall will NOT permit us to check that all players have been vaccinated. Under those circumstances Sally and I are not willing to run the game. The current form of the disease is extremely contagious; one person could easily ruin it for many. We will review this decision in a few months. Perhaps things will have changed.

I received a lot of sympathetic responses to this. The one from Med Colket, who had played at Eno with his wife Kathy for several years, included an idea that caught my attention. I relayed it to Sally.

Med Colket had an intriguing suggestion. He recommended that we request that players submit proof of vaccination to me voluntarily. Then we only invite the people who have submitted valid proof. I would send out invitations every week, and people would RSVP. This will have the advantage of giving us a better estimate of table count.

A little later Jeanne learned that because we were a private entity we could require vaccinations if we wanted. The previous information that Sally received from Eno Hall had been erroneous. I decided to implement Med’s approach anyway. Our first game would be on October 20. I sent an email to everyone on my list:

We have used a suggestion from Med Colket to devise a way to reopen the Simsbury Bridge Club. We need a little time to get everything set up. Here is our schedule of games for the rest of the year:
October 20 and 27
November 3 and 10
December 8, 22, and 29. I am aware that some bridge players must cater to the wishes of burdensome family and friends during the holidays. However, I am optimistic about the last two dates because Christmas and New Years are on Saturdays this year.

Anyone can register as a vaccinated member of the SBC by sending an email or text to me, or leaving a message on my voice mail. You can register as either a player or a pair.
1) Designate the names of the player(s).
2) Provide proof of vaccination—either a photo of the card(s) or the date and time of a game played at the Hartford Bridge Club in 2021.
3) Pairs should designate whether they wish to be considered “recurring”.
On the Friday before every game I will send to all who have registered as vaccinated an email announcing the next week’s game. The deadline for responses will be the following Monday. People should notify me (by email, text, or voice mail) if:
1) They are a “recurring” pair that will not be playing the following Wednesday;
2) They are a registered pair that is not “recurring” but plans to play.
3) They want to provide proof of vaccination for a partner who was not previously registered.
4) They would like to play but lack a partner.
If fewer than twelve people (three tables) commit to play, the game will be canceled. I will send an email announcing the cancellation on the Tuesday before the game. I will also post a notice to that effect on the club’s website, which is at http://wavada.org/SimsburyBC/.

It was not overly difficult to implement this system. First I needed to add a field on the “audience” file for the SBC on the free version of MailChimp. I called the new field Registration. That part was easy, and I was familiar with how to do it. I then used a feature on MailChimp to designate two segments, one with a blank in this field and the other for players with a letter. I put an H in this field for those whom I had seen play at the Hartford Bridge Club and a C for people who had sent me copies of their vaccination cards.

The time-consuming part came next. I had to enter these by hand one at a time. I had to sort the file, find the player I wanted, select them for editing, scroll down to the field, enter the character, scroll to the bottom, and save it. The most annoying thing was that when I returned to the list of players, not only had my place on the list been lost. The records were also no longer sorted. So, I had to repeat the same process. After a while I had to add another step—skipping to the next page after sorting.

The good thing was that I could easily see a list of all the registered players and another list of the players who were on the master list but had not provided me with proof of vaccination. By the time of the first game seventy-two players were registered.

It has been well established that Ken and Lori Leopold had done a great job in 2019 of establishing a new standard for a small duplicate bridge club. One of the biggest attractions of the game—especially for those who often ate alone—was the wonderful spread of food and drink that Lori and some others helped prepare every week. Sally and I would have been happy if we could somehow have emulated them, but it was not really feasible for either of us, and the persistence of the Delta variant of the pandemic made it even a little dangerous.

Another thing that would be missing in this new version of the club—at least in the beginning—would be the lessons that I had presented. They had begun at 6PM or as close to that time as I could manage. Because I was still afraid of catching Covid-19, I intended to wear a mask, at least at first. I was fairly certain that one senior citizen struggling to speak through a mask to a group of senior citizens would not be very attractive. Also, the rest of the preparations would probably take up a good bit of my time, and I was quite busy with other projects, including these blog entries.

