It’s a miracle
In early 1993, I began looking for a job. The first application was for an IT traineeship at Cap Gemini Pandata. The company was in the process of merging with Volmac, the largest Dutch software consultancy company at the time. Cap Gemini was an international company. The new company’s name soon became Cap Volmac. Years later, it became Cap Gemini again. They had sixteen vacancies. Some 1,600 people applied, of which they selected 200 for intelligence tests. One of them was me. Before the tests began, other applicants shared discouraging tales about assessments and job interviews they had undergone. The economy fared poorly, so there weren’t many jobs. Many graduates had been searching for a long time. It was discouraging, so I expected to remain unemployed for quite a while. But that wasn’t meant to be.
The intelligence tests went well, despite my impression that I had messed them up. They were mostly about pattern recognition, which was to my advantage. They then invited me to an interview and to take some additional psychological tests. On my way to the appointment, Dirk from dormitory DANT took the seat across from me on the train. That was a bit of a coincidence. I hadn’t seen him for years, and I lived in Hengelo at the time, so not on the campus. Dirk asked me why I was wearing a suit. I told him about the interview. He started laughing loudly. ‘Your tie is a mess,’ he said, ‘Let me fix it for you.’ He then arranged the tie correctly.
Had this particular event, which appeared purely accidental at the time, not transpired, Cap Gemini may not have hired me. The interview and the tests also went well. My misfortune, stemming from not fitting in during my student years, led me to investigate and understand cultures and cultural differences, so it wasn’t hard to translate Cap Gemini’s expectations for its future employees into test answers. The tests demonstrated that I fit perfectly into Cap Gemini’s new corporate culture, which they had just formulated during the merger process. Many senior employees didn’t fit that profile, it soon turned out. Cap Gemini also stressed that I was the master of my own destiny. It was one of their company slogans. Master of my own destiny. Wow! I had never felt like that before.
Cap Gemini hired me and sent me to a junior programming class to prepare for the first assignment. My self-confidence was low because I had manipulated the test to make it seem like I fit in. And it was after five years of everything in my life having gone wrong, leaving me with zero self-confidence. I felt unfit for the job and was afraid to turn up. But then again, if you don’t show up, you have already lost, so I took my chances. These feelings receded once the class had started. They taught us that programmes need a structure: a setup to do things like initialising variables, the body where the real action is, and a conclusion where you report on the results, so like printing output. They also said that it was good practice for the programme’s name to say what it does. So, if the programme prints output, you could name it PrintOutput. That helps make programmes easier to understand.
We learned to work with Oracle by creating screens and reports. I made jokes about a programme nicknamed DoeAlles (DoEverything) that I planned to write. It was to have a setup, a body and a conclusion, so much was already clear at the time. The programme was supposed to do everything, as the names suggest, and everything really meant everything. I was starting my career, so there seemed to be plenty of time to work on it. It is noteworthy because we exist inside such a programme. It was, of course, a practical joke. Programmers make them quite often. More were to follow. I could indulge myself in test scripts, like making a SOAP call containing a message called ‘Good Times Bad Times’, the name of a soap series on television in the Netherlands. Or Mr Huge Overweight Bear ordering an automatic bee milking machine.
My classmates usually discussed what car they would choose once they were on the job. They hardly talked about anything else. I was the only one planning to use public transport. Not surprisingly, I was not a model employee. One classmate, Ad, a cheerful guy from the Eindhoven area, expressed his amazement at the company having hired me. ‘There were 1,600 applicants. And they picked you? How could it happen? It’s a miracle!’ Ad and I had a good laugh about it. His last name, Bourgonje, referred to Burgundy. In the Netherlands, a Burgundian lifestyle denotes enjoyment of life and good food, most often found near Eindhoven. And Ad radiated this lifestyle. He seemed the personification of it. His first name, Ad, and his coming from the Eindhoven area are a noteworthy coincidence as A******* D****** chose to live there, and AD are Her initials.
With regard to the work that awaits us
My first assignment was on a project at the former Cap Gemini’s Groningen office. Volmac had been a centralised corporation with a large office in Utrecht. Groningen was a remote corner of the country, so they didn’t have much business there. The people working in Groningen all came from the Cap Gemini Pandata branch. The Groningen office became vacant as the merger company centralised in the Utrecht office. That made it possible to station programmers in the office in what would become a new concept called a software factory, putting us at the cutting edge of innovative organisational development.
The Volmac people wore suits. Cap Gemini Pandata was the product of mergers of smaller software corporations, so it is a mixture of cultures. Some wore a suit, but most didn’t. The merger company Cap Volmac didn’t require you to wear a suit unless it was the dress code of the corporation they sent you to. I had worn a suit at the programming classes, but arriving at the Groningen office in one made me an oddball. The office was close to home, allowing me to change into casual clothes during the noon break.
