Saved by the Bell

Author © Scott D. Zachary

       In the year and a half that I had worked there, I never saw anything like it. The managers shut the company down, and dozens of employees from all the departments gathered around the packing table at Nite Lite to express their appreciation and to wish me well in my new endeavor. This unique honor was a tribute to my having improved all of their jobs dramatically. To quote the owner:

“During this past year, not only has Scott completely mastered our systems, but has reviewed and modified virtually every computer program of the company, eliminating the hundreds of operating glitches that had plagued our company before his arrival. ... [Scott] has had a very positive impact on all of his fellow workers.”

       In addition to having fixed the most bug-infested system I’ve ever seen, I jumped whenever anyone at Nite Lite requested a software improvement that would make their jobs more efficient. In fact, I jumped for a hundred hours a week during the first year of those sixteen months.

       Now, do you see why the employees at Nite Lite were anxious to show me their gratefulness for all of my super-human efforts? They gave me many presents at my going-away party. Some of the gifts were meant to be funny, such as a life-size blow-up doll with realistic accoutrements. I did take that inflatable companion with me to South Africa, but that’s all I’m going to say about that.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       I enjoy combining unlikely combinations of words and speculating whether they’ve ever been used together in a sentence at any time in history. I also love to conjure unlikely combinations of events in my life. With that in mind, it would be interesting to know if anyone else has ever called the American Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, requesting job contacts that landed them a position half-way around the world in Johannesburg, South Africa. I doubt it. Let’s throw in one more unlikely factor: Did they call from Clarksville, Arkansas when they did it? The most improbable twist is that it wouldn’t have happened if Governor Clinton weren’t skyrocketing in the presidential polls at the time (explained in Tantalizing Travels).

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Sterling, the Director of my new company, flew to the States for a thirty-day vacation at the same time that I was going to South Africa. He had arranged for us to cross paths at LaGuardia Airport. Sterling recognized my bright red Nite Lite baseball cap at the same instant that I spotted his shiny bald head. He and I had a wham-bam meeting over lunch before we dashed off to our respective flights. Sterling called our touch-and-go meeting his “sanity check” to make sure I wasn’t a fruitcake. I apparently passed his lunacy test. By golly.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       My newest sparkle unfolded seamlessly in July 1992. A gorgeous day curtsied my arrival at the Johannesburg International Airport. No “Welcome Scott!” signs in sight, so I bought a Castle beer near the gate and lounged, keeping my red baseball cap beacon on my head. I didn’t care about anything, except that I had achieved my dream of living overseas again. And, I stood on a different continent than my ex-wife! That’s all that mattered. I reveled in my new surroundings, occasionally looking around to see if someone might be searching for their new employee.

       I drank beer and waited contentedly. I reflected that two people made this tantalizing adventure possible: Aunt Marvelene and Teri. I owed them big-time. Aunt Marvelene subsidized my phone calls around the world. I paid her back for her telephone bills out of the cash from selling my car, but I still owed her a great big “Thank you!” I also owed Teri at Unify Corporation a choice bell, one worthy of her exceptional deed that helped to land me in Africa. With nothing but an unlikely story from me over the phone that I’d probably be going to South Africa to develop maintenance management systems using Unify’s software development tools, Teri sent me $500 worth of technical documentation on their Accell toolset and the Unify 2000 database—no charge! Not only that, she shipped them overnight at their expense. What a gal!

       I mentally devoured that forty-pound box of documents in one week, and that was the kicker that landed me here in South Africa. Teri’s attached card read: “I collect bells. Would you please send me one from South Africa?” I would make finding an appropriate bell for Teri a top priority.

       “Scott Zachary, I presume?” asked a distinguished, gray-haired gentleman.

       “You must be Jack,” I countered.

       We shook hands. Jack took my backpack and slung it over his shoulder. I walked alongside him to pick up my luggage. Waiting for my suitcases, we talked about my new job and possible accommodations. Jack offered me a room in his three-bedroom apartment, and I agreed to split the rent with him. I liked Jack’s mild-mannered drawl and his subtle wittiness. I was 35, and Jack was about twenty years older than me. He was my new boss as well as acting Director of the company in Sterling’s absence. Our personalities meshed.

       I hadn’t given any thought to the prospect of driving on the left side of the highway until I rode with Jack from the airport to my new home in Sandton—on the wrong side of the road—at 90 mph! The speed limit on most South African freeways is 140 kph (kilometers per hour) or 84 mph. On occasion, you might see someone drive the speed limit.

       “Have you ever driven on the left side of the road?” asked Jack.

       “Only as a passenger in British taxis.”

       “You’ll have a company car, a Ford XR6, like mine. You can follow me to and from work until you feel comfortable driving by yourself.”

       “Sounds good.”

       “If you’re not too tired, several of us are going to see the musical play Grease tonight. Want to go?”

       “Sure!”

       Thinking back to the first year that I lived with Aunt Marvelene, I had managed not to drink alcohol because I didn’t want to disappoint her. Plus, I was still unnerved from my stint sleeping on a jail cell floor. When I did drink after that, I did it on the weekends away from her house, usually at a hotel in Fort Smith. She made it clear that there would be no drinking on her property as she had dealt with enough of that kind of destructive nonsense from my father who drank himself to death.