So, we would be relying on the wonderful game of face-to-face bridge to attract people to Eno Hall. We would also try to promote the same uniquely cheerful and supportive attitude among the players that the SBC previously boasted. We had strong hopes that those two elements would suffice.

As I mentioned, I had all the equipment, including the computer, at my house. Linda Starr, who had helped me in 2020 to use the Hartford Bridge Club’s Dealer4 machine to create the boards for SBC games, agreed to set up files for our first game and to give me a refresher course in how to create the boards. Actually, I had only the vaguest memory of how to use the the software that ran the dealing machine. She had to show me everything again. I took careful notes and promised not to lose them this time.

I was able to create a set of boards and to photocopy the hand records. I remembered how to load the dealing machine with cards, but I warned Linda that the fine coordination in my fingers was terrible. I then proved my point. When I withdrew the very first hand from the very first board three or four cards slipped out of my hand and came to res behind the shelves on which the Dealer4 was positioned.

Left to right: printer; display, keyboard, mouse, & computer; Dealer4 on shelf.

This had happened to me at least once back in 2020. I just removed a box of who knows what from the bottom shelf and told Linda “At least I also have long arms and fingers.” I then skillfully retrieved all the missing cards. I counted them to make certain.

From that point on I created the boards and printed the hand records with almost no difficulty. I did not interpret this unexpected feat³ as an ill omen, but I probably should have.

Linda also created PBN files (needed to submit results) for all the rest of the games scheduled for 2021. She copied them to a USB drive that I had brought with me, and she showed me how to find them on the computer that ran the dealing machine. I should be all set for all of 2021.

By this time I had commitments from ten pairs. We were all set to have a real face-to-face bridge game!

On Tuesday, October 9—the day before the game—I received this depressing email from Sally:

We have a problem! Eno Hall is telling me that they can’t accommodate us tomorrow. We can start back next week. I’m sure we could use HBC for one week if you want to tell people to meet there one time? Or just tell them that we will start next week?

So, I had to send out an email announcing the cancellation of the first week. It frustrated and humiliated me to have to do it.

We later found out that the reason that they could not accommodate us was because they had not scheduled a janitor for that evening. That was what I had speculated was the source of the problem, but most people thought it must be something less mundane.

We had an even better turnout for the rescheduled first week—eleven pairs with a remarkably diverse level of experience. I came in early to the Hartford Bridge Club on Wednesday morning before the game. I planned to use the boards made for 10/20. I could see no reason not to use them. The only problem was that Linda had not copied that one file on the USB drive. So, I asked Donna Feir, the club manager and the director for that morning’s game, if I could copy that one file. My other alternative was to make new boards from the file for 10/27 that was already on the computer. That would take me about a half hour even if all went well, and then I would need another ten minutes or so to print the hand records.

I let Donna talk me into a third alternative—using the boards and the hand records created for the previous night’s game at the HBC. They were available because too few players had signed up. So, all that I had to do was to copy the PBN file from the computer used by the directors. I located the file without difficulty, put my USB drive in the port, and copied. I then put all of the gear in my car. Now I was ready.

I had arranged to take Sue Rudd and Maria Van Der Ree In my Honda to Wednesday evening’s game. I was supposed to pick Sue up at 5:30. The Honda and I arrived in Sue’s driveway fashionably late at 5:32. I honked my horn and waited a few minutes. Her house appeared dark. I honked the horn again. Then I took out my cell phone and dialed her number. It rang five or six times. Then a bizarre masculine voice identified itself as the “backup voice mail” for Sue Rudd. It then advised me not to leave a message because Sue does not usually check it!

So, I called Maria’s number to see if she knew what was going on. It rang five or six times and then went to voice mail. I left a message and could think of nothing better to do than to drive to Maria’s home. I found her outside waiting for me. I tried to tell her that she couldn’t play because I could not rouse Sue, but she got in the car anyway.