On the first day, my colleagues asked me to familiarise myself with the functional designs of a project system named PROBIS that we were to maintain. These were folders with diagrams and formal language. After browsing them for several hours, I was done. Someone said, ‘Oh no! You have depleted your work stockpile for this month entirely.’ On the wall was a printout of the PROBIS data model. It was a tangle of arrows named relations and blocks named entities with obscure names. And inside these blocks was a list of the entity’s attributes.
I had become part of a team of six with a few colourful personalities and a project leader, Arno. KPN’s real estate department, a Dutch telecommunications company, hired us to work on Oracle screens and reports. Only, they didn’t come up with work. There was nothing to do for several months. But we had a lot of fun, and I had far more fun in five months than in five student years. Our project manager, Arno, was an ambitious career guy wearing a suit. He was not a local and stayed in a hotel. Arno organised project meetings and demanded progress reports he could present to senior management, even though we did nothing.
One team member, a graduate linguist, produced eloquently written progress reports. He once wrote, ‘Concerning the work that awaits us, we can only assume a wait-and-see attitude.’ We also mocked the new corporate culture and measured each of us against the scales of the corporate values. I was definitely ‘daring’, a colleague noted. Another team member, Pieter, was an anarchist. He had previously been in the squatters’ movement and always wore the same orange sweater. Perhaps he had two orange sweaters and switched them regularly, but that remains unclear. He was the type of guy who might wear the same sweater for months.
Pieter lived 400 metres from the Cap Volmac office and walked to work. When the project ended, he had to go to another office building in Groningen. He complained jokingly that the distance was twice as long. Pieter often mocked Arno and his ambitions. Once, when Pieter was in the elevator with Arno and a few others, he said, ‘Arno, as the project leader of this project, you have it doubly difficult.’ You could see Arno cheering up. Finally, some recognition. And then Pieter continued, ‘First, you have absolutely nothing to do, and second, you don’t radiate any authority.’
At the time, Windows was gradually becoming the standard operating system. It had new features, like WAF files for sounds. Some team members played around with these features, so if I started my computer, it sometimes made an unexpected noise. I had so much time on my hands that I familiarised myself with Oracle database administration. I also took some courses and did a few exams. But there was so much time and nothing to do, so I sometimes went out late and then caught up on my sleep at the office. Once, I lay down underneath my desk to take a nap.
Then, Arno came in. He planned to give me a pointless assignment, but didn’t see me sitting behind the desk. So he asked Bert-Jan, who sat at the desk opposite, ‘Does B*** sit here?’ In Dutch, sitting can have the same meaning as being. This particular choice of words gave Bert-Jan an escape, so he answered, ‘No, he does not SIT here.’ And that was correct. I was lying there. And so, Arno proceeded to bother someone else with the redundant task. Bert-Jan also came from a remote place, Enschede, close to the German border, so when there was an assignment in Poland, they offered it to him. The managers in Utrecht may really have thought that Enschede was close to Poland.
At some point, high-ranking managers from Utrecht came over to visit us. They planned to set up a software factory in which people at the Cap Volmac office would develop software for the company’s customers. We were the only team in the entire company already doing that. Okay, we weren’t doing that already because work hadn’t come in yet. In any case, we were at the cutting edge of innovative organisational development, and Groningen was the place to see it happen. And so, the Utrecht management big shots, for once, made the arduous trip to the edge of civilisation, Groningen.
Arno was soon busy preparing the office for the visit. He divided the team into departments, including functional design, programming, and testing, each with two employees, and management, which was himself. Arno ordered us to clean up the office, create signs for functional design, programming, testing, and management, and display them on the doors. The managers from Utrecht came by and were impressed. They said, ‘This is how we are going to do work in the future.’ We later made jokes about it, ‘This is how we are going to do work in the future. Doing nothing all day.’
After a few months, the work came in, so Arno was busy managing our work. He constantly demanded progress updates. It soon became apparent we would miss our deadline at the end of July. Before Arno went on holiday, he discussed the situation with our customer and arranged a new deadline for the end of August. Once Arno was gone and no longer bothered us, things suddenly went smoothly, so we met the original deadline in July. When Arno returned, the programmes were already running at the customer’s site. His superiors praised him for delivering a month ahead of schedule. He was on his way to a stellar career. Perhaps he received a nice bonus as well.