       Now, far away from Aunt Marvelene, I unbridled the thoroughbred alcoholic in me. I rarely ever drank hard liquor because it made me stupid when I did. That evening before the play, Jack got me started on Bacardi and Coke. He sipped, and I swilled. What little I remember of the production was excellent.

       Jack, our secretary Lynn and her husband, a couple of other gals, and I went out dancing and drinking after the play. On our way into the apartment at 3:00 a.m., Jack mentioned, “Oh yeah, you have an appointment for a physical at eight o’clock.”

       “Eight o’clock this morning?! Today? Saturday?”

       “Sorry, I forgot.”

       “In five hours?”

       Jack woke me up at 6:30 a.m. to get ready. Lugging one of my worst hangovers ever, Jack drove me to my physical examination.

       “Aside from bleeding to death through your eyes, you are in excellent physical condition, Scott,” summarized the foxy blonde doctor.

       “Am I going to die?”

       “Probably not today.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Monday morning, I dove into MSI’s (Maintenance Services International) software package called Write Plan, a maintenance management and stores system.  Several big mines in South Africa used this software to maintain all of their equipment. They included Associated Manganese, Karee Copper Mines, several gold and platinum mines, and DeBeers Diamond Consortium. Add to that list Blue Circle Cement and a cyanide manufacturer. The programmer who originally designed Write Plan dumped about twenty minutes of wham-bam training on me, and I was off to the races.

       Jack delegated my first programming project to me: completely re-engineering the look of Write Plan by adding multi-colored character-based windows to all the hundreds of computer screens. Top level managers of big corporations worldwide had begun falling into the trap of thinking that “pretty windows” make software packages better. Not so. Businesses have paid a heavy price in development costs and hardware for those pretty screens. Nevertheless, character-based (“green screen”) software was already losing the battle to windows. My task involved modifying the logic of Write Plan to display character-based, window-like screens to keep Write Plan competitive.

       After more than a decade of designing software, the thrill of programming still enthralled me. If you’re not a logical person, you won’t understand my attraction. As spontaneous and illogical as I’ve often been in making my life’s decisions, my talent for grasping and implementing programming logic was as good as it gets. Of course, I hadn’t yet begun to sample the wares of humility. I still occasionally stumble over that virtue.

       During the evenings, I wandered through the gift shops in the Sandton Mall and browsed through the tourist shops downtown. No bells. Certainly not a fitting tribute for Teri’s uncommon kindness, but I’ll keep searching.

       I hadn’t been working in South Africa for more than a couple of weeks when the owner of Nite Lite called me at work. Jack and I were discussing the merits of user-friendly programming when our secretary Lynn poked her head in the door. “Excuse me, gentlemen. Scott, you have a call from someone named Henry at Nite Lite in Arkansas—USA—on line one.”

       I picked up the phone and punched the flashing button. “Hello, Henry. How’s it going?”

       “Scott, my worst nightmare has come true.”

       “Really? What’s the matter?”

       “As you well know, we were going to move into the new building here on Route 40 shortly after you left, and we did. Your replacement John began installing our entire network and configuring our software on this site and then disappeared. He left us in a disastrous state! He taped a note on the computer console that read: ‘My kids have gone on vacation for the summer, and so am I. Good-bye!’ Nobody can reach him. Tangled computer wires are hanging everywhere. We have one terminal working out of forty. We’re dead in the water, Scott.”

       “Wow. That is bad.”

       “Did you know this was going to happen, Scott?”

       That question set me on fire! I donated some 4,000 hours of free overtime to Henry in the sixteen months that I worked for him as I thoroughly optimized the heart of his business, and he dared to question my integrity?! “No, I did not!” I flared. “I trained John very, very thoroughly. He could do everything I can do. He should’ve easily been able to install your system in the new building, Henry. No doubt.”

       “I’m desperate. What would you do, Scott?”

       Realizing that John had dumped a grand opportunity in my lap, I put my feet up on my desk and muted the phone. “Where’s my cigar, Jack?” I pressed the phone’s speaker button so Jack could hear my wheeling and dealing. “As I see it, Henry, you have two choices. You can bring in the big guns from Pick Systems for two hundred and fifty dollars per hour. They should easily get your network up and running, and they can get your operating system in order in a week or two. However, they don’t know your software, so they’ll have to fiddle around with it for who knows how long to get it configured. John may have screwed up a lot of programs trying to jimmy-rig the network through the software. Or, you can pay to bring me back.”

       “Would you come back and get us straightened out, Scott?”

       “To be honest, I don’t want to, Henry.” (And I didn’t, especially after he had questioned my loyalty a few breaths before he pleaded for my help.) “On the other hand, I understand your predicament. Let me talk to the Director and see if he’ll let me return to the States. He’s in a meeting right now and should be out shortly. Call me back in half an hour.”

       “Okay. There’s no time to waste, Scott.”

       I hung up and grinned at Jack as he snipped the end of a Cuban cigar and handed it to me. “Well, Director...” I chomped my bicuspids into the cigar. “Are you out of that meeting yet?”

       “What’s your plan, Scott?”

       “Sterling said I would be a financial encumbrance for a while until I become billable. I think we can get Nite Lite to pay for my first couple of months’ cost here. Sixty-five dollars an hour sound reasonable to you?”

       “It sounds good to me.”

       Jack and I continued our discussion about the Write Plan software. Henry called back precisely thirty minutes after we had hung up.

Click here to read the conclusion of “Saved by the Bell”