At that point, I called Sue Rudd again. Three phone calls in one day was a personal record for me; the previous record was one. Sue answered this time. She was upset at me for not picking her up on time. I told her that I had been in her driveway at 5:32, and I would be there again in ten minutes. I was. Sue got in my Honda, and we took off.

I was not stopped by any policemen on the way to Simsbury, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I pulled into Eno’s parking lot at 6:45, fifteen minutes late. Jerry Hirsch was standing there waiting to help me with the gear.

Everyone was playing by 6:50. The game itself went fairly smoothly. We were done by our mandated finishing time of 10 o’clock. Everyone seemed to have had a good time. “And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

The crowded room that greeted me when I finally entered the playing area made everything worthwhile. The two people whom I had never met—David Marks and Ann Sagalyn—introduced themselves to me while Sally, Jerry, and a few others set up the six-table Howell.

When, after the scores had been announced, I tried to transfer the PBN file from the USB drive onto the SBC computer, I discovered that I had copied the wrong file at the HBC. So, I had to promise Sally that, when I obtained a copy of the right file, I would send it to her by email.

I then copied the file containing the text version of the results so that I could insert it into the email to the registered members scheduled for Friday.

I brought all of the gear home except the very heavy laptop and its power supply. Sally took those with her so that she could send the results to the ACBL.

I have driven from Simsbury to Enfield hundreds of times. I may have even bragged that I could do it blindfolded. On this evening, however, I was very tired. The adrenaline high had worn off. As I exited the parking lot, I turned the wrong way onto Station Street, which is one-way. This totally disrupted my perspective. I took Iron Horse Blvd. up to Route 10 without any difficulty, but then I missed my turn onto Wolcott Road. I could have salvaged a little dignity by turning onto Floydville Road, but I did not see a sign for it. Instead I drove all the way up to Route 20 in Granby. This little detour added perhaps ten miles to the trip.

I did not realize until the next morning that I had never eaten supper the previous evening.

I was still exhausted on Thursday, but I took the time to write up a Hand of the Week. It took me much longer than before because I had never precisely documented the php programs that I had written in 2019 to produce it. I eventually figured out how they worked, keyed in the hand and my ideas, and sent out an email to invite everyone to the game on November 3. This email included a copy of the summary of the results from the 10/27 game.

The file that I needed was stored on the HBC director’s computer, which is barely visible through the left armrest.

I obtained a copy of the correct PBN file and emailed it to Sally. However, I never received the email from the ACBL with a link to the Live for Clubs web page for the game. It turned out that Sally had never used the procedure for submitting results established in 2020 for submitting the results in the format required for the Live for Clubs software. She promised to figure it out.

The preparation for the second game went smoothly. The trip from Enfield to Simsbury was blissfully uneventful. Both Sue and Maria were ready on time. We arrived at Eno at 6:15, and we were ready to play by 6:25.

Unfortunately, Route 44 was closed because of an accident somewhere on or near Avon Mountain. The alternate routes were jammed with traffic. Two people from West Hartford—Felix Springer and Kathie Ferguson—arrived late.

When Felix arrived at about 6:45 we started the game. Al Gee and Kathie were assigned a sitout for the first round.

It was a near thing, but we got all twenty-four boards completed and scored so that we could leave by 10 o’clock. Some people had apparently doffed their masks at some point, and someone noticed them. Sally received an email on Thursday from Karen Haberlin at Eno Hall:

Hi Sally,
This is just a reminder that masks are still required in town buildings unless people are eating or drinking.
Thank you,
Karen

Meanwhile, Sally must have figured out how to attach the files; I received the emails for both games. I thought that something was still amiss. I noticed that the links to download the hand record files were missing from both the selection page and the results pages. I later determined that they were also missing on the HBC results. The software must have been changed during the pandemic.

I adjusted the emails in which I invite players to the next game so that the instructions for taking advantage of the feature for printing a hand record was removed.

1. On May 1, 2020 the New York Times ran a long article about this event and the popularity of bridge in general. It is posted here.

