Those Old Y2K Blues

Year 2000 projects uniformly sucked. Everyone in IT who lived through the massive boredom of the so-called Y2K debacle has a story to tell. Mine includes the end of my “big consulting” career.

It went like this. The consultancy I worked for was engaged by a big petrochemical company to inventory all of their systems, evaluate for Y2K compliance, and prioritize for remediation. When I first showed up to the endless unadorned beige halls, beige carpets, and brown doors of their office building, our team was literally housed in a closet. I sat on a crate in the corner for a couple of weeks with a computer propped on a cardboard box, pretending to be productive. Eventually we actually got a small conference room to share, and I had an actual desk to sit at, next to Chas, one of those cowboy-boot wearing “my family has a ranch but I’m doing this technology thing” kind of dudes we seemed to have a lot of in Houston.

The partner on the gig was Tommy, a fresh new partner, sort of good-looking with reputation as a party boy. He featured prominently in all the wildest stories that got passed around the office, the kind of guy who hosted an annual crawfish boil, pool party, and drinkathon at his west Houston McMansion where all the men wore Hawaiian shirts and all the women wore bikinis. I showed up in my athletic one-piece suit with a coverup. Clearly I wasn’t playing the game correctly.

On the Y2K project, I somehow ended up assigned to the engineering group, working with a contract Brazilian programmer whose name I forget. Nice kid and quite competent. The engineering software was almost entirely homegrown applications written, used, and maintained by the engineers themselves, and they were quite amused at the corporate assumption that they needed some fresh-off-the-streets consultants to help them manage or fix their systems.

There I was, unwanted and mostly unneeded, yet somehow I was supposed to be impressing the client with my go-getter-super-organized-you-can’t-live-without-me project management. Mostly this involved driving all the way from west Houston to Baytown a couple of times a week to hang with my programmer, who nicely explained what he had done, was doing, and was planning to do, none of which required my input or supervision. But Tommy wanted everything planned down to 15-minute tasks in a spreadsheet which would have been pretty much made up and of no use to anyone. He was a big believer in the official methodology that had been developed for huge mainframe projects and which was too cumbersome, complex, and time-consuming for anyone to actually use, even if they had understood it. None of our long weeks of training included that methodology, so I doubt Tommy comprehended it better than anyone else.

When I was back in the west Houston office, I noticed that, Chas, my friendly officemate, was developing an odd habit of spending hours a day on the phone. At first I tried to ignore this, figuring he had work or personal business that was no concern of mine. But it intruded on my awareness, and it became apparent that he was running some kind of Christian phone therapy service during work hours. With a deep, caring, soft voice he’d express concern and mutter prayers to some anonymous person or other. Knowing Chas as I did, this really stumped me. Wasn’t this the guy who had had noisy sex with the manager of our previous project in a shared hotel room in Chicago during training last year? Everyone heard that story from his roommate. Not to mention teaching every woman on the team how to two-step and jitterbug at the big kicker bar in north Houston? That nice tall blond girl with the fiancé from South Africa got a bad case for him after one of those outings. Well, Chas remained the golden boy on the project regardless of his almost complete lack of getting shit done. After all, he didn’t regularly tell Tommy that putting “sharpen pencils,” “schedule conference room,” and “check emails” on the project plan was stupid. Which I probably did.

One by one the people on that project handed in their notice and went on to other things – NASA, graduate school, Enron. My mentor asked me “how did you go from being a top performer to a marginal team member?” Dude, it has everything to do with leadership, but nobody ever believes that. Shit’s gotta roll downhill, and partners are at the top of the hill. Eventually my recruiter (his phone number was on everybody’s speed dial) turfed me up a nice project management gig at a real estate company and I made my exit as well.

Tommy had a glorious 20-year career with that consulting company. But I’m not jealous about that, because I’d never have been able to play the game that long, nor did I want to.

Chas ended up quitting shortly after I did and went traveling around Texas holding tent revivals. There’s no more enthusiastic evangelical than a reformed rake, or so I hear.