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 15th and 16th. The project I was hired for and was going to be working on was located at 1050 20th 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 2nd 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 explained that I was a new hire and asked for the person who had hired me. When they heard the name they informed my that she had quit and her last day had been the previous Friday. So I asked about the person who replaced her. They responded saying that they didn't think the position had been filled yet. They directed me to another IT person. That IT person explained to me that the group's supervisor had left and that the person filling in for her had not come in yet. I was then taken to the supervisor's office which was at the far end of the room. I was told I could wait there. At this point I was thinking this is very odd. Didn't the person who hired me tell anyone that I would be showing up today? In all my previous experiences when I reported to work on my first day there was someone to meet me and there was a place prepared for me to sit.
The acting supervisor did show up after awhile. She welcomed me and then introduced me to one of the programmers, Dean. Dean was the programmer I would be replacing. It was his last week. Dean showed me around and got me acclimated. There was an empty cubicle across the aisle form Dean's cube he said I could use. The cube did not have a computer or a phone, just a desk and chair. Cell phones were becoming more common, although I didn't have one, but landline phones were still the norm in offices. Dean explained that I should request a phone, a computer, and that I would also need to request network access. I then spent some time filling out paper request forms for these things.
Dean walked me around and introduced me to the other IT team members and the users that I would be working with. This was a very large project and it had many modules and each module had it's own group of users and an IT person. The “Records” module that I was assigned to was one of the largest and it actually had two IT people assigned. The other IT person was Heidi. Heidi was smart but had the handicap of being quite good looking. I know, you are likely wondering how this could be a handicap? I am sure you've noticed, women who are very good looking get lots of male attention. Heidi was no exception. As a result, her guard was always up. She kept her distance and was not easy to interact with and at least initially not easy to work with. She kept away and offered me no help with the exception of an occasional eye-roll when I made a comment or asked a question.
The rest of that week I followed Dean everywhere. He was very friendly and very helpful. It was great for me, but he was leaving because he was disillusioned with the project. He saw lots of problems and was pretty frustrated with how everything was going. Now maybe this is just me, but if I go to the trouble of bringing in a new person to work on a project the last person I would have them spend time with is one who thinks negatively about the project and work environment. This seemed of little concern to those at CDCR. It turned out that Dean was not alone in his opinion but it would be a little while before I learned that. There was of course a contractor (TRW) on the project. They were going to be developing the new system. CDCR IT's role was to ensure that the contractor provided what the department needed and learn the technical side of the system as we would be the ones to maintain the system once it was in place. During this phase we were to assist and review the technical design. The TRW programmer assigned to our area was Ron. Ron was a good guy and easy to work with.
By Friday I had a phone with assurances that I'd get a computer on Monday. Also on Friday I was informed that the Records group was going to be meeting on Saturday. I was told I needed to be there even though I knew virtually nothing about what was going to be worked on. Now here's the problem. As a programmer for the state I am a salaried worker but I am eligible for overtime pay based on FLSA rules. This means I get overtime compensation for any hours worked over 40 in the week. Since I started on a Wednesday, I only had 24 hours for the week. That meant that I was not only not going to get overtime (1.5 pay) for coming in on Saturday, I wasn't going to get any pay at all. Basically I worked Saturday for free attending a work session meeting on a non-IT issue I knew nothing about and had nothing to offer. Saturday I sat in a room for 4 hours just watching others work. Fun! Well, that's not exactly the correct word.
Monday I got a computer in my office and by the afternoon I even had network access. The system was being developed in Oracle. For some reason it was not considered important for me to have access to Oracle. I was supposed to learn the system and ensure the system did what it was supposed to while being restricted from actually accessing the system. All I could do was ask the TRW developers what they were doing. I couldn't actually look at anything. Already I was seeing why Dean was so anxious to move on. I kept busy getting to know the users in the Records department, learning what functions they needed the new system to provide. They were all very busy preparing documents for a big all staff meeting that was scheduled for the coming Monday.
On Monday after the morning briefing, which they did daily, we all piled into the big conference room downstairs. There were probably 60 to 80 people attending. A comprehensive offender tracking system has a lot of parts. It needs all the information about each incarcerated person, their current status, their history, the facilities (prisons), their activities, their movement (they are bussed various places from time to time), their work, etc. The purpose of this meeting was to review each working group's non-normalized functional entity relationship diagram (ERD) . I know this probably is meaningless to you unless you are a computer programmer. An Entity is anything of interest that the system needs to track. Examples are someone's name, their date of birth, or their gender. The diagram shows the relationship between each of these entities. Example – every offender has one date-of-birth, may have many names, may have been convicted of many crimes. To make things more complicated is the incarcerated population in general is made of people who have not felt compelled to follow the rules. So, things, like Social Security Number (SSN) that one might think is one to a customer is often not the case as some of the prison residents have more than one. That goes for most anything you can think of with this population including gender, although it seems on the federal level that condition has now gone away. Anyway the point is the prison population is not known for coloring within the lines and as a result many items need to be captured in ways that you might not expect.
I think I've gone on long enough about this but what was happening in the meeting was each functional area, of which there were something like 10 or so, would in turn post on the wall their entire ERD after which the group together with everyone in the room would talk about each and every entity and its relationships and how they might effect their area. This was not a quick process. We ended up meeting for 20 and ½ days in a row, not counting weekends as we took weekends off. So we all met all day, every day for over 4 weeks. The room didn't even have any windows. That's a friggin' long meeting.
The marathon meeting finally ended. It had been an interesting 6 weeks. I was finding that working at the state was going to be very different and this was just the beginning.
My daughter started a new job is SF nearly 5 years ago. On her first day she arrived at the office at 8am, after being driven over the bay bridge from Berkeley by her husband and dropped off. The front door was locked and no one around. After much rattling of the door a janitor opened the door. Told her it was “first day of lock down” due to Covid and everyone else stayed home! She managed to grab a laptop, call her husband back across the bridge to pick her up and spent 2+ years without meeting anyone in person.
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