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Hello State Service I started my new job with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on a Wednesday. Why a Wednesday? Maybe it was the start of the month. Maybe it was just the date they gave me. Maybe my last day at El Dorado was Tuesday. Why I remember this will become clear later. I had interviewed for the position at CDCR headquarters building located on S street between 15 th and 16 th . The project I was hired for and was going to be working on was located at 1050 20 th street in what is now called the Mars building but was back then referred to as the Mayflower building. I arrived about 8. I walked in. There was no reception area. I asked someone where I'd find the IT group I would be working with and they directed me to the 2 nd floor on the south east side of the building. So I proceeded to the second floor and after standing there a couple of minutes someone asked me if I needed something or was looking for someone. I ...

Leaving El Dorado County for the State of California Me with and some Eldorado IT guys - "Stop in the Name of Love" I t was 1995. The year of the O.J. Trial and the Million Man March in Washington DC. It was also the year of the Oklahoma City bombing. On the lighter side there was the movie “Toy Story”. The Number 1 Billboard song for '95: Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise. I was looking for a new job. I had put 7 years in at El Dorado County which was a PERS organization. I was initially thinking of returning to private industry but my mother-in-law, who had a long career working in IT for the State of California, encouraged me to think about looking at the state, since I had those 7 years in the same retirement program that the State of California used. She had worked her way up to upper management and was familiar with many of the state's top IT managers. She pointed out that while state government was much larger than El Dorado size had adv...

  Please GOD, Get Me Back to Being a Programmer. I was still the IT Applications Programming Manager at El Dorado County with a staff of 20. My manager, Ollie, while a good guy, really had no understanding of what my staff did and more importantly why what they did was even needed. Good news was he mostly left me alone but the bad news was there was a push from above to greatly reduce our staff and he was not pushing back. M eanwhile I was having the kind of fun one can only enjoy as a manager. One of my programmers, Jeff, who had opted to work a 4/10 schedule (four ten hour days with 3 off) came into my office to complain he was being shorted because he was now only getting getting 8 breaks (2 breaks a day) a week when he used to get 10. I listened to him and made an attempt to feebly commiserate by saying hey your right I was just on vacation and I didn't get one break during that time. I think the county owes me 10 breaks... Let's just say he was not comforted. ...

Kids, You Can't Always Get What You Want: W hen Kris and I married, Kris was 27 and I was 38 although I was about to turn 39 in a few weeks. Kris's birthday is a little less than 3 weeks after Christmas and our wedding anniversary is less than 3 weeks after her birthday and then my birthday is 3 weeks after our anniversary. Our major celebrations, starting with Christmas all happen in less than 2 months. While it's happening it seems like they are on top of each other but then I get the rest of the year off where I don't have to think about it. As an adult I have never been big on presents or for that matter holidays. Kris has learned to curb or at least lower any expectations these things might foster for her in regards to me. We've been together over 38 years, so for better or worse Kris has managed to cope with the way I am. W e bought a house and moved to Rocklin after we married, thinking we probably had a good chance of getting an IT job in the area...

My Mid-Life Crisis A year or so after I reached the “ripe old” age of 40 I began to freak-out a little. I still didn't know what I wanted to do for career. I had been putting off that decision since high school and that was over 20 years ago. For the life of me I just never had been able to figure it out and hence, I kept putting it off. A s a male growing up in the 50's and 60's there was always an expectation that I needed to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I only wanted to be a grown-up me. I have never been much of a planner and frankly, having to make a decision about something that would define the rest of my life was intimidating and a bit overwhelming. The message I was getting was I had to learn how to do something that would result in me getting a job where I could earn enough money to not only support myself but also take care of a wife and a family. My view of the working world was pretty limited and I failed to see anything that fit me, c...

  El Dorado County Part 4 – I Become a Manager and County Politics Downtown Placerville I was working in a Project Lead position in the IT department of El Dorado County whose offices were located in Placerville. The IT department in the county, as in most companies, is not a revenue generating department. It's role is more one of cost avoidance, i.e. you automate because it's more efficient. Organizations who are not IT companies fund their IT department by charging the other departments that are using their services which is pretty much all of them. Usually the charge is based on how much IT services they use. It's reflected in the department's budget and of course it's just all on paper. In 1991 I'm not sure how many organizations did this particularly well but our CIO was well versed in this area and he implemented a system where each department was assigned a baseline charge for IT services and then an additional charge based on that department...

El Dorado Part 3 – Returning to Normal El Dorado Camping Trip - Me, Linda, Wilma, husband of ?, ?, John, Helen, and Leianne   I was working at El Dorado County and had just, with help, completed converting and enhancing the county's Welfare and Child Services systems on to a new IBM mainframe system. It had been over a 9 month process, one where I had been working long days non-stop. There was now a rather long list of issues that needed fixing. There were also new ones cropping up pretty much daily. In fact new issues were being discovered faster than we could resolve the existing list of issues so the issue list was growing. This went on for a few weeks before we were able to turn a corner where our fixes were finally outnumbering the new issues being found. I distinctly remember when this happened. I had been working closely with the Social Services Admin manager, Lila, and was meeting with her and others multiple times a week. Occasionally the Department head would ...

El Dorado County Part 2 Me and Kris at the Eldorado County IT Holiday Party I was working at El Dorado County converting their Social Services systems from an old Sperry UNIVAC mainframe computer to a new IBM one. The task had a completely unrealistic deadline and although I was seriously engaged in doing it, I was not feeling a sense of urgency since failure was a sure thing. The two main systems were the Child Services System and the larger Welfare System, that included Food Stamps and AFDC. There was no way any one person could convert those two systems within that deadline. Heck, one person wouldn't even of had a chance of converting one of them. It wasn't a normal conversion. It was essentially creating a whole new Welfare System. Did I mention that I had not previously worked on a Sperry computer before so I was going through a learning curve to boot. Regardless the conversion project was something that was beyond my control. There was no way it was going to...

El Dorado County Me and Kris on the backyard deck at our  house in Rocklin K ris and I were married and had moved to Rocklin. Being computer programmers we figured our best hope for employment was up in Placer County as there was a semiconductor manufacturing company up there as well as Hewlett Packard. Consilium, where we had been working in Silicon Valley, was a software company whose product was the leading semiconductor manufacturing software on the market. It turned out neither of the hi-tech companies in Placer were interested in us. We ended up getting jobs elsewhere, Kris with the IT department of the Sacramento Bee downtown, and me with the IT department at El Dorado County located in Placerville. The result was we both had commutes but in different directions. (Placerville is not in Placer Country and Yuba City is not in Yuba County. What happened there?) A t El Dorado County I was hired into a programmer analyst position. The county was my first experi...