There is room for improvement
After nine months, the project ended. My manager was a good one, which proved a stroke of luck, as management roles attract individuals pursuing status and money, so not the best people. And so he took a hint. The next assignment would be in the COBOL programming language. Having only experience in Oracle, I was about to do another course, this time in COBOL. My manager gave me a bulky COBOL book. I browsed it for a while. COBOL seemed tedious compared to Oracle. A few days later, he asked me my opinion about the book. I answered that it didn’t inspire me and that Oracle seemed more fun. He immediately cancelled the course, and from then on, I only worked with Oracle.
My next job was restructuring a database at the telecommunications company KPN. I had some database knowledge. And my managers were impressed that I had familiarised myself with database administration. And so, I did get that job. The company doubted the capabilities of their database administrator, so they hired me to reorganise one of their databases. They took this delicate task out of their database administrator’s hands and gave it to me, a novice with little experience. And so, their database administrator didn’t like me from the start. And I didn’t follow his advice because he was a bungler. After all, that was the reason they hired me. And he showed off his expertise using incomprehensible language, so I often had no clue what he was talking about anyway.
It was a politically sensitive environment. The telecommunications company had previously been a government operation. It was also why the office was in Groningen, as the government had relocated its headquarters to promote regional economic development in this lagging outskirt. The government recently privatised it and put its shares on the stock market. The board wanted to purge the old-fashioned government bureaucrats from management positions to replace them with boastful people in suits. At least, that seemed the plan if you looked at KPN’s job advertisements. A former fellow student of business administration recognised me, even though I didn’t recognise him. He asked me what I was doing there, so I said something about my IT job. That was clearly beneath his station. He worked at KPN as a manager and boasted about the number of people working under him. He fitted the profile of the people KPN was recruiting.
Six years later, KPN nearly went bust because of excessive risk-taking during the Internet bubble. Mission accomplished. Billions of euros went down the drain. And burdened with 55 billion euros of debt, the company had to fire thousands of employees. But that was six years into the future. The head of the department I worked for was a risk-averse bureaucrat fearing for his job. If something went wrong, his head might roll. The database administrator might have felt that his position was on the line, too. He often complained about me to the department head. And the head passed on these complaints to Cap Volmac. I also had a team leader who more accurately reported how I was doing to the department head and my account manager, so they didn’t take me off the job.
Yet, I caused a major accident. To reorganise the database, I needed a list of the tables in the production database and their sizes. Production is the database that matters. The data in the production database is precious. For that reason, I had no access to the production database. There are also databases for development and testing. However, the job required production data, so I prepared a file named tablelist.sql containing a query that returned it. And for once, they allowed me to access the production database using a tool called SQL Plus. I could start the script by typing @tablelist and pressing enter. I started typing @t. The system didn’t respond.
And so, I pressed enter to see if there was any response at all. A few seconds later, the system responded: table dropped, table dropped, table dropped. I cancelled the script, but it was too late. Some precious data was already lost. Back then, in 1994, it wasn’t possible to restore the database to the moment before the accident, which was a new feature that was about to be introduced. Today, you also don’t need to perform database restructuring because the database software does it automatically. The operators had to restore the backup from the previous night, so a day’s work was lost. The database administrator had left a file named t.sql in the SQL*Plus directory, which dropped the tables. Only a bungler would do something like that. It thus wasn’t my fault. Everyone knew, but it reflected poorly on me nonetheless. And it was odd. How much bad luck can you have?
The fuss made Cap Volmac send me to the Professional Skills course. I was not politically sensitive. I was aware of that because of my troubles during my student years, so I found it a good idea. And the course taught me something. Positive framing can contribute to a better atmosphere. You can call it political correctness. If it is a complete mess, you can say, ‘There is room for improvement.’ It is the same mess, but it sounds a lot better. A consultant’s primary responsibility is not to solve problems but to make money for Cap Volmac by making the customer happy. Careers depend to a large degree on social skills. That comes with a drawback. Problems don’t get solved if the required measures are unpopular. I let it all pass me by, focused on my task, and finished the database restructuring job.
The next assignment was at the real estate department of the same telecommunications company. They had hired me to make database queries in their financial system for management information and assigned me to the financial department. Usually, managers or salespeople desired their reports promptly. It was always very important and, of course, very urgent, so I jokingly called them life-and-death queries. It took a few hours to write a query, verify the output, and deliver the report. By then, it was often no longer needed. The availability of the data, rather than necessity, created a demand for these reports. In other words, the reporting usually wasn’t that important. Over time, I found patterns in their requests, so I made a set of standard queries with parameters and delivered 90% of the reports on the spot. No one had ever thought of that, so they saw me as a genius and hired me for longer.
