The Lovely and charming Kim starting Flash Development

Not sure if I wrote about this before but I figured you might find it interesting.  My sexy and charming girlfriend Kim and I met a few years ago when  we were both working just South of http://www.smithdata.net .  I was a programmer and she supervised all the   Documentation  for our software (That's what our management called it - the developers called it defective vaporware but that's another issue).  Anyway, I wrote about how disfunctional this place was before but one of the worst elements of it was the stratification.  Out of 14 programmers, one other than myself had ever heard of OOP.  They were all assembler (and it was a proprietary flavor of assembler written in the mid 70's) programmers and wrote the buggiest crap you could ever imagine - with two exceptions.  (Actually there was one programmer that knew OOP when I was there, but the only other cool person in programming actually started to learn it and she kicked butt).  Only one person had a computer science degree from a 4 year school and just about everyone had a tech school degree from a really really bad tech school there in town.  We sold software to small towns (< 3 horse) and actually did quite well in South Carolina because none of the big guys really liked competing in that market.  Anyway, when they hired me we were transitioning to OOP (well, they claimed we were when they hired me and the next two unlucky folks).  We were using this crap called Visual DataFlex   and you would really have to see it to understand how bad it sucked (and the documentation actually claimed as late as 2002, that it's probably the 'best' object oriented language ever written.  This 'best' OOP language didn't have any real support for inheritance - you could only inherit from the class Array (which was one dimensional).  The president of the company was the cause of all of this sh1t.  He was an absolute nut.  In 2001 he still refused to let us do anything on the internet b/c it was just a 'fad'.  Moreoever, when I started there in 2001, they were still debating on whether or not to go to a Windows based environment - they were still green screen and the president again thought that Windows was a fad.  I know this sounds like BS but I can prove  every bit of this.  All the president cared about was the grass and landscaping, and whether or not there were ant hills - he REALLY hated Ants.  He had  a few yes men that he hired that exacerbated everythign.  One was a retired Air Force dude who talked about the Air Force 24/7.  Every fucking thing we ever talked about in meetings caused him to chime in about the way the Air Force did it.  He had really great Air Force stories too.  He used to be on a Commando Team that raided other Air Force bases to test their readiness - but they did it unannounced.  He claimed that he had special combat training where he could take out up to 10 people simultaneously without any weapons. But for all of his Air Force talk, all his braggadocio about his accomplishments, his stories about Generals being scared of him - he somehow never managed to make Officer - Go Figure.   He also wore SKIN tight polyester pants and short sleeved dress shirts.  He was a eightlifter but he was also a lard a33 so wearing Nut Huggers, Short Sleeved Dress shirts which showed off his bitch tits and ties that were too short made him look really _____.  Then there was his buddy.  This guy was a Pentacostal “Christian” that was probably the most evil fucker I've ever met.  These two were the henchmen of the president and if you are ever casting a All-Male Bukkake Video, I can't think of 3 better candidates.  They also had the same cheesy mustaches and had this real hangup about African- Americans and Women.  We only had two Brothers working there and they ran one of them off quickly (he was way too smart to stay there for long anyway).

Now the Programming manager was an amalgam of every bad Manager stereotype you've ever heard.  He never went to any educational training.  He was a School Bus Driver most of his life.  He worked as an IT Manager in another company for about 15 years but was too 'smart' for the dummies there - they wanted to use Oracle for their Enterprise application which served 8 production facilities all over the world.  He knew Oracle was stupid and that they should use Visual DataFlex instead.  When they hired some real consultants to come in - they laughed about the Visual DataFlex and he got pissed off and  left.  He applied at this company and got the job b/c (and I'm not kidding)  “He was the Deacon” of First Baptist of ________ and much of the management went to church with him. (Oracle sucked according to him - and normalization was stupid.  Every, EVERY programming problem could be solved by 'adding a file' - and yes, Visual DataFlex had text files as the back end, not Tables)   It should come as no surprise that about 2 months after I started, we got a call from the bank of one of the customers who used our Payroll program.  It seemed that the IRS had just contacted them b/c one of the secretaries at the Police Statioin had a deposit made into her account in the amount of just over $12 million.  She made $9.75 /hr so this was a bit extreme.  The IRS had the transaction flagged b/c it looked like some money laundering.  It seems that the Killer Payroll app that our Bus Driver manager 'designed' (He bragged about his 'design' skillz constantly) had a little overflow problem and Visual DataFlex, being the best OOP language that it was, didn't raise an exception.  It just kept overflowing until the application crashed.  The paycheck amounts were stored in a 'work file' and this wouldn't be cleared out if the process didn't end correctly.  So there was no indication that anything went wrong and the amounts in the debit and credits happened to balance out so no one thought anything was wrong - no one but the IRS.  (This same manager had another programmer, at the threat of  being fired, hard code the 'correct' values on a payroll register once after telling the customers “I don't know what's wrong - you must have done smoething wrong b/c I just ran it and everything reconciled”