2. Our experiences regarding the First-Ever Regional at Sea on a Riverboat is described here.

3. The trickiest part of using the dealing machine is withdrawing the completed board from the machine. Cards sometimes get stuck. If you pull the board out a little and then push it back to adjust the cards, Dealer4 might start dealing the next deck. Then you have a mess to deal with.

The 1948 Project

Posted on July 16, 2021 by Mike

Why and how. Continue reading →

I would have called it: *Mi Chiamo Jack Vance. Ecco la Mia Storia.*

Motivation: The primary inspiration for this monstrous undertaking was Jack Vance’s remarkable autobiography, This is Me, Jack Vance! When the pandemic suddenly endowed me with an unexpected surfeit of leisure time in the spring of 2020, I read many books. One of the best was the Italian version of Vance’s award-winning autobiography. Three things impressed me the most about the man and his work:

Jack Vance was such a cool guy. He did so many interesting things (including cheating on his eye exam to get into the Navy), and he and his wife took truly amazing international vacations.
Vance was tremendously talented, and not just as a writer. Even more impressive was his discipline. He wrote most of his books when he ran out of money on extended vacations! He could sit down in an exotic location and churn out four thousand words a day. His wife typed up his output as fast as he could write it. He evidently sent his second drafts to the publisher, and nearly all were accepted.
He dictated his autobiography when he was in his nineties and BLIND! He must have relied almost entirely on his memory; his friends and colleagues were almost all dead when he started the project.

When it became evident that the pandemic would be around for months, if not years, In June of 2020 I realized that I had been accorded a unique opportunity to attempt a huge project. The idea of trying to document my own life in a thorough manner took root in my imagination. I had often claimed that I had a million good stories. In the beginning my primary objective was to assure that as many of those amusing anecdotes as possible were recorded while I could still remember them. I had no doubt that many people and events had already faded from my memory or morphed into something that no longer resembled reality. Even so, I felt compelled by fate to transcribe as many as possible as accurately as possible.

I started with my Army days. So many utterly bizarre things happened in those eighteen months that I wanted to write about them before more memories became blurred or distorted. My biggest regret in life—bar none—was my failure to keep a journal when I was in the Army. I certainly had plenty of free time. I had no social life; I played golf, but my evenings were almost always free. I even had a typewriter. It just never occurred to me to write about my experiences.

After completing a few blog entries about my heroic stint defending the country, I wrote about my last undergraduate semester at the University of Michigan. This was one very painful entry that I just wanted to get out of the way.

I soon became enchanted with the process of researching and writing. I no longer just wanted to retell humorous anecdotes. I thoroughly enjoyed digging up references to familiar people and events and reliving ancient memories. I set up a timeline in a spreadsheet and gradually filled most of it in. From that point on, I have released entries in a close approximation of chronological order.

The Format: I did not spend much time mulling over how to present the text and images. Wavablog, the collection of my blog entries on Wavada.org that use WordPress, seemed like an obvious choice for such an open-ended project. The other possibility would have been to use the same php¹ format that I developed for my journals and other writings. The biggest advantage of WordPress was its ease of tagging names and other items for cross-referencing. I would have needed to write a lot of code to duplicate this feature.

Some aspects of WordPress annoyed me. Its WYSIWIG format provided no easy way to handle footnotes. I seem to be unable to write without them, and my php functions make them easy. WordPress allows user-defined functions, but I don’t see how they could be used for footnotes.

I never seriously considered changing formats after I started. WordPress was adequate for what I hoped to accomplish.

Sources: Since I had not kept in touch with anyone from my grade school, high school, undergraduate days (except my collegiate debate partner, Bill Davey) at the University of Michigan, or the Army, I had very little to supplement my memory concerning the first twenty-four years of my life.

I certainly wished that I still had my yearbooks from eighth grade and high school. I don’t remember discarding them. It is possible that my mother threw them out when she cleaned out my room while I was in the Army. I know that she threw away my collection of baseball cards, and my saxophone also disappeared. There was not much chance of finding a copy of either of them online. My grade school doesn’t even exist any more. Rockhurst High School is flourishing in 2021, but I could find no trace of the 1966 yearbook on the Internet.

