Early 1984
In the meantime, Connie, continued to work with the lady who was running her own secretarial service, but business was not going too well, so Connie ended up just working part-time. By the Spring her business was off so much that she let Connie go as she did not have enough business to pay her. But things would turn out well for her as there were other offices in that building and Connie had gotten to know some of the other people very well. She and Michelle whom I mentioned earlier had become good friends but would lose touch for a few years after leaving that job.
As I mentioned earlier at the end of 1983, we had signed two accounts to our “Universal Life Processing System”. The Life of the Southwest account was nice as it was in Dallas and it was easy to visit and meet with their folks. After we got ii set-up, I turned it over to another system engineer. In January of 1984, I begin traveling to Bankers Life in Lincoln Nebraska. I traveled through mid-March of that year. I would fly into Omaha Nebraska and drive about an hour to Lincoln Nebraska. It was really cold during those months and it seemed to be dark and dreary most of the time I was there. Eventually, we had them up and going.
The Hot Tub — Spring 1984
In April of this year, I bought a hot tub from a place called Blue Island Spas. The reason I bought it was in 1983 (I forgot to write about it before) I was seeing a doctor who was a Doctor of Physical Therapy. She had a treatment that seemed to help but it was very unusual to me. I would go there, and they would put me in a hot tub, well it was a stainless-steel big tub. Since my hips and ankles were so bad at this time, they had a lift I would get in and then they would use it to place me into and get me out of the tub. After that, I would go and stand in a very cold room, naked and they had this instrument they would use to scan my body (I think it was infrared) and then they would show me a picture and it would show the hot spot on my body and then that what the therapist would work on that day.
The hot tub worked out great as my manager came over the weekend after they had brought it out and helped me build steps so I could get in and out of it. The only problem was that it was outside and when it turned cold it was tough running outside to get in it.
Connie’s EDS Interview
Before things turned out well for Connie, there was a disappointment along the way. In mid to late spring Connie went on an interview at EDS to be an administrative assistant. I cannot even remember which division Connie interviewed with. Connie had thought the interview had gone well and that she would be offered the job. But then she did not hear from them again. They never called and said we found someone else, etc. To say I was disappointed in the way they treated her would have been an understatement. I wanted to call the interviewing manager and give him a piece of my mind, but Connie talked me out of it. To me in all of my 32 years at EDS that was the most disappointing thing that happened. But things were about to change.
Shortly after that in the early summer, Connie got a call from a lawyer that she had met in the building when she worked for the secretarial service. His name was Michael and he and another gentleman that was a good friend of his were going into business together. The other gentleman was named Steve and he was a CPA. They had some kind of a partnership, but I am not sure what kind as the plaque on their office never had a business name just their names on it. They rented a place with two offices and a conference room in it. They would then refer clients to each other. Michael had called and asked Connie if she would be interested in being their secretary and she said she would. She went to an interview with Michael and Steve and they offered her the job. It was a decent job with a good starting salary plus they offered her participation in their profit-sharing plan.
One of the good things about that early summer of 1984, I was at home because of the Russian incident. You can read more about that in “Stories Others – The Russian”
. Connie had not even heard from Michael at this point, so I had almost a week at home with her and it did not even count as vacation.A Sad June
In June of that year, I had a big shock. I had gotten home on Monday evening at about 6:15 pm when Connie told me that my cousins had called and that my mother had had a major heart attack. She was in intensive care at the time. I made plans to fly to Nashville the next morning. I had an 8 am flight but received a call around 3 am that my mother had passed away. It hit me pretty hard as I had planned to go visit her on June 22nd and stay the weekend for my 20th high school reunion.
I left early that morning and after arriving in Nashville rented a car and headed to our house to see my aunt and cousins. I spent a few hours with them then drove back to Nashville to pick up my brother. We spent the night at our house and he the next morning went and made all the arrangements for my mother. We had the funeral on Friday the 15th of June. Those few days are a blur and I do not remember much about them. My brother and I then spent the next several days going through the house and determining what to do with everything. We let our aunt cousin and relative have some of the clothes and furniture and then we donated the rest to different charities. Finally, after several days we both returned home.
One of the things that came out of that visit was my interest in genealogy. One of the people my father had grown up with came with his wife to the funeral. We then visited them and received so much information about our father’s history. That created a lifelong desire to keep learning as much as I could about my parents.
