I spent the first eight years of my career working for Wang Laboratories. For six of those years, I worked in the group that developed our "Wang Office" line of "Integrated Office Automation" software. You might be asking "what does Integrated Office Automation mean?" The answer is Groupware. Or collaborative software. Or whatever your favorite current buzzword for stuff that includes email, directory, calendar scheduling, PIM, bulletin boards, etc. We even had a workflow system built in for serial routing of email -- which, by the way, we had some patents on. I worked extensively on our minicomputer-based product, but also on a Windows front-end and on a Unix client/server version that we called "Open Office".

Every now and then, the competitive analysis group in our product marketing organization would send out a bunch of documents dedicated to analysis of the office automation market, and one day in the late 80's one of those documents had a paragraph in it that said something like "We've heard that Lotus is working on something called Notes. We don't know much about what it is, but we know enough to believe that this is something we're going to have to watch very carefully."

Fast forward a couple of years. I've left Wang, and spent a couple of years at a startup company, and that didn't go particularly well. I meet with a headhunter and the first interview he lines up for me is at Iris Associates, and he tells me that they are the people who wrote Notes for Lotus. Well, I've heard of Notes a few more times since that first memo passed through my Wang inbox, but I still don't know much about it. Fortunately I have a friend at Lotus in Cambridge, a fellow named Kent Quirk whom I went to school with, so I give him a call. The interview is in two days, but he invites me to go into his office the next day so I can see the product and have a leg up on other interviewees. I was pretty impressed by what I saw, which was a beta of Notes 3.0. Having worked on products that did many of the same basic functions, I could tell immediately that Notes had it right.

I was really psyched for the interview!

Unfortunately, I was also really sick for the interview.

Even more unfortunately, I did not know that I was really sick. I didn't find out that I was running a high fever until I got home.

I must have looked terrible, and I can only guess how incoherent my answers to the interviewers' questions were. It seemed to me that things were going well, but they actually cut the interview short. I had interviewed with Tim Halvorsen, Eric Patey, and George Moromisato, and I was supposed to interview with Ray Ozzie, but it didn't happen. Later on I figured out the obvious: that their perceptions of how things were going were very, very different from mine. I was sick as a dog for a week with the worst case of flu I've ever had .

So, fast forward again a few more weeks. I decide to call my former boss from Wang for some job hunting advice. I had an offer in hand, but it wasn't anything exciting. A couple of friends had been encouraging me to try out some contracting, but I wasn't sure if turning down a full-time job was really a good idea. She was also no longer at Wang, and I didn't actually know what she was up to. It turned out that on the day that I called her, she had just received a can't-turn-down job offer. She had been doing some part-time VB contracting for the company her husband worked for, and since she was going to take the new job she was willing to recommend me to take over her contract, which only had a few months left so she figured I could continue my job hunt while getting a feel for what contracting was like. I agreed to interview with the fellow who was supervising her work.

So, I show up at the interview the next day, having brushed up on my VB. There had been no time to send in a resume beforehand, so I just handed it over and waited while the fellow read it. He looked up from it and said "VB programmers are a dime-a-dozen. I could walk out on the street right now and come back in ten minutes with two or three candidates. I'm sure you could do this work, but I have a question: What do you know about Lotus Notes?" I said, "Well, I've seen it." He said, "That's more than we have, and I just got a call a couple of hours ago from my corporate headquarters informing me that our division has been chosen to pilot a company-wide roll-out of Lotus Notes, and I've got six months to get it going. In the short time I've had to research this, I've discovered one thing: people who know Lotus Notes are impossible to find. But your resume tells me that you can definitely learn it faster than just about anybody, so how'd you like to learn it on our nickel? Can you be on a plane to a meeting with others involved in the project in Chicago tomorrow morning?" I thought about it -- for about a nanosecond -- and said yes. Within two days I had the OS/2 and Notes install disks in my hands and I started the chapter of my life that has now gone on for more than twelve years.