September 5, 2019: In Which I Appear in Some Sort of Advertisement

From 1988-1990, I was a Marketing Counsel (odd title, yes, see below) at SAS Institute Inc. The company writes statistical analysis software, and now I’ve told you all I know about it. In that time period, they had an absurdly high percentage of the mainframe market.

My job was to negotiate licenses of the software to various corporate and governmental entities. It was horrible work. On occasion, though, as the users were so desperate to get their hands on the software, the negotiations went very smoothly. Corporate diktat: we had to play nice and never argue, because the users were always right.

Ah yes, “Marketing Counsel.” At some point before my arrival, my boss, Dave Donelson, waged a war with Monica Mouse for something (Monica’s name changed to prevent lawsuits; Dave’s dead, so, no). Dave lost, and was cast like the Bad Angels from heaven, from the third floor of one building to the basement of another. Here the department, which did nothing but negotiate contracts, ground along in its grudging existence. I joined them in August, 1988.

I think by late 1989, I was in Big Trouble with Dave and his high-school educated superior, Diane Johnson. (Settle down, this story requires a little background. Most of you have advanced degrees, and you can’t sit through a page?) This isn’t pretty. Dave was Diane’s subordinate. He was afraid of her. So once every couple of years, he would take after someone and badger them till he either was able to fire them or they resigned so he could appear like a tough manager. Poor old Dick Hatch, who had already retired once and whose co-workers in nearby offices complained about his flatulence, preceded me out the door a year earlier.

The workflow was that we all negotiated the contracts, then passed them by Dave for approval. Dave’s method was to pick up my folders and rake through them till he found stupid things to ding me on. It got so bad that I asked Nancy to review a set of his comments and see if he was actually correct that I was a lousy lawyer.

She told me later that she went to the bathroom first and thought to herself, I really need to tell him if he’s not cutting it. Then she went through the folders, and when she handed them back to me, she said, “You guys need to get sued so Dave will have something real to occupy him.”

I’ve always been grateful to have Nancy in my life, but seldom so much as then. Nevertheless, Dave took after me harder, and, after I seemed to have redeemed myself by negotiating an enormous contract with Air Canada, it got worse.

At one point, in his office, he was idly looking over something I’d brought to show him, and he allowed, quietly, “Burroughs-Wellcome really needs to release their financials.”

Ah. So that was it. This is painful. Dave was HIV-positive, we all learned, and Burroughs-Wellcome had the only anti-retroviral at the time, AZT. Criticism was that it was too expensive. Gay folks climbed up on B-W’s building and hung banners. It got ugly. As B-W was privately held, it didn’t have to reveal anything.

So that was the tension; my wife worked for Burroughs-Wellcome, and, to be fair, Dave had every right to resent them. But does that justify his scheming to fire me?

I have never been close to being fired at any other job I’ve had, even when I performed poorly, like in my first legal job. I did not perform poorly at SAS.

So I developed my exit strategy, looking for work around the Raleigh firms that had been so anxious to hire me when I left my firm in Greensboro. But we were in a recession and no one was answering his or her phone. In the end, when I resigned, I bypassed Dave and went and told Diane, just to fuck with Dave a little. I left without a job waiting. I’d never do that again.

Now the details of all this are hazy for me, as the whole episode was a little unreal. At some point while I was whiling away my last days at SAS, someone came for me at my office and said something to the effect of would I like to be in an ad for the company. As I was otherwise in disgrace, why not? They told me to wear a blue blazer and anything but a white shirt the next day. We were already very casual at SAS back then, so I’d actually be dressing up.

The next day, right down in our basement department, someone set up lights and a camera, drawing the bemused looks of my co-workers, who no doubt wondered why they weren’t chosen.

A good question: why was I? There was no way Dave was going to allow me to be filmed for an ad; it would give me way too much status in his eyes, and there was no way he’d put me in a position to enjoy anything anyway.

This is the part of this story that remains a complete mystery for me. Why me? Who chose me? I wasn’t that well known. Did Diane sign off on it? Did she need to? Was this purely from Marketing? I had a couple of friends there, nice relaxed fellows; one time, I was set to be blamed for something that was actually the fault of the marketing guy, and he told the big boss guy that it was his fault, that I’d been “wrongfully wronged,” an expression I’ve always liked. So maybe it was one of them? But why?

I had only a couple of lines, and I was directed to deliver them with maximum smugness. It was something like, “I never hesitated before licensing SAS’s software, and I’ve never regretted it.” And as directed I smirked like a Republican. I felt a little dirty.

That was it, and I never heard another word about it. I suspect that they used it in an ad produced by and for the company’s sales force. I never saw the actual ad, so I don’t know if I was even in it. All I can say is, whatever that was about, I did that bastard in two takes.

Dave never mentioned it, and I never heard about it again. It was a weird company that way, chock full of southern passive-aggressive behavior.

I joined in. Not too long before I left (I had a couple of month notice period in which I trained my replacement, the inestimable, brilliant, and hilarious Jay Sloane, who still works at SAS to this day), my phone lit up. It had a primitive form of caller ID, and the display read “Jim Goodnight.” Dr. Goodnight founded SAS, at the time owned 58% or so of it, and was one of the 50 richest Americans. Here, my readers, I lost my nerve. I thought, nope, not talking to him.

Yet this was my chance. He wouldn’t have called unless he had heard good things about me and was going to ask why I was leaving. It was my chance, readers, to state my case, not that it would have made any difference. The trees on SAS’ campus had grass growing right up to the trunks because Dr. Goodnight liked it that way, but I doubt he was into intraoffice squabbles. So I didn’t answer the phone. I wish I had. I was out of work (except for part-time) during the recession for nine months. Dave’s dead, and Diane left SAS, but, at the time, I could have at least vented to Goodnight and felt better in the moment.

Do you have regrets like that? I hope not. I now wish I could recall the names of those Marketing guys and get to the bottom of this. Oh well: another misunderstanding.