There was a reorganisation at the time. All the departments laid off people, and the financial department I worked for had assigned one employee for dismissal. Then came the accountants to check the administration. And there was, as you can say, ‘Room for improvement.’ Only one individual had done his work properly. It was the man who was about to be fired. That didn’t matter. They fired him nonetheless. He was in his late fifties, about six years away from retirement, and had received a sizeable inheritance. He probably also received severance pay, allowing him to retire early, so he didn’t care. Someone must have selected him. He was a loner. It made me think that the best employees can be the least popular with management.
There was also an opportunity to learn from the department’s management, which usually took a wait-and-see approach. Once, I alerted them of a looming problem, and they answered, ‘We will address the problem when it arises.’ At the time, I jumped on looming issues like a tiger, trying to surprise the problem before it surprised me, so I found their attitude quite funny and jokingly called it ‘management by doing nothing’. But most problems you anticipate never materialise, and if they do, often in a different manner than expected. And so your preparations are nearly always in vain. I was too on edge and had to calm down.
Hit the moving target
Cap Volmac emphasised employability. You were responsible for your employment by ensuring your skills remained in demand and up to date. That was what they meant by being master of your own destiny. And in the constantly changing market for skills, you had to ‘hit the moving target,’ they called it. You must go where the demand for skills is, and anticipate what is coming. During a company meeting, they once gave us toy guns to aim at moving targets on a large projection screen in the front of the room. Times were changing, and I had been working on the real estate department’s obsolete systems for a few years. My manager and I agreed that catching up with the latest developments was better than maintaining outdated software.
In 1995 and 1996, Oracle introduced two new development tools, Developer/2000 and Designer/2000. They sent me far away from home, to Zeist, where Cap Volmac had just started an Oracle Developer/2000 software factory modelled after the example we had previously set in the Groningen office when we were pioneering on the cutting edge of innovative organisational development. They were a group of people working with Oracle Developer/2000. Zeist was far from home, so they put me in Hotel Heidepark in nearby Bilthoven. On Mondays, I took the first train from Groningen to Den Dolder, where I had a parked bicycle at the train station. From there, I went to work at Zeist.
In the evening, I went to the hotel in Bilthoven, where I parked my bicycle between the expensive cars. I stayed there during the week, and on Friday afternoons after work, I took the bicycle back to Den Dolder and took the train from there to Groningen or Sneek to visit Ingrid, or to Nijverdal to visit my parents. You could eat at the hotel, and they had a posh lady with a German accent who would advise you on the menu. The Cap Volmac budget allowed me to eat there only twice a week, and only the cheapest menu, so she soon left me alone. Bilthoven was the posh village A******* came from, and She had repeated the word Zeist many times for no apparent reason. That was peculiar, a bit magical even. If witches did exist, which seemed unlikely, A******* had to be one. It intrigued me.
There was a booklet issued by the university with the home addresses of the students’ parents in my belongings. Because I stayed in Bilthoven for several months, and had a lot of time on my hands, I cycled to the street where A******* had lived and looked at the house where She had lived two or three times, and once checked the name on the front door to see if the name tag matched Her last name. It was not far from the hotel. Her parents still lived there, it seemed. I didn’t expect to run into. It was a weekday, and She would probably visit Her parents during weekends. On one of those trips, an elderly lady walked a dog near that house. The dog pooped. I saw it happening. The lady said, with that typical hot potato in her mouth, ‘He never does that.’ It was the kind of village where dogs don’t poop. It illustrated how different A*******’s life must have been from mine.
After a few months, Cap Volmac relocated the software factory to Utrecht, so I moved there as well and ended up in a posh neighbourhood, Maliebaan. The rent was high but less than a hotel. The latest tool was Oracle Designer 2000, which Oracle introduced around that time. It had a promising future. Designer/2000 could generate Developer/2000 programmes, so you didn’t need to write them yourself. I gained experience with Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 and took several additional courses. The Cap Volmac management hyped a new buzzword, OTACE, which stands for ‘On Time Above Customer Expectations’. With a fixed deadline, you could lower the customer’s expectations by promising less than you plan to deliver. Making as few promises as possible is always a good idea, as lowering the bar increases the chance of success.
After a year, I hoped for a Designer/2000 assignment near home. My manager agreed. Yet, there was trouble brewing once again. An account manager came up with a prospective assignment. I knew him. He was a rough guy who only cared about his bonus. People like him might have done well in the Wild West, playing poker, staring down opponents and engaging in brawls in saloons. I told him I had specifically aimed for a Designer/2000 assignment because I had invested a lot of time and effort in it. He said, ‘The customer is planning to switch to Designer/2000, and you can play a role in that process.’ He didn’t disclose any additional information. His vagueness put me on high alert, and I presumed he was planning to dupe me. And so, I warned him that I would decline the job if it weren’t Designer/2000.
