Graham Seibert Autobiography draft Jan 15, 2013 Page
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GermanyJosée and I settled into Von Behring Straße 6 in Zweibücken. It was a situation similar to Danang – I was IBM's lone representative in an outpost of an outpost. I got to know my Army client pretty well on a social basis, playing poker, running, and participating in community affairs. However, they ran their operations pretty well, leaving me not much to do. I dedicated myself to learning German. It was the most athletic period in my life. I ran every day, as much as 12 miles on the back roads. Josée and I socialized, mostly with the Vietnamese friends she made there, young wives of American soldiers and older wives of soldiers in the French garrison, as well as East Bloc refugees she met in a German immersion course she took as much to learn the culture as the language. She was truly the queen bee, better educated, better dressed, better looking and higher class than any of them, and fluent in all four operative languages: English, French, German and Vietnamese. We vacationed in France, quite frequently. Paris was only a five-hour drive, at least for a Mercedes sports car on the relatively thinly patrolled routes national which preceded the autoroutes. We would park the car at a modest hotel just inside the Péripherique, the ring road which generally coincides with the outer stations of the metro, and take public transit everywhere. We spent a lot of time in the Vietnamese quarters, where the food and grocery shopping were both excellent. On at least one occasion we drove to Cadaques, Spain, where I had vacationed when in Vietnam. We must have cut a rather Gatsbyesque image as we rolled through the small villages of France. I remember an old lady commenting as we rolled slowly though one, top down and Josée looking like a princess, "Il faut profiter du soleil." It is good to take advantage of the sunshine. The honeymoon ended after just over a year. Josée fought. I could not handle it – I had never fought with a woman before. Had I paid better attention, I would have noticed that her mother and father fought all the time. It was part of her concept of marriage, and her Buddhist notion of kharma inclined her to accept it as an inalterable part of her nature. I loved her but I could not live with her. She left for Los Angeles, with the understanding that she would get a no-fault divorce and I’d pay for her college. My premonition about German women had been accurate. The few who cared about meeting Americans did not have that much to offer. Even when I moved to Frankfurt in 1974 the pickings were slim. Though I was more than ready to start a family, I managed to have only one serious relationship, with a Hungarian woman, Livia, before returning to the United States in November of 1976. She was slim, blonde, beautiful and fluent in several lanaguages. A pleasure to be with. I might well have married her, but she pushed the subject too hard, and I backed away. My friend John Gentzler thought I had made a mistake. And I may have, as it took another thirty five years to find true love. Frankfurt offered more interesting work due to one exceptional soldier, Major Ron Glidden. His ambition was to automate the retail level of Army supply, the Direct Support Unit. DSUs fixed military equipment that was beyond the capability of the drivers and mechanics in the units that owned them. The DSUs used paper records to keep track of their spare parts inventories, typically carried about 1000 different kinds of item. They also handled replacement orders for the units they supported, things like spark plugs and headlights. Keeping track of things and money had been the first business computer applications back in the 1950s. The problem at the DSU level was budgetary – they couldn’t afford a computer for such a small job. A DEC PDP-8 might have done the trick, but DEC did not support customers the way IBM did. IBM offered no comparable computer. But wait - a ray of hope! In 1973 IBM announced the 3741 data entry system. It was supposed to be just a key-to-floppy-disk device. However, they did provide 4k of memory and an Intel 4004 processor, a primative programming language, and a printer, supposedly just to help edit the data being entered. That was all I needed… something I could program, however primative. I wrote an inventory control system for the DSUs, and Glidden promoted it relentlessly throughout the Army in Europe. Observing the obstacles that confronted him, and his doggedness and taking them on, was an education. In this world you do not succeed on merit alone – it takes a lot of persuasion. In the end, the long knives managed to kill our DSU level supply system. However, Maj. Glidden had an ace in the hole. The DSUs had a second requirement – to keep track of work orders from their customer units. They had to make sure that they got all the repairs done, more or less in the sequence received, and returned the items to the units within a reasonable timeframe. Once again the numbers were small, in this low hundreds of items being repaired at any one time. I programed the system to handle this, and while the long knives were occupied killing our supply system, Glidden snuck it through. It became an Army standard system. I think it makes a fairly good accounting of my last two years in Germany. Though I had the right to return to San Francisco from whence I had come eight years back, IBM swore they needed me in Washington, D.C. Having nothing really to hold me to San Francisco, I assented. It was a canard. My next two years were the least productive of my career. Washington DCLate 1976 had not been an auspicious time to return to Washington. IBM was being regularly trounced in the federal procurement marketplace by Control Data, Sperry Unisys, Burroughs, Digital Equipment Corporation, Wang Federal Systems and other companies that seem to crop up every couple of weeks. IBM's high reliability, high service and high cost model didn't compete well in that marketplace. IBM’s top brass, however, appeared not to appreciate their situation. They were as arrogant as ever. Among other things, they enthusiastically implemented affirmative action, which meant that I found myself working for a series of people other than white males, people who had less time with the company than I and, in my opinion, no obvious skills, management or technical. They left me in a cubicle to molder, moderatly well paid and severely underemployed. There was a lot of free time to catch up on other aspects of my life. I started buying real estate. First, a house in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington. Then a month later, a rental house in Takoma Park, Maryland, and within a year, a six-unit apartment in Takoma Park and half interest in a townhouse in