by Randy Dyess
OUT OF GAS
Book 1 of the Out of Gas Series
By
Randy Dyess
Out of Gas
Copyright: Randy Dyess
Published: 10th October 2012
Publisher: Randy Dyess
The right of Randy Dyess to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my loving wife, Judy. Without her support none of this would be possible. She has spent countless hours without my company as I hide myself in my office working on this book and all my other projects. She has also had to do something no person should have to do, put up with my rants and raves about the economy, our government, and our media while I researched this book.
Thank you for all your support.
My Thanks
I also want to thank Judy and my mother for their tireless hours reading and editing the mess I called a rough draft. Without their help, this book would not be readable by anyone except for a few monkeys out there.
Thank you so much.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
OTHER WORKS BY RANDY DYESS
Prologue
Mark and Kelly Turner were what many people would call “Average Americans”. Their childhoods were not spent living in large cities or playing at the country club on the weekends. They were spent living with middle-class parents in small towns just outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Towns close enough to Dallas-Fort Worth to have the advantages of bigger cities for shopping and entertainment, but far enough away everyone still behaved like they lived in the country. It was not unusual for the older residents of the towns Mark or Kelly grew up in to have large backyard garden or chickens running around loose. There were even some empty lots at the edge of the towns that would hold a cow or two during the warmer parts of the year. In Mark’s hometown, old man Jones even kept an apiary of bees that would buzz around for miles during the spring and summer flower season.
While there were social groups in the schools Mark and Kelly attended, these groups didn’t ride around in $50,000 cars or spend their summers at the beach or in Europe. Students in Mark’s high school drove around in pickups and spent their time practicing for one sports team or another. Their evenings were spent working on their parent’s farms or in the family businesses. Kelly’s high school was not much different. Agricultural classes were the most popular classes in the school and Kelly spent more than one school year raising rabbits behind her house to show in the livestock show. Mark had similar experiences and raised a sheep in the backyard of his parent’s house one year before discovering computers and dropping Ag for computer programming.
Kelly really did not like raising animals for Ag class nor did she dream of the day she would get married and have children like the majority of her classmates. Kelly was the “brain” of her little school and spent her time studying and worrying about how to get into the best college she could afford. Her dream was to escape the boring existence teenagers endured when growing up in small towns across America. Like many of those small town kids, Mark and Kelly left their hometowns immediately after graduation for the excitement of going to college in a large city. Mark and Kelly happened to choose the same college in Denton and started dating soon after they discovered they both spent their summers at their grandparent’s farms in Madill, Oklahoma. They realized it was possible they saw each other at the town pool each summer when visiting their grandparents. As it turned out, Mark and Kelly had lived no more than 30 miles apart their entire lives. They never knew this until ending up together at North Texas University.
Surprising everyone they knew, Mark and Kelly married right after graduation from college. Mark changed his dream of working in San Francisco and Kelly changed her dream of a glamorous lifestyle in Manhattan for one with a family in the Dallas area. They told everyone they would turn out more successful in the smaller Dallas area than the bigger cities of San Francisco and New York. Deep down they were both like many people in the South. They did not want to move too far from their parents and change lives they were comfortable with. As it turned out, both sets of parents ended up moving within a few blocks of Mark and Kelly after their children were born. They did this to help take care of the children while Mark and Kelly pursued their careers.
While in college, Mark majored in Computer Science. After graduation, he found it was easy to find a job due to the rapid growth of computers in American corporations during the last part of the 20th century. Unlike most of his classmates, Mark did not take a job consulting or at one of the up and coming dot-com companies that were making a splash around the world at the time. He went straight into the database group of a large airline company located near the DFW airport. He would later lament this career choice cost him from getting rich. Many of his classmates received stock options and climbed the corporate ladder at those small firms. However; in the long-run, his choice turned out to be right one because of the dot-com crash in the early 2000’s. Everything came crashing down around the ears of many of his computer science friends who thought it was cool to be a CIO at a small dot-com company. Mark was happy moving up the ladder at Plains Airlines and enjoying the secure salary which came with the large company.
Kelly took a different career path. She landed a job in the Human Resource department of a large restaurant company that owned multiple restaurant chains all over the country. With her friendly personality, optimistic outlook on things, and her high IQ, Kelly rapidly advanced up the ladder at Texas Restaurants. Kelly advanced faster than Mark did and within ten years of joining the firm found herself as Vice President of Human Resources. She was responsible for managing over 15,000 employees in the 1,500 individual restaurants found in the six chains which made up Texas Restaurants.