I contacted my manager and discussed the situation with him, telling him that something did not seem right. I had invested a lot of time in Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 and had been away from home for a year. I would rather stay in Utrecht for a few months to get a proper Designer/2000 assignment. Designer/2000 was just released, so work had yet to come in. If you intend to hit a moving target, you must aim just in front of it, considering the direction of the movement. It takes time for the bullet to arrive at the target. By then, the target had already moved a bit further. So, I was already there, where the target would soon arrive. And there was plenty of work at the software factory. And so, I asked him if I could decline the job if it weren’t Designer/2000. He said that sales targets were important and we all must do our bit. But I was supposed to be the master of my own destiny. Knowing that my Designer/2000 skills would soon be in high demand, I said I would look for another employer if that was his stance. He then gave in.
The account manager pressed on, ready to make the kill. Before the interview with the customer, another department of the telecommunications company, we once more discussed the assignment. And again, he didn’t say much more than, ‘They are planning to switch to Designer/2000, and you can play a role in that process.’ It seemed he was planning to ruin my career for his bonus. Once more, I warned him in no uncertain terms. And despite his name being Warner, he didn’t appear to understand what a warning was. Then came the interview. The department manager told me they planned to use Designer/2000, but their people would do the Designer/2000 work. They needed me to maintain their obsolete systems. And my resume was perfect as I had been looking after the old programmes of their real estate department for a long time. That was the role I could play in the process. And the account manager knew that all along.
Assuming the account manager was ready to close the deal and seal my fate, I declined, saying I hadn’t been informed of the assignment’s nature. And so I humiliated the account manager in front of the customer, making Cap Volmac lose face. The account manager probably believed he could get away with it. Indeed, I didn’t want to cause a fuss again, but I thought Designer/2000 to be crucial for my future employment. Life is a bitch. If you end up with obsolete skills, you end up unemployed. Later, my manager said that my actions had raised several eyebrows in higher management. I was a model employee, a true master of my destiny, but more than Cap Volmac had hoped for.
A job in Groningen soon came. At the KPN pension fund, they were in the information planning stage, determining whether rebuilding their pension system in Designer/2000 would be possible. I was there for only a few months to make the pilot programmes in Designer/2000. Their data model missed a crucial component, registration dates, allowing you to recalculate claims using the most recent data or go back in time and do the pension calculation based on the available data of that time. People could make errors that need correction or change the calculation rules, perhaps even retroactively, making registration dates a crucial feature in pension calculations. You also needed a complete account of the previous registrations so you couldn’t overwrite them. It was not that difficult to figure out. Once I had done it, a pension fund employee told me the old system had that feature as well. If the wheel hadn’t existed yet, I might have invented it.
Soon afterwards, I went to the Niemeijer tobacco factory. The head of the production department desired a planning system. He didn’t trust the old-fashioned IT department. He had the budget and preferred to spend it on a system he wanted rather than on what the IT department would offer him. And so we had a room in the factory rather than in the office building where the IT department was. Niemeijer had hired an information analyst, Feikje, from a local IT bureau named Vertis. Vertis primarily operated in the province of Groningen. It specialised in factory production and Oracle, as it was a spin-off from a local potato-flour factory’s IT department, which ran its systems on Oracle. And so, they knew factory production planning. That was indeed a specialism.
The system dealt with products and production lines. The production lines had speeds and options that allowed them to produce specific products, so if there was a production requirement for a period, such as a week, the system could plan production, knowing which production lines could make these products and at which speeds. I could never have designed such a system. Feikje was unwilling to compromise on quality, so the system became much better than the head of production had anticipated. It showed all the possible options for which production lines to use for which product, some of which no one had ever considered. Feikje had the backing of the production department, so there were feuds with the IT department. Their chief information architect was near retirement and didn’t understand what we were doing. He bothered Feikje with silly questions that annoyed her.
Feikje had married a dentist. She had previously lived in the same neighbourhood, Lewenborg, where I lived at the time. There, she had a conflict with the same dentist I had left because I didn’t trust him. After moving to Lewenborg, I selected this dentist. At the first visit, he took X-rays and said a cavity was developing beneath a filling. He showed me the picture and pointed at a dark spot. Another filling had a similar dark area beneath it, which he claimed was not a cavity. I was unqualified to evaluate these X-rays, but the areas were alike, so the dentist lied. Feikje was already dating her future husband, who was a dentist-in-training at the time. They also realised something was wrong there, which adds some credibility to my suspicion. In hindsight, it was a noteworthy coincidence.