RA is really bothering me
But it did get so bad that the doctor ordered me to get complete rest. She wanted me off my feet and in bed as much as possible to take some of the pressure off my joints and give them a rest as I was having a bad flare-up at the time. That was one of the times that I could see that Connie was very worried about me and our future. She had not had her interview with Michael and Steve yet and my not being able to work scared her. Her mother was down during this time and she helped some. I remember when one of the ladies who was on my team and had assumed my team leader’s duties while I was out for those two weeks came by the house and I spent a couple of hours bringing her up to speed on all the activities we had going on. I knew Connie was worried, but it was much later that I found out it was taking its toll on her mentally. She was wondering what if I was unable to work, could she get a job that would pay enough, etc. Luckily after those two weeks, I was able to go back to work, and at least that lessened some of her worries.
GM Purchases EDS — Sumer 1984
During the summer of 1984, GM purchased EDS for 2.5 billion dollars. EDS was to assume all of GM technical people and we would take over running all of GM software, data centers, etc. It was a time of turbulence for us as a lot of people were transferred to Detroit and many opportunities were created for all of us. Over the next two years, I ended up becoming a SE Manager responsible for three accounts. My job was to manage the technical people supporting those accounts.
Connie’s New Job
The summer was fairly normal summer as Connie started her job with Michael and Steve and enjoyed working with these two gentlemen. They were easy to work for and very professional. The doctor also insisted that I lose weight and I lost about 40 lbs. that summer.
Connie started working for Michael and Steve in late July or early August. This was the time that the PCs were starting to show up in offices. Michael and Steve had bought one for Connie to use and it had Word Perfect on it for her to use. I do not remember what the problem was but Connie had asked me to help her with it. So, one Saturday afternoon, we stopped by the office where she worked and I have to admit it was a very nice place. The offices were brand new and in a new part of town that was growing. Anyway, we went into the office and I sat down at her desk then it happened. I had never worked on a PC before, just big mainframes and used dumb terminals. I turned around and asked Connie, how do you turn it on as I could not see how to turn it on. That was the wrong thing to ask as Connie just started laughing so hard and she could not stop. Finally, I got a little irritated and she stopped laughing long enough to tell me what she thought was so funny. She said here you have been working on computers for over 11 years and I have to show you how to turn it on. I am still not sure why she thought that was so funny, but she would always kid me about it and say I had to show Sparkie how to turn on a PC. Do you guys think it was that funny?
Christmas Cancelled
As the end of the year approached, we determined that our Universal Life Processing center was not feasible. While it was a great idea, it turns out the companies were not meeting their projections on the number of policies they thought they would be selling. Then the product they were offering became more complicated requiring us to spend additional man-time modifying the system. Thank goodness we recognized early on that this was not a good idea and we were going to lose money on it, so we negotiated our way out of the contract. One started with great hope end with a realization that this was a bad idea.
The end of 1984 saw a major upheaval at work. While I was still working on our Insurance Systems for small insurance companies, there were a lot of people over 200 working on a new insurance system called the “Insurance Machine”. It was way behind schedule and the company had just replaced the division manager with a new one about 4 months before Christmas. Around mid-November, the new division manager canceled all Christmas vacations for those people working on the Insurance Machine. Luckily that did not involve me but did affect a large group of people. We had several people resign over that decision. Even though the decision did not directly affect those people not working on the Insurance Machine it did cause a lot of concern about the new division manager.
1985 — Lansing MI
The year 1985 kicked off with me traveling. It snowed a little bit during the night of Jan 1st and 2nd. I left home early that morning to meet some of the people I would be traveling with at the office. I met those people around 6 AM and we all headed to the airport for a flight to Detroit Michigan. There were about 6 of us traveling with the salesman to Jackson Nation Life Insurance Company in Lansing Michigan. While I did not know it at the time the next two years were going to be the hardest that I spent at EDS.
We arrived in Lansing about noon that day and met with the executive of the Insurance Company and discussed with them what we would be doing over the next 4 to 6 weeks. The company was owned, by one man and the interesting thing we found out in talking to him was that he had three sons and one daughter. The three sons were Regional managers, one was located in California, one in Texas, and the other in Chicago. The daughter was a billing clerk at the home office there in Lansing. Talk about old fashion, He was as we would learn later.
After the first week, we would fly to Detroit on Sunday night and leave on Friday afternoons. There were 6 to 8 of us that went every week. I remember one Sunday night we got in very late because of the weather and it was almost midnight. We arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. Normally it was about a one and a half hour’s trip from the airport to Lansing but this evening because of the snowstorm it took us about 3 hours to get to Lansing. We were not staying at the hotel we usually did, and we ended up getting lost trying to find the new hotel. We finally got to the hotel at about 4:30 in the morning and had to be at work at 8 AM. We were exhausted that evening but had a dinner meeting scheduled with some of the company’s officers, so it ended up being a tremendously long day.