So what does this have to do with Flash?  Well, there was this thing there that Programmers were superior to everyone else.  No one was allowed to talk to us except for the managers. Before I got there, Kim was working in Support and went to ask a programmer a question.  Her Supervisor found out about it and lit into her saying “I don't want you talking to her or any other programmer..  If you walk by her in the morning and she says “Hello”, I don't even waht you saying Hello back.”  Well Kim's a smart girl and she moved up quickly, but even as a Supervisor, she and every other non-programmer were treated like garbage by the programmers and managers.  When I stared working, I refused to play this game and this definitely made me some enemies when I started there.  I write software for God's sake and that's it.  I'm not God's Sysadmin, I don't do transplant surgeries or anytihng close to it. But the lamer the programmer, the more they had this attitude.  The worst culprit was this fat ass, sloppy redneck fuck with Plumber's Crack who only wore three different shirts.  He was the 'head' programmer and wrote a lot of the software.  Among some of his killer features was a requirement that you have to stop the program, change the time and date, rerun the program and rerun a transaction (which I use very looselly here) in order to make an adjustment.  Kim had to document stuff like this and it was hard to say the least.  But the worst part was that he told her stuff like 'you're stupid' because she thought it wasn't user friendly S even though I did everything I could to differentiate myself from fucks like him - as well as publicly ridiculing this type of behavoir and lame a33 code, Kim was so scarred for two years from him that she had a lot of neurotic fears about programming. 

So when I told her she had a lot of graphics talent and should look to get out of that company, she had a mental breakdown.  On the one hand she appreciated my support and she knew I was right.  But on the other hand, people like Plumber's Crack told her constantly that HTML help was stupid, Flash was stupid, Mouse Driven apps were stupid.  So she vacillated between thinking she could do stuff like Flash programming and believing that since she wasn't a 'programmer' she'd never be able to use Flash or create Graphics.  For a long time she got really defensive every time I tried to teach her ASP.NET or SQL or even Crystal Reports (yes, some of these 'real programmers' that were vicious to her coudln't do anytihng but write Crystal Reoprts), she'd get really defensive b/c she thought she couldn't do it and that I was being mean to her when i told her that she could.  While this may sound goofy - if you saw the verbal abuse that many people like her recieved (particularly women who got it from men), it wouldn't be that surprising  On a daily basis she heard stuff like “Why are you so stupid? I know what customers want and they want to have to change the system date to write an adjustment.”  Or “You're not a programmer so you won't be able to understand this”  Or “Who do you think you are talking to the programmers.  You aren't to talk to them about anything”  So when we first started dating and I asked her to lunch, she thought I was being mean and mocking her b/c 1) Men didn't eat lunch with women at that company 2)  Programmers were too good to eat with non programmers.  I thought it was nuts but actually it was a reasonable thing to assume based on many people's attitudes.  When I stared there though I refused to play this shit and so did two other guys.  Very slowly this stuff began to change but there were still a lot of women scared to go to lunch with guys, or even ask to go with the programmers at the time I left.

So here's my girlfriend who's truly gifted at graphics development terrified to write Cystal Reports or try Flash.  She went to a really prestigious college in the south after graduating #2 in a high school class of around 500, and graduated with honors.  By any objective standard I'm the dummy of the relationship, yet I had to listen to her refuse to do stuff like try and learn Flash b/c she thought she was too stupid.  Finaly we both left this shithole but the company she moved to still had a bit too much of this “Me programmer You subhuman” mentality.  Little by little though I kept on her about Flash b/c I knew she could do it.  I made her work with SQL and learn Joins (which terrified her once upon a time but she kicks a33 at now) then stored procedures.  When she wasn't worrying about 'being too dumb' she learned everything WAY faster than I ever did.  She even started doing some really advanced stuff with Crystal which she was terrified to try while at the previous place.  Then she moved on to Excel VBA and that was it - if she could learn all this stuff this fast, I revoked her privileges to say she was dumb.  It was a slow battle at first b/c of the self doubt caused by years of abuse but finally it broke down and she started really kicking ass at Flash.  Now she's working with Flash MX 2004 and getting pretty good with ActionScript.  (Having worked with her and a few of the Geniuses at our former company - I'd bet a years pay that she's not only smarter than them, but already a better programmer and most of them had over 10 years experience. ) 

So NOW  Kim is hitting the top part of her learning curve and before long I'm hoping to get married, quit work and let the smarter on of us make the big bucks.   No doubt my sweetie is going to be really great at this.  And there's something really cool about seeing someone who's been through the shit she's been through, who's had their self-confidence wrecked by loser programmers w/ plumber's crack Finally start to shine. She still has a occassional self doubts but I think those are simply the ones we all have when we start doing development professionally.  And I'm so graphics challenged that having her do Fireworks images for me is definitely really cool.  Her sight  has just been posted and there's no real Flash up - now.  But I've seen some of the stuff she's going to post really soon and it's good - very good.  She's a perfectionist so we won't see anything 'real' up there for a few more days- but I'm convincing her that her stuff is too good not to post.  And she's started learnig ASP.NET and how to integrate Flash MX with it so we should see some good stuff  up there soon.  So all I can say to Kim is “I'm proud of you sweetie - and keep going,  Post those movies you've been showing me the last week and keep learning the new effects.”  Most of the stuff is done purely for fun but it's good and dating a real Flash Developer kicks a33.  Those losers from Hell Data Processing would need to slither up to the top of a skyscraper just to kiss your ass .  And hopefully everyone here will pester yoiu into posting all of your movies - I know one of us is going to for sure.  All I can say is I'm very proud of you!