Walking out of Paradise, once again
Ingrid and I began planning to live together. Meanwhile, I considered becoming an EDP auditor as my graduation assignment was on EDP auditing. It could benefit my career, as programming would not lead to higher ranks or salaries. That made it a dubious choice as I like programming, not desk work and telling others what to do. EDP auditing also meant switching employers and joining an accountancy firm. Despite having heard about those firms’ long work hours and elitist attitudes, I applied to Moret Ernst & Young. They invited me to an interview. They expected me to work at least 40 hours per week and then study 20 hours without compensation. Had the idea of becoming an EDP auditor truly inspired me, I would have done it, but programming was fun, making the sacrifice unattractive. Their arrogant attitude also turned me off. I said that the prospect of working such long hours didn’t excite me, and expected not to hear from them again.
A few weeks later, at 11:30 PM, the telephone rang. The phone awoke me, making me wonder what kind of idiot was calling me in the middle of the night. It was Moret Ernst & Young begging me to work for them. The guy on the phone said he couldn’t discard my resume. I had skills that were in high demand. He seemed to consider midnight regular working hours, so I declined again. He didn’t realise that calling someone in the middle of the night was insane. I remember him saying they were desperate and even tried to hire leftists like me. So, people who didn’t like to be called at night were leftists. Shortly afterwards, their firm had a recruitment advertisement in a magazine with a giant picture of a salmon with an arrow pointing at its nose and the text, ‘We are only interested in the salmon’s nose. We have no interest whatsoever in the rest of the salmon.’ They only wanted the cream of the crop and were not at all interested in the remainder. Ingrid and I laughed about their smug arrogance while they had been begging me to work for them.
In 1997, I moved to Sneek. After moving, I looked for a job nearby because the long bus rides to Groningen soon proved a drag on my physique. There was a vacancy for a functional designer at FBTO, an insurer in Leeuwarden. They invited me for an interview, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether the job was right for me. It was not programming but writing out specifications, so I hesitated. The salary was also low, leading them to think that was the reason, so they raised the offer, which was still low. Taking a job only because it is close to home is not the wisest of decisions. Months later, I decided to do it against better judgment as there were few jobs in the area. And because they also lacked alternatives, they hired me despite my hesitations, which wasn’t the smartest idea either. I later learned that the personnel officer had warned them against it. Once on the job, my task turned out to include serving as a project leader, which also proved quite uninspiring.
The insurer had split the IT department into smaller teams working for a business unit. Every three weeks, we planned our tasks for the coming three weeks, and a business unit representative determined the priorities. It worked well because there were fewer political games, such as business units competing for resources. The IT department was exceptionally well organised compared to what I had seen elsewhere. They had done an excellent job. This way of running IT departments became commonplace in the following decades and is known as Agile.
The people in the team knew what they were doing, making me redundant as a project leader. There is no point in managing people who know what to do. The atmosphere was friendly. Having grown accustomed to challenging conditions and people trying to make my life miserable, I soon felt out of place. I could get used to the friendliness, but not the job itself. All those documents, meetings, and priorities were dreadful, making me jealous of the cat, Sandor, who didn’t go to work and lay around doing nothing. I had cheerful thoughts like, ‘Only 35 years left until retirement.’ If that is optimism, then that is not a good sign. Programming was much more fun. I was qualified for Oracle, but FBTO didn’t use it. I decided to try my luck as a freelance Oracle specialist in Designer/2000 and database administration. And so, I walked out of Paradise again, but this time out of free will. After all, Cap Volmac had taught me to be the master of my own destiny. But an ominous incident would soon suggest I was not.
Freelance jobs
After contacting a few freelance bureaus, which led to an ominous incident that further suggested A******* interfered with my life using magic, I began working for a small bureau named Betamax, led by Martien, a retired manager. He talked as if he had a hot potato in his mouth, so an elite accent, but was nonetheless an agreeable man. He made lots of money but was probably in it for fun, to have something to do rather than watching out of the window at how the grass grows on the neighbour’s lawn and playing bingo with his colleagues-in-age in some hall with orange juice on the table.
He had a sense of humour, so we had a good laugh after I had once answered the phone with ‘Superb***’ because I had expected a call from Ingrid. And he said that I was a man of few words, but that everything I said was meaningful, meaning that I didn’t engage in small talk, so a keen observer he also was. The first year, I worked at the insurer Univé in Zwolle. They were outsourcing their IT department and needed someone to monitor their remaining databases until the system transfer was complete. I was there just in case something happened, so there wasn’t much to do. To pass the time, I studied to become an Oracle-certified professional database administrator.