A New Car
In February of that year, Connie and I bought a new car to replace the Pontiac Aspen that I bought in 1976. We had signed an account with GM in 1984 and we were allowed to buy a car with the GM discount. If I remember correctly it was at invoice plus maybe a $100.00. It seemed like a good deal, so I bought a new 1985 Oldsmobile Calais. I kept the Aspen to give to my nephew. It was a wonderful car. Even though this was the first model year, it was one of the cars that I had the fewest problems with.
A New Account
In March of that year, we signed a contract with the insurance company in Lansing. It was one of the biggest insurance contracts that EDS had signed. I got a nice bonus out of being on the team that sold it. We were supposed to have it installed in about 8 months. We had estimated 150-man months of work and our system was to go live on January 1st, 1986. More about that later. It was going to be a high challenge for us because at the time the most policies we were processing each evening was a little over 200,000. This company had almost a million policies so we were going to have to do a lot of run-time improvements so we could process all those policies in one evening.
As was usually the case, we assumed all their computer people and assigned an account manager. I went up shortly after we signed it to meet with the account manager and to start laying out the project plan. The first day I was to go into the office the account manager was sick, and he told me to just take his place that day. What happened next was very interesting and you can read more about it in “Stories” – “Others” the meanest man ever. Here is a link. https://joelbuntley.com/stories-others/#MeanMan
Summer of 1985
The year was going along fine. Connie was enjoying her job with Michael and Steve. She was enjoying working with them. The only thing she did not like was answering the phone, but she was enjoying the other work they were giving her to do.
One of the things she found interesting was that Michael had moved to Texas from New Jersey where he was a criminal lawyer at the time. Connie found out that his breaking point for criminal law came when he got a guy off who he knew was guilty. I do not remember the exact crime, but it was a major crime. Now here he was in Texas do divorces, adoptions, bankruptcy, etc. but he would never do criminal law again.
The summer was ok, even though working on an installation can require a lot of extra time, I was able to not have to work all weekend and not much longer during the day giving Connie and me at least the sense of a normal routine.
The Aspen
Connie’s sister, brother-in-law, and their two kids came to visit that summer and we were able to take some vacation and spend some quality time with them. We still had our old 1976 Plymouth Aspen and were giving it to my nephew as he was going into his senior of high school. Danny (Connie’s brother-in-law) and I went to the courthouse where I sold him the car for $1.00 and had the title transferred. As of now Connie’s nephew still has that car. He took it and did a lot of work on it as the years went by and was eventually acing it in drag races (legal ones of course). I cannot believe that he has kept it running.
Fall 1985
During the fall of that year, I remember my hips were hurting so bad and Connie was driving and every time she turned quickly or hit a bump in the road I was as being in pain. It bothered Connie because she was doing the best that she could and there was nothing she could do as she was just driving normally. Now during this time, I did not have many days when just sitting in a car and driving would bother me that much but this day it sure did. It was another time Connie became very concerned and she knew how much I hurt on certain days and there was nothing she could do about it.
1986..
This year did not start very well for me but Connie was doing ok and still liked her job with the lawyer and CPA. The hard part for Connie this year was seeing me struggle.
We were supposed to go live with the conversion for the insurance company in Lansing Michigan, but we were nowhere near being ready and had already used the 150-man months we had estimated for the project. Being the projects lead a lot of the responsibility for that fell on me.
In March of that year, we contracted to have our patio extended and converted into another room. It was a big undertaking and one of the best things we did, We had the spa move into that room. We also had a stereo and some exercise equipment. We would enjoy that room for the rest of the time we lived there.
I was doing a lot of traveling, and even though we were behind on the project my management structure did not lay the blame on me. In fact, they promote me to a team manager and I was overseeing two other installations besides this one. The other two were in Jacksonville Florida.
The travel was hard on me but it was really hard on Connie. She knew how hard it was for me physically to do all that traveling and working all those hours and she supported me any way she could. I had learned a few tricks in traveling in that I would always book a rental car from an agency that had a small bus as I physically could not get into a big bus with a high step.
I remember one week I was in Lansing for two days, then flew to Hartford for a day, then to New Jersey for a day, and then to Jacksonville for a day. The traveling was very hard for me and now looking back on it I do not know how I did it.
That summer they finished expanding the patio and enclosing it and we were enjoying being able to go into the spa and not be out in the hot sun.
My RA was acting up and I learned that when I was at the back of the evaluators and could not get off before the doors closed it was time for me to go back to the hotel to rest or to go home if I was in town. Looking back on it I cannot believe how hard I pushed myself and the toll it took on Connie. She saw me in pain and how hard it was for me and it was really hard for her. For some reason, I felt if I stopped, I would never get going again. I learned that when I was at the back of the evaluators and could not get off before the doors closed it was time for me to go back to the hotel to rest or to go home if I was in town.