Reston, Virginia. With the tax write-offs, they more or less broke even, and they were a great vehicle for growing an estate. I shared my house in Washington with three roommates, hoping that through them I could enlarge my circle of friends. I did develop friendships, but no romances came of them. My highest priority was finding a wife. Though I tried several churches, work, and other avenues to build a network of contacts through which I might meet somebody, it didn’t happen. I dated, not as much as I would have liked, and simply did not find anybody who seemed like a candidate to be Mrs. Seibert. However much we fought, I had at least loved Josée. In desperation I invited her back for an attempt at reconciliation. It fell apart after six months, costing me another $20K in the form of a house I had bought for her family. I was fortunate to avoid worse by beating off her junkyard dog feminist attorney, Nan Hunter. Josée had Americanized herself pretty quickly. After two years marking time in IBM’s Washington military sales office, I transferred to a staff job. I helped develop cost models for federal proposals, showing the cost of every piece of hardware and service at every stage in the contract, and providing a cost model over the life of a project, typically five years, discounted to present dollars. I had suggested that it was silly to do it longhand. It was a natural computer application, and we were a computer company. I was invited to automate the process. The system was to be written in a new programming language called APL – A Programming Language – that IBM had developed for interactive use. It was hosted on machines in Los Angeles. I did the programming in Bethesda. In 1978 and 79 this was big news. I really knocked myself out to make a robust and full-featured program. I spent the best part of a year developing this thing and got it working pretty well. My boss was an old-time manager. Managers at IBM were ex-salesman for the most part, and the better ones became sales managers. The others, the technical managers, were therefore seldom great technical people themselves. I think I can say that my manager had no clue what I was doing, but he heard feedback that it was more or less okay. When the project was over he gave me a $500 award. It was a very small recognition. And at that point I decided that I was wasting my time with IBM. I had a couple of hundred thousand dollars in my investment portfolio and a real estate portfolio of five properties. I could afford to take a risk. I went next door, from 4330 to 4350 East-West Highway in Bethesda, and talked to Booz Allen and Hamilton. They immediately made an offer of 10% more than I was making and I jumped at it. I really should have done more research, but I was ready to go. A lot happened the last week of August, 1979. Josée took off alone for the Tahitian vacation we had planned together, planning to deal with the divorce upon her return. In my first days at Booz, Allen I met an attractive young woman named Mary Ann McCleary. And, in the vast mysterious Soviet Union, a baby girl arrived who would be baptized Oksana Oleksandrivna Badovska. About my third week at Booz I was thrown onto a proposal effort with this same Mary Ann McCleary. I knew the computer part of the proposal cold and was by this time a fairly good writer. Mary Ann knew what Booz wanted and how to get all of the support tasks accomplished. The proposal won and I was put in charge of the project. Pretty heady stuff. A couple of surprises came out as Mary Ann and I started seeing each other. First, she had always seen me as the guy who rode a bicycle to work. She was shocked, not unpleasantly, when I showed up for a date driving a Mercedes 450SL sports car. The second surprise was that we had the same birthday. I spent only one year with Booz, Allen. They were in the business of making money, pure and simple. Ethical issues that posed no legal liability were never even a consideration. They pulled me from the job I was heading, and competent to do so, to put me on another called SNEP, the Saudi Navy Expansion Program. The US Navy was helping the Saudis recycle petrodollars by building them a navy. It as as big of a pork barrel as one can imagine. The Saudis who oversaw the thing were few, young and naïve; the Navy guys pretty senior and appreciative of the benefits that come with managing a large budget, and the Booz, Allen managers were former Navy guys who saw an opportunity to make megabucks. I was never going to be a player in this game. It isn’t my style. When they asked me what size computer the Saudis needed to manage their spare parts, I extrapolated from the highly relevant experience I had had in Germany and Vietnam. I suggested one that could have fit easily in a semi trailer. Wrong answer. The Navy wanted to give them IBM’s biggest and best, something that would fill half a gymnasium. The difference was between tens of thousands of dollars and a few million. When one of the young Saudis asked me how we had come up with our extimate of the necessary capacity, I indiscreetly indicated that I had no clue. Wrong answer – without ever being told exactly why, I was soon pulled off the project. Way off. They sent me to Buenos Aires to work as the junior member of a three-man team with Renault Automobiles. The other two consultants were from a totally different divison of Booz, Allen, one with long-standing contempt for the federal division. The two consultants had company-wide reputations for being just plain nasty. So much so that only his good knowledge of Spanish for this job prevented the older one, Frank Orzel, from being fired. When the project ended, he was gone. Mike McLaughlin, the other one, was an incredibly young, brash and cruel man who had mastered the Booz, Allen style and could work endless hours. They tried their psychological sadism on me, but it didn’t really have much effect. They were both working on other jobs, flying in and out of Buenos Aires. Neither one had nearly the background I did in computers, and Mike didn’t speak any Spanish. They needed me. The five months I spent there enabled me to bring my Spanish up to fluency. I wrote our final analysis report in Spanish, with the help of Pierre Cuillerot, the French chief of staff, who was fluent in Spanish and who had become my mentor. A man should stay at Booz Allen Hamilton for only one reason: to become rich. They demand an incredible amount of work and expect that only legal and competitive considerations, not ethics or integrity, will serve as guides to conduct. Mentoring was a part of the culture. One day over lunch we discussed who was whose man. I was the only one of the table without a godfather. It was a pretty good sign I was in the wrong place. Download 412.6 Kb. Share with your friends:
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