It was easy money. I made €70 an hour for doing close to nothing. My colleague, a regular employee, might have been jealous, and understandably, as I made twice as much as he did for doing nothing. He constantly criticised me. I regularly did extra things I wasn’t supposed to do to prevent problems. If you get paid handsomely, you make the most of your task. His criticism began to annoy me, so on one occasion, I did not fix an issue. I could have done so, but it was not my job. He criticised me for that also. Having extensive experience with similar situations, I said, ‘If I had done it, you would have criticised me for that, as it is not my job. Whatever I do, I can’t do it right anyway. So, what is the point of trying?’ He took the hint, and the criticising stopped.
Univé was one of the few organisations that still had a time clock. You had to check in if you arrived at work, and check out if you left. I had not seen that for a long time. I had no car, but one of the Univé employees lived in Sneek, so I often drove with him and paid for the trips. It was quite a distance, and I didn’t like travelling every day. Travelling wore me out, even when someone else drove. And so, I rented a room outside Zwolle in the countryside and stayed there a few nights every week. The landlady, Ms Mallinckrodt, was a divorcee, and as I remember, her former husband had been a CEO or owned a business. He ran off with his secretary, who was probably much younger than she was and likely good-looking as well, so it was a classic script. She had two sons who were already grown up and no longer lived with her. She had an air of elite status and sometimes said her home was worth over a million guilders. One remark made it clear she viewed me as a kind of peasant. ‘He is not a man of the world,’ she once confided to my wife, Ingrid. Ingrid was pregnant at the time, and sometimes came over, later also with our baby.
Ms Mallinckrodt told me that she had little income and needed tenants for that reason. She also seemed to desire male companionship, not for a relationship, but a man in the house to talk with. And as a woman alone in a home, with strangers roaming about, you never know. She lived in the countryside, so I cycled to work and sometimes went on bicycle trips in the area, thinking my life had turned for the better. I had a family and was making a lot of money. I couldn’t have imagined that in late 1989. It wouldn’t get any better than that, I surmised. Ms Mallinckrodt was also kind. She once lent us her car during an emergency. Ingrid had come over, but she had left the heating on because we had a tenant, the infamous Mr V, but she had closed the radiator valve near the thermostat, making me fear the installation would overheat. We returned home late in the evening. If we had used public transport, we might not have made it home.
At the end of 1999, a software consultancy firm named CMG hired me to work on the euro preparations for the Friesland Bank, a small independent bank in Leeuwarden. It was still independent, perhaps because the Frisians were proud nationalists. They had their own language and supported local businesses, such as their bank and insurers. The people from CMG wore suits, and since the job was at a bank, I wore one too. One of their systems required special attention as it was a perfect example of feature creep. The bank had a system bloated with exotic features but lacked people who understood it. It was the marketing department’s wet dream, but the IT department’s nightmare. It was a company savings system. Its customers were employers who could open savings accounts for their employees. The account managers at Friesland Bank offered their customers a wider range of options than those at other banks.
On top of that, Oracle had built the system on a fixed price, so Oracle had given minimal effort to maximise its profits. Oracle had used inexperienced programmers and cut back on testing. As people at the bank didn’t understand the system, they got away with it. And so, there was as much room for improvement as there could possibly be. The following issues made the conversion complex:
- Each account could have three monthly balances: a savings balance, a premium balance and an accrued interest balance.
- Employers could negotiate interest rates and their terms, so there were hundreds of different combinations.
- The interest could be added to the month’s balance, paid out, or deposited on a separate interest balance in the account.
- There were bugs in the system, so the balances didn’t add up, and, as it later turned out, the system didn’t calculate the interest correctly.
- The balances were the sum of all the transactions on that balance. One euro was 2.20371 guilders, leading to tricky rounding errors.
Converting that system to the euro was cumbersome because all transactions and balances had to be in balance, month by month and by category within each month, whereas the other systems had only one balance. And, contrary to the other systems, many balances didn’t already match due to system bugs. The project leader from CMG first asked me to investigate the system and write a plan, which I did. It was a global plan with approaches to known issues. It was impossible to foresee what other problems might arise, but the plan had the promise of success.
It took me over a year to build the conversion, and the conversion programme ran for four days, while the other euro conversions ran for a few hours at most. The programme could crash due to insufficient memory, perhaps caused by a leak in Oracle PL/SQL, which was relatively new at the time. Yet, the programme was restartable and would resume where it had stopped. The project leader didn’t like the idea of the conversion taking so long. He pressed me to improve the conversion’s performance.
That was a waste of time and resources, so I told him that it took so long because of the system’s complexity. It was not a current account system that had to be operational, but a savings system that could be down for a week without customers noticing. There was no internet access to bank accounts at the time. The contributions came in once per month, and at the end of the month, so it could remain out of operation for four days. There was no reason to worry. He wasn’t satisfied with my answers, so he hired a performance expert to review the programme. The expert couldn’t make it run faster, either.
