Yes. Today marks my 30th year in Atlanta. I started work here in IBM hardware education on May 16th 1985.

Back in early May, I flew down from St. Louis to interview for a job in education. When I started working for the IBM Field Engineering Division in 1978, my account was McDonnell Douglas Automation which was the largest data processing center in St. Louis and one of the largest in the country. We had 26 full time customer engineers. I was 14th in seniority. By 1985 we were down to 14 CEs and I was 13th in seniority. IBM was a victim of its own success. Processors and I/O had gotten smaller, faster, and more reliable. They were gonna cut headcount even more, not by layoffs but by promotions and buyouts. Also, by this time FE had merged with the Mattel Division Office Products Division which I had left back in 1977 under a black cloud. A friend of mine had pulled some strings and got me out of OP and into FE. The money was better and it was more professional. Now, I saw some of those managers who didn’t like me getting closer to me so I figgered it was time to get out of Dodge.

At the Atlanta Education Center, they were looking for 3081 (top of the line mainframe) instructors. I was support trained on that processor. There were two types of training. Product which was basic and support which was more in depth. I was also support trained on mass storage (an early tape library) which this manager also managed. To top it off, I was product trained on 3800 (high speed laser printer) also run by this manager. I showed up in a navy blue three piece Brooks Brothers suit, white shirt, and conservative tie. I had also gotten a haircut. I arrived early. The interview went well. An hour after I left the building, the manager was on the phone with my manager offering me the job.

I got back to St. Louis the next day and my manager called me at home. “What did you do in Atlanta?”

“What?”

“He called me right after the interview and wants to hire you.”

I explained that there were certain conditions. I had to have three weeks off in September because we were gonna take a trip to Greece and spend ten days on a sailboat sailing the Greek Islands and then take a bus tour of Greece. With travel it would require three weeks. During the interview I had told him that and he said he would work with me. Jeff, my manager, told me he would take care of it. I also told him I wasn’t sure whether I would be a temp instructor to see if I liked the job or go ahead and make it permanent. Jeff told me he had told him he would take me temp or permanent. I realized permanent would be the best way to go because it would get me promoted from associate instructor to instructor earlier. So, Jeff called him back and said I would take the job but I had to have the three weeks of in September. Eugene, the Atlanta manager said he would work with me on it. Jeff said that was not good enough. No three weeks, no Denny.

I got the three weeks and a 10 percent raise. I went permanent. That was the right decision. I made full instructor in nine months. That was three months earlier than normal, but, I taught 3081, 3084, and mass storage. I was his only instructor who taught three different classes. Another instructor started with me as a temporary instructor. He didn’t go permanent until three months after he started and it took him a year to make instructor. By going permanent, I was six months ahead of him.

I wasn’t planning on staying in Atlanta for 30 years. This was only supposed to be a way station to the job that I really wanted, Systems Engineer. I became an instructor to get presentation skills. But stuff happened. Instructor was a training ground for management. Most instructors were on a path to management. Not me. No way! No how!

Eighteen months after I started, my manager came up to me in lab and told me he wanted to start sending me out on management interviews. At this time I was his fair-haired boy. Made instructor early. Taught multiple classes and got good reviews from students. I told him I thought there had to be two years between moving and living expenses, i.e. IBM paying for employee transfers. (Remember, IBM used to stand for I’ve Been Moved) He told me that could be waived and I was ready to go.

“Nope. I don’t want to be a manager.”

It was like I slapped him in the face. I immediately went on his shit list. Fortunately, I only worked for him for another nine months. Mass Storage training was shutdown, and 3081 training was slowing down as well since customers were moving to the next generation processor, the 3090. They needed more 3090 instructors so I moved over to that program and had a different manager.

As it turned out, it was a good thing I did not become a field manager. In the first two years I worked as an instructor, we sent out over 50 people to become field managers. But, we were cutting headcount out in the field and all of a sudden, we didn’t need any more field managers. In fact, a lot of them tried to come back and be instructors again.

I never did become a systems engineer and that was a good thing. Lots of SE jobs were cut. During the nineteen-and-a-half years I worked for IBM here in Atlanta, I worked in the same building with a variety of different jobs. After my accident, I had an opportunity to move into programming, and I taught programming as well as being a systems programmer. There were a few years where my official job title was programmer but I carried more teach days than many fulltime instructors. It kept me employed while many instructors got resource actioned or workload balanced out of jobs. There were a lot of 60 hour weeks. There was some traveling involved. Two years running I made Medallion level at Delta Airlines by June. Got a lot of first class upgrades. They were easier to get back then. I was able to upgrade any flight over a thousand miles to first class. During this time when I was working my butt off I worked for a great manager who took care of me. Great raises and awards every year. It’s amazing how many managers don’t know how to motivate people. The better care of me he took, the harder I worked.

Speaking of the building I worked at, it was built in 1983 for education. They moved the Kingston New York training to Atlanta. Likewise, the training in Washington DC and Chicago. They consolidated it all in this one building. They eventually moved all of the hardware used to support customer education into this building. Now, there is no IBM presence at all in that building. Hardware training is now in Boulder Colorado and the hardware supporting customer education is in Montpellier France.

I have a lot of fond memories of that building from being a hardware instructor, a software instructor, and a systems programmer. Nineteen-and-a-half years of my thirty-one-and-a-half year career with IBM was spent working in that building. It was a beautiful building nestlied in a wooded area. I think the manager responsible for building it and consolidating hardware education in that building and who ran education there for three years is dead and gone. I know he would have hated to see IBM education leave it.

Thirty years in Atlanta. Almost half my life. I can’t believe I’ve lived in GOC Central in Beautiful Dunwoody for seventeen years. They sure have passed by quickly.