Mark and Kelly took the first ten years of their new careers to move up the corporate ladder despite the fact both sets of parents wanted grandchildren right away. Kelly was under additional pressure from her parents as they did not think Kelly should put off having children for a corporate career. Southern tradition believed women were supposed to get married and have kids right away. Their jobs where meant to help supplement the family income and not be careers that came before family. Kelly didn’t agree with this tradition and wanted to have everything. She wanted a career, kids, marriage, and luxury vacations each summer. When the Turner’s decided the time was right; they
eventually became the parents of two beautiful little girls: Cheyenne and Dakota. Kelly was in a position of authority at work which allowed her to take a couple of months off after each baby’s birth without losing steam at Texas Restaurants. Sadly, most other new mothers at Texas Restaurants did not get to enjoy this benefit when they decided to have children. Kelly often wondered why they left their jobs after finding out they were going to have a baby.
Mark rose up the ladder as well, although not quite as fast or far as Kelly. Plains Airlines was a much larger company and it did not promote from within as Texas Restaurants. CIOs came and went and each one tended to bring in his own set of cronies to work with him. Mark did rise as far up as Director of Operations in Plains’ IT department. He oversaw a staff of over one hundred database administrators, server administrators, and software developers. As he grew older, his goal of becoming CIO at Plains Airlines faded as he seemed to be stuck at his current job level. His inability to crack the executive level at Plains Airlines always bothered him. But given his knowledge of the systems at Plains, he did find himself getting a large yearly raises and bonuses to make up for his lack of title advancement. Mark had to settle for the fact that at $180,000 a year, he was making as much money as many of the executives. Even without the title and other benefits given to executives of most American companies, Mark felt he was doing well in his career.
Mark’s income, combined with Kelly’s nearly $150,000 yearly salary, meant the Turners could afford a lifestyle many people only dreamed about. They did the regular things people with their income level did. Kids were enrolled in about every activity they wanted. The family went to professional sporting events on weekends after Mark finished his golf game and Kelly came back from her spa and shopping trips. They promptly spent each and every paycheck and bonuses on vacations, clothes at the mall, and new cars they leased every few years. They were unlike most Americans in the fact they maxed out their 401ks each year and bought large amounts of stocks through their companies stock purchase plans. Mark even set aside money to invest in other stocks recommended by members of their country club. The Turners had a dream life. But it was a dream life that was about to be shattered by the cold, hard truth of the global economy. The global economy did not care about the American dream. It did not care how much Mark and Kelly enjoyed their six thousand square foot, golf course home. It did not care about their golf outings, spa treatments, and luxury vacations. The global economy was on a course to destroy everything in the next few years.
While they lived a “dream life”, this life did not come without a price Mark and Kelly would not realize until many years later. That price, due to the pressures of their jobs, caused Kelly and Mark to miss many events which took place in their children’s lives. They did pride themselves on a promise they had made to each other that at least one of them would be there for each event as often as possible. Neither Kelly nor Mark would miss major events such as birthdays or awards. They believed coming to these major events and lavishing their children with toys and fun activities would make up for the long hours spent at work. After all, they did take them on vacations and spent most holidays with them. What they didn’t realize until much later was their children were being raised by their grandparents. As parents, Mark and Kelly were so detached from their children, the actual time they spent with the girls meant nothing to the girls or to Mark and Kelly.
Chapter 1
When Mark arrived at work at seven the next morning, he found a meeting invite for 7:30 in his inbox. The CIO wanted him to attend a meeting with Mark’s direct supervisor, Owen. It did not matter what Mark had planned during day, when the CIO said jump, you jumped. Mark cleared out all of his other scheduled meetings for the day and said to himself, “I wonder what this is about.” He hurried to get a large cup of coffee for what he thought was going to be a long day.
“Hi, Mark,” Damian said as Mark entered the executive conference room. Damian Justice was the CIO of Plains Airlines and while he only came aboard a few years ago. Mark liked him more than the other CIOs in Plains’ revolving door of C-Level executes and trusted what he said. He felt like Damian was honest with everyone and he had his staff’s best interest at heart when he made decisions on Plains’ computer systems and infrastructure.