During the summer the doctor that was treating my RA retired and I had to find a new one. Connie and I had been to a seminar put on by a rheumatologist a few years before and she had liked him. So I started seeing him. At my new patient meeting, he did a lot of X-Rays and wanted me to go see an orthopedic surgeon.
It had been a long year, and we were not through the summer yet. I decided I needed to treat Connie, for all she had been through that year and take her to Hawaii. Little did I know at that time how much more she would have to go through for me.
On September 5th, we left for Hawaii, that would be the only vacation time I took off that year. We went to Maui since we had already been to Oahu. Her mother and a friend came down and stayed at our house to take care of our two shelties, Brandy and Misty. The vacation was very hard for me as I was suffering from my RA. You can read more about it in “Trips – Hawaii 1986”.
Surgery –1986
I saw the orthopedic after I got back, I cannot remember if it was in late September or early October. He told me that he was going to have to do both hips on the same day, He said they were in such bad shape that if he only did one I would not be able to walk because of the pain in the other one. He could not believe I had done as much traveling as I had done and how I was able to take the pain. I was not looking forward to it but we scheduled it for November the 18th. While waiting for the surgery I can continue to work as much as I could. It was hard on Connie as when she was driving the car, she could tell how every little bump or unexpected turn caused me to grimace in pain.
During this time we moved from our offices in Richardson to the new EDS headquarters in Plano Texas. It was a major move of over 200 people. We all had to go in on Sunday at 1:00 PM to make sure everything had been moved and all of our terminals were up and running. This needed to be done so that when we came in on Monday we were prepared to support our customers.
I left work at about 11 AM on Monday the 17th, as we had to check into the hospital the day before the surgery. After a quick shower, Connie and I head to St. Paul Hospital in Dallas Texas. There was a BBQ place near the hospital called Sonny Bryans. It was just a little shed and they had the best BBQ and onion rings around the Dallas area, they stayed open until all the meat they cooked was sold. Sometimes they would be closed at 12:30 and sometimes at 2:30, just depending on the crowd they had. Luckily, we got there at about 2 pm and were able to get something to eat. I told Connie my hips were not hurting, and we should call off the surgery, but she was not willing to let me do that. I knew I had to do it not only for me but to make her life better.
I checked into the hospital around 3 pm and then went for X-rays, blood tests, etc. All the things required then for surgery. I thought my surgery was scheduled for around 10:30 on the 18th but they did not come to get me until almost noon.
When they took me to the area to wait till I was taken into surgery, Connie and the nurse were teasing me. You can read all about it in “The Funnies” it is called “The Baby”.
After taken me to surgery, I do not remember anything till the next morning when they woke me up and made me stand up and take a couple of steps. That was hard. I was put on crutches and each day had to walk a little further. I stayed in the hospital from Monday, November 17th until Friday, November 28th. Thanksgiving was on the 27th, and I remember Connie and I going to the cafeteria for our Thanksgiving dinner. It was not the best dinner nor the best Thanksgiving I had ever had but it was ok. Connie talked her boss into driving down to pick me up since he had a van and it was higher to sit in than the cars we had. I was so glad as I was not sure about getting out of that little car. After getting home the first thing I asked Connie to do was to go out and get us a couple of hamburgers.
One of the things that happened during my stay in the hospital was that GM bought out Ross Perot and a couple of other officers of the company. Ross was given a seat on the GM Board and owned a large amount of GM stock but he clashed with the Chairman of GM Roger Smith, so they bought him out.
After Surgery –1986
Those days were so hard on Connie, not only was she working for Steve (CPA) and Michael (Lawyer) in their two-man office, but Steve had decided to do a mass mailing. She was working all day, then coming to visit me and then going home to work on the mass mailing that Steve wanted to send out.
Connie helped me through Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then she had to go to work on Monday. I made it through most of the day on Monday by myself but Connie’s mother came in that evening from New York. She was there to help me through the next month as I still could not be by myself as I was struggling to get around with having both hips replaced.
On the Saturday before Christmas, Connie, her mother and I all went to a Target store in Richardson where Connie bought a computer desk as we were going to get a computer after the first of the year. I stayed in the car, even though I was getting around ok, I did not want someone bumping into me. I had been told a story about a person having their hip replaced and while at the grocery store a kid had run his cart into the side of the person and it displaced his hip. We did go to a place called the Black Eye Pea for a late lunch.
I was still on crutches but was doing a better job of getting around. It was Christmas Eve and I remember sitting in the TV room watching TV while Connie and I put the desk together.