Even so, I think that I remembered the names of most of my fellow students in both my grade school and high school classes. It helped a lot that I took classes with mostly the same people throughout, and we sat in alphabetical order in almost all classes.

Wayne Miller helped me with my debate-coaching days at Michigan, and Scott Harris helped with the Wayne State period. Don Ritzenheim’s dissertation was also a valuable source of information.

I expected to find a great deal of information about the early days of our software company, TSI, by rummaging through our basement. My wife Sue never throws anything away unless it has rotted or is covered with mold. However, my search yielded very little that was of much use. So, either Sue squirreled a lot of files away somewhere else, or I did not investigate all the containers in the basement, large areas of which are virtually impenetrable.

Some of the more impenetrable areas of the basement.

I found on my desktop computer files containing dozens of business emails and my many trip reports from the period of 1999-2009. I also found all of the communication concerning the attempt to sell the business in 2010.

Images: I bought Sue a camera in 1973. She used it a lot for decades. I expected to find a large number of photos (or, even better, CD’s that contained photos) in the basement. I found a couple of albums that she had forgotten about and a few loose photos, but I never located the mother lode.

I used a series of disposable cameras to take a lot of photos of our first trip to Italy in 2003. They have been missing since shortly after the trip. I certainly did not throw them out. They almost certainly were stuffed in an envelope, bag, or box and now languish in a pile of junk somewhere. Also missing are the numerous photos that Sue took of that first big tour that we took.

The missing cable should be to the left of the one shown on the old hard drive that sits atop my desktop computer.

These three failed searches were the biggest disappointments of the whole undertaking. Close behind was my inability to find many electronic photos that I took with my two point-and-shoot cameras from 2005-2009. The files were lost when the hard drive on my laptop crashed. I had hopes that they might be on a very old external drive that for years had been plugged into a USB port on my computer. However, the device had a DC-in interface, but I located no such power cable. Furthermore, the company that marketed the drive in the U.S. for its Chinese manufacturer appeared to be out of business.

The good photos had been removed from the tan envelope shown here and filed before this photo was taken.

The most exciting discovery was an interoffice mail envelope that had been buried on a shelf in my office. They were beneath some three-ring binders and 9″x12″ envelopes that contained items from various trips. The envelope contained hundreds of photos that I had taken with disposable cameras in the late nineties and early two-thousands. About half were shots of employees at TSI’s AdDept clients, and some even had notations on the back identifying the people in the photos by name.

Whenever I found appropriate photos that Sue or I had shot, I used them in the blogs. Otherwise, I often looked on the Internet for whimsical or instructive illustrations. If I used something that I shouldn’t have, I will gladly donate a portion of the profits of this tome to a mutually agreeable charity.

I suspect that a cache of photos of the Wavada family is taking up space somewhere in our house. My family did not take a lot of photographs, but I remember that my mom kept a stack of them in the drawer of a round table in the living room. If I come across any, I will try to integrate them into the appropriate blog entries.

“Where are they now?”: I googled nearly everyone mentioned in any blog entry. If I could find any information about them, I included it, usually in a footnote. I tried to contact a number of friends and acquaintances. Only a few responded, but it gave me great joy to hear from them.

Of course, some of the people that I mentioned have died. The life expectancy of a male born in 1948 is only 73.1 years. If I make it to the end of September 2021, I will be in the upper fifty percentile.

1. My journals and books have been posted using programs that I wrote in php, a scripting language used to produce HTML code. The name of the language is an abbreviation of “personal home page”. It allows someone to produce web pages in almost any format, but getting started with it is not for the faint of heart. It was really designed for people who knew C or C++. I don’t, but it was close enough to BASIC that I managed to teach it to myself with a lot of help from online manuals and fora.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: php

2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing

2021 The Rebirth of the Simsbury Bridge Club: Part 2

The 1948 Project