The bank was close to home, so I took the train every day. One day, on the way to Leeuwarden, the train suddenly halted in the middle of the countryside. The train driver hared into the meadows to a sheep in distress. It lay upside down. After returning, the driver explained on the intercom that the sheep might have died otherwise. If it couldn’t get upright, it might suffocate. Then, the train continued its trip. It was the first time I had seen a sheep upside down and also learned what to do about it. That came in handy, a few years later, when Ingrid and I were walking with my son Rob near the Weerribben, when a sheep had ended up in this unfortunate position. I jumped over the fence and put the sheep on its legs. That was my first sheep saved.
Meanwhile, a serious calamity had occurred. An overzealous account holder with some calculation skills had verified the complex interest calculations and found a discrepancy. And it soon proved to be a symptom of a much bigger problem. Many interest calculations had gone wrong. Some were too low, while most were too high. The bank had paid 500,000 guilders in interest too much, which it then decided to collect. Account holders received letters requesting them to refund the excess interest. Some employees found it unwise because it wasn’t much money and would reflect poorly on the bank. It might have been better to fix the problem by quietly giving people what they were due when their interest calculation was too low, and leaving the rest as it was.
That was not what the bank’s board decided to do. They gave me the task of correcting the interest calculation, as I was the only one who understood the system. It included calculating discrepancies in collections or payments. The problem was not only in the interest rate calculations but also in data faults, such as missing or duplicate interest rates or balances that didn’t add up. As they would have said at the professional skills course, there was room for improvement. More plainly stated, it was a total mess. No one understood what was happening. And no one seemed to care. I found myself in a morass, alone. No one else could help me. That didn’t unnerve me, but I had to be careful. If I made a mistake, no one would notice until it was too late. Patching the interest calculations became nearly as time-consuming as the euro conversion.
There was even more room for improvement than I had previously feared. Once the improvements for the interest calculations were ready, the tester ran the usual test cases and gave the changes her blessing, much to my dismay. I was amazed at the sloppy attitude of the people responsible. These test cases hadn’t uncovered these errors in the first place. I told the manager responsible for the operations, ‘If we make another error, and the bank has to correct it again, you will have a major public relations disaster. More testing is required.’ I proposed doing the tests myself by loading a selection of data covering all known situations into an Excel sheet, performing the interest calculations in Excel, then running a test and investigating any differences to determine whether the error was in Excel or in the system itself. My manager agreed, and so we did it like so. It was not 100% testing, but in all likelihood, all the significant errors would manifest. After performing these tests, we implemented the changes. Subsequent interest calculations showed no errors. After the euro conversion had finished in January 2002, they let me go.
It seemed that not everyone liked me. I focused on getting the job done and had to work around other people’s sloppiness. I never used harsh words, but saying that the testing is insufficient can rub people the wrong way. You could interpret that as incompetence. It doesn’t necessarily mean the tester was incompetent. The system was far more complex than those at larger banks, so the decision-makers had made a judgment error to begin with. And I had a deviant working schedule, and worked fewer hours. When my manager once grilled me on the train for leaving 30 minutes early for an appointment, I answered that the bank only paid me for the hours worked and that it wouldn’t cost them anything. And that it was agreed upon.
She didn’t seem okay with the answer. I had made the agreement with the software bureau CMG, so not with the bank itself, so she may not have known about it. They had their rules, and deviating from them was not appreciated. Ingrid had once worked at the bank as a cleaning lady before we met. She sometimes took her mother’s car. They didn’t allow her to park in their garage, saying it was for employees, but they had already left the building. Only after Ingrid quit her job and the bank couldn’t find a replacement did they offer her a parking spot. I had tried to get a regular job there, but they had turned me down. That turned out to be my good fortune. The bank went under after the 2008 credit crisis. A larger bank took over their operations.
The economy fared poorly. I couldn’t find a new project, and remained unemployed for several months. Officially, Betamax still employed me. I had worked for Betamatch on temporary projects for more than three consecutive years, which automatically made me a regular employee. Martien, the owner, asked me to quit my job, but that would make me ineligible for unemployment benefits. And I had warned Martien several times about the situation that might arise, which he believed was so remote a possibility that he didn’t seem to care, and so he let it happen. I asked him to fire me instead. There is no work, so that wouldn’t be an issue. Martien, a gentleman whose business was still doing well, didn’t like to fire people, so he offered me a contract with a low salary and a bonus if I brought in money. Yet, without improvement in sight, I started seeking regular employment. After a few months, I found a job at a government agency that processes traffic fines.
Latest revision: 7 April 2026
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The Plan For The Future 