“Morning, Damian. Morning, Owen. What’s up? ” Mark asked as he took a seat next to his immediate boss, Owen, who was Vice President of Applications.
“I asked you and Owen here to discuss the possibility of off-shoring the IT department.”
“Which sections?”
“All of it. Every last nut and bolt,” replied Damian as Mark looked at Owen for confirmation. Owen just nodded his head which caused Mark to let out a low whistle. He prepared for the day long battle about to take place to convince the latest round of executives that off-shoring everything was a bad idea. He had been with the company for twenty years and built the current computer infrastructure over those years. His knowledge of the systems and how they interacted with each other was valuable to the company. He was often called into executive l meetings to explain the details of Plains’ computer systems.
The day had gone badly with one long meeting after another on the plan of moving the IT department off-shore. They discussed the effects the move would have on the operating expenses and projected profits for the airline company. Mark was called numerous times to white board to draw out the different systems and how they communicated with each other. Over the course of the day, he drew out the data flows and described how each system would need to be changed if one went offshore before the other. It was an exhausting day for Mark. He needed to pour out twenty years’ worth of knowledge without any preparation and to multiple senior level executives over the course of the day. Owen helped some, but most of his help was for the larger picture budget items, personnel issues, and long-term plans.
“What do you think?” asked Owen as they left the latest meeting “Do you think what they are asking is even possible?”
“A few years before you came aboard, we did this same exercise. We went through the whole audit process. After determining everything which might be moved off-shore, we drew up the project plan and presented the whole thing to the stake holders. The cost and complexity of the move out-weighed the savings at the time and the project was dropped. Hopefully things will go the same this time,” replied Mark.
“I don’t know. They seemed pretty adamant about seeing this through.”
“If they do go through with the move, it will take a lot longer than the twelve months they gave us. We might use some of the work from the last time we went through this, but everything will have to be revisited. I think we are looking at three months to even know what we can do, another 18-24 months to do the work, and then another 6-12 months break everything in. This is not the easier off-shoring and out-sourcing projects we have done in the past with the smaller systems. Moving all our IT systems off-shore is huge and will take careful planning and execution to keep things from falling apart.”
“We have made some changes since the last time after finding out how undocumented the whole mess was. But after all these years of CIOs coming and going and each with his own pet projects our whole IT department is a mess. The department is a huge, complex jumble of redundant work and data being moved everywhere. Software exists without good documentation and even without the source code in place. Outdated software is running on old servers everyone is afraid to touch because they might break and we would not know how to get them back up and running. I think we should consider taking the next three years and cleaning everything up before even considering moving anything offshore,” Mark told Owen.
“I know.” said Owen. “You tried to say the same thing multiple times during the day, but they seemed to dismiss your concerns and wanted to move forward anyway. They seem to think we can clean everything up as we move it off-shore. Who knows, we might be able to use this opportunity to bring everything current. Not even bother moving older systems, j
ust replace them with new stuff. You have told to me several times how you would like to utilize the more expensive software packages by moving the custom stuff and smaller systems into them. Now may be the time to start that process.“
“Good point, but this is different.” replied Mark.” I’m worried about what will happen to the staff if they know we are going offshore with everything. How many critical people would we lose during the process? Nothing was said today about how to retain them. Usually when this happens, there is a whoosh out the door as everyone starts looking for other jobs. Although with the economy the way it is, some of your guys may have a hard time finding something else. A few of my staff have been here for years and you know how the hiring is in IT. If you are over fifty, you are a dinosaur and need to be put out to pasture, not hired.”
“We should see what we can do for them during this process. How do you think we should proceed?” Owen asked.
“I was thinking the same thing, but I haven’t gotten far enough in my inner planning to come up with an answer. I think we should rely on outside contractors and start retraining everyone here on some other job,” replied Mark. “We can keep some of them during the project and after the move we can transfer them to permanent positions. You know how techies are though, they only want to do want they know and do not just want to come to a job each day. If you don’t give them something to match their creative minds, they will not last long.”
“Well, they may have to get over it in this economy. The days of arrogant ‘I only do this’ techies may be over. They may have to just suck it up and do it in order to keep a job.”
“You know some of them won’t do that. I can name ten or twelve of the guys in my area alone that will not make the change. They are either too old to learn something new or too arrogant to think we should ask them to do something other than cutting edge programming.”
