The ad was for "sales support" and so seemed a little fishy to me. But GEAC had just bought CLSI ... they were two of the giants of the new library integrated systems world that I wanted to get on board with, and so I went for the opportunity. Both companies still exist, though in different forms than back then. The job I was applying for was as a Bid Writer at the CLSI building in the Nonantum section of Newton MA. Almost everyone there was ex-CLSI and called the company by that name, though that changed in the time I was there. It was a charming building, an old rope factory made of brick and granite with high ceilings and towering windows. I had my own office!
I remember that when I was there in my nicer suit (of 2) for my interview, desperate to get a job in library automation, I leafed through a magazine called Wired in the waiting area with a lead article about something I'd never heard of, "Browsing the Web." The interview went very well. The HR person asked for my salary requirements and I told her $34K, which she jumped at. I was hired! She later told me that she was delighted to find someone with my background and told me how hard it had been to find what they needed.
Boy, I had to get some new suits! This was strictly a suit-and-tie office ... not even a sports coat once in a while. We found a day care center near the Burlington line that we all three liked (Colonial Country Day School), and I would drop off Dave in the morning then drive down 128 and cross-country to Newton in my Citation II. We had some huge snowstorms in the Winter of '93/'94 and I can remember my car being totally buried in snow some days when I got off work. Yes, you had to go into the office during snowstorms back then.
Unfortunately, this job didn't really work out and I was gone soon, starting in March 1993 and leaving in August 1994. I made some great friends there and we played softball and wallyball and went to Red Sox games with the company tickets. I’d usually bring my lunch but we went out a lot, Newton had many options. But the marriage of GEAC and CLSI wasn't really working, there was no effort that I noticed to merge them.
Our salespeople would identify sales opportunities. As mentioned, many libraries back then were eager to move to integrated library systems, but of course each considered themselves unique. They would come up with Requests For Proposal (RFPs) full of detailed questions, and the salesperson would throw it over the wall to me or my fellow Bid Writer to answer. A big problem here was that we had huge books of boilerplate responses we were supposed to craft RFP responses from, but they were usually wrong/outdated and we didn't have the time to ask the programmers if the software would really do this or could be configured to do that.
And the other big problem was that the sale was really driven by the bottom line; it didn't matter a lot what we said in the RFP responses. Library systems came with their own hardware environment back then ... the word SAAS hadn't been invented yet ... and the huge consideration for the university or public library system was how much it would cost to buy, install, maintain, and amortize, not what it could do. This was my introduction to the truth that in business, the people doing the buying are rarely the people who actually have to use what was bought.
A huge life event during that time was that our four old cats, Killer, Canton, Valatie, and Rowley, all passed away in quick succession. Killer was the first to go at the age of 17 in the Summer of 1993. She had been in my life since my junior year of college and we had a deep bond, the memory of losing her still brings tears to my eyes. Another link to my past was suddenly gone. We also bought our first new car, a green Plymouth Voyager minivan.
Though I wasn’t a good fit for the job and it didn’t do much for me, it did teach me a few things. One was seeing the inner working of how vendors courted potential customers, including gaining familiarity with the RFP process, which proved to be a help much later in my career. But the job didn’t do much for me, and in the Summer of 1994 I heard of a job with a library company that sounded great. I was eager to move and got that job with no problem.
GEAC/CLSI was really falling apart by then, probably because of lack of customer focus. They wanted me to become a manager, which I did for a week when I knew I’d be leaving but hadn’t given my notice yet. The raise they offered me for becoming a manager was 1.25%! I'm proud to say that was my only week ever of being a manager. They gave me a nice going-away lunch and as always, I was sad to leave good friends. But the ship *was* sinking and it was time to move on after a year and a half to ...
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