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Palatine, Illinois.
Weber-Stephen Products is a large manufacturer of high quality outdoor barbeque grills. They have an enormous customer base and they are very successful.
Before I start I have to mention the golf course. The owner of the company built a beautiful three-hole configured for nine holes course with a stream running through it. It was professionally done and the greens were like any green on any pro course. I was one of the only people who ever played on that course. On the weekends I would come with friends or my father and my brothers and we would play 18 or 36 rounds of golf!! I played before work, during lunch and sometimes I played after work. Tiger Woods, on his best day, could not beat me on that course. We may be tied for every game but Tiger would eventually get tired and I would beat him. I have always thought that if I ever had a nice piece of land someday, I would build myself a course just like the one at Weber.
This is where I got my start in Information Technology and the knowledge that I received at Weber gave me exactly what I needed to launch my career down the fast lane.
One day, our IBM System 38 had a disk failure. When the manager went to the backup tapes he had discovered that there was some error in the backup, which made all the backup tapes unusable. We lost everything including the configuration of the System 38. While the manager went around to other Mapics shops to collect pieces of Mapics so he could rebuild the applications systems, I was in charge of rebuilding the System 38 from the ground up. I learned all the component pieces and I rebuilt the machine. I became an information sponge and I had a great feeling of accomplishment. One of the most important things that I learned was the value of the backup. Everywhere I go, I validate, revalidate and test the backup procedures on a regular basis. You would not believe how many times I have found holes that could have been costly. For many years as an independent consultant I was hired to go into various companies and audit their configuration and fix their performance problems. You would not believe how many times I found critical folders or libraries that had not been backed up. They are disasters waiting to happen. I know I am getting off the track a little bit here, but I have to mention this story. One night I was asked to come to the east coast and do some troubleshooting. They had serious performance problems and they needed help badly. They locked me in their building all night and I fixed quite a bit of problems while also proposing some wiring changes to some of the departments. While performing my customary backup audit I found that they were not backing up at all, and they had not backed up their data files for many months. The night time processing had the backup procedure built into it. Someone put a piece of code into it that bypassed the backup if there were any failures. Every night there was a failure so it bypassed the backup and ran the end of day procedure. The next day the operator took the blank tapes from the tape drive, sent them to the vault and loaded new blank tapes for the next night. If they had a disk failure they would have lost all their inventories, all their new item setups, all the accounting, all invoicing, purchase orders and all the custom development that had been done over the months. The reason the backups failed was because no one initialized the tapes. I put a piece of code in there to initialize the tapes, I kept the error code in there so the end of day could be performed in case of backup failure, but I sent and error message to the console so they would know that the backups failed when they came in the next day.
Ok, now let’s get back on track with the Weber story. It was a great job, I had a beautiful office, the people were excellent, I had my golf course, but I felt like I wasn’t doing anything significant. I happened to live in Elk Grove Village at the time and Claire’s Boutiques, a large retailer, was looking for some help. If I stood on my driveway and threw a softball three times in the direction of Claire’s, my third throw would land on their front door, that’s how close they were to my home. On a whim I went in for an interview. The manager told me about all the exciting projects that they were doing and all the projects that were coming up for the year and I was hooked. It was a real tough decision to leave Weber but I had to go.
I am still friends with my ex-manager from Weber (now retired) and the golf course has turned into a field.
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