Sigi Bigelis

A friend asked recently if I had heard from Sigi lately. We were sitting at a hookah bar in Athens Greece. The same friend, who was once Sigi’s Mendocino pot contact, had asked a few years back, and a Google search revealed an article he had published for IBM.  I pulled out my phone.  The first article up was:  http://atwaterpub.blogspot.com/2015/10/rip-sigitas-bigelis.html.

“Shit he’s dead,” I replied back. “Butt cancer. Nearly five years ago.”

As I read, I couldn’t help but think the author had missed the essence of Sigi. There was nothing inaccurate, it just seemed overly, well, “In Bruges.”.  You know that movie where two hitmen end up in Belgium, one loves the architecture, the other is annoyed. Sigi was like that, he either annoyed the fuck out of you or you thought he was brilliant.

What follows is a series of stories about Sigi Bigelis, and my interactions with him at work and outside. The fact that a friend and I were still discussing him 25 years after I had seen him last, should tell you he had an affect on my life.   There is a lot to discuss, so check back periodically to see what else I remembered. 

Introduction

I met Sigi by reputation first. In 1986 I had just received my security clearance, and ended up working on a super-secret satellite project at Lockheed in a secured building where he was employed. My team lead, Charlie Treadwell, at the time gave me a research project to figure out how some data got corrupted in some orbital status files. It was a “let’s see what’s the kid made of” project. Basically, it made me kick around the system, and ferret out some anomalies. I’ll spare you the twenty blog entries it would take to cover the peculiar tract of math dorks and statisticians the government had hired to write orbital mechanics algorithms I met that week.  But as I queried though what fields in the data meant with people like the woman who’s glue on nails were so long she couldn’t type, and the bearded programmer who always had one hand in his pocket, typing with the other, I would hear the same response.  “Oh, that’s in the “Eye dent-or”. You’ll have to talk to Sigi.”  They never bothered to tell me what the Eye dent-or was. Just spoke of it with mysterious vagueness to let me know it was an all-powerful program, like the ring of Sauron or something, that governed all other programs in the building we worked on.  Even Frank Kirchman, my team leads boss, told me if I really wanted to understand our system, I could only find its meaning through the Eye dent-or.  “I should spend time with Sigi.”  His name rattled off people’s tongues like he was the ninja master of mathematics. A super elvan, able to program things us lesser beings could not, the “Eye dent-or.”

Being a working-class kid, fresh out of commuter college, who thought he was at best a hobbit, and not one of the elves that seemed to populate the building I didn’t feel myself worthy of an audience with the great Sigi.  Instead I bothered the hell out of Jeff Stewart, a former Air Force guy who had worked in satellite tracking stations, changing data tapes on computers in the remotes of the Aleutians and had landed a job at Lockheed as he already had the clearance.  He was starting a degree in Computer Science at San Jose State, and had been given an assignment with the software group the surrounded Sigi. While Jeff was helpful, I soon exceeded his knowledge of data field meanings and he deposited me at the cube of Sigi Bigelis where he was reviewing a code printout.  There was a quick intro sentence, “Ah, Sig, ah, Stan has some questions about the orbital status files and how the Eye dent-or affects them.” 

With that, Jeff made a quick exit. I was left standing in the cube partition gap behind Sigi.  He looked over from his print out. Studied me, looking up and down, dwelling on my tie for a second, and answering in a crass voice that reminded me more of smoking women in trailer parks than what I expected from someone who’s name was spoken of as though he was the Gandalf incarnation of a great programing wizard.  I still remember it sounded like a crow squawking at me. “What?”

If you are meeting the Pope, the Queen, or Gandalf, its best to have a prepared statement. I did not. “Ah,” I said dropping a record format book on his desk, “What is the correlation score used for?”  I pointed to a 30 bit field in a Cyber Record Manager layout. (This was the 80’s after all, relational databases were infants, and NonSQL Hadoop etc. database inventors were still separate sperm and ovum in their unmarried parents.) 

Sigi just frowned a bit and squinted his eyes from behind his large plastic rimmed glasses. Maybe 28 or 29 years old, he was trim, neatly dressed in slacks and a casual button-down green shirt.  I could tell I’d irritated him.  He just stood, looked at me out of the corner of his eye as he passed and said in that same crass voice, “Follow me.” He led me through the hallways to a room labeled “Document Control” with a waist high counter, grabbed a pad from it, and filled it out handing it to the woman behind.  She pulled a green covered two inch book from a shelf and dropped it on the counter.  “Sign for this.”  The book had “Secret – Something or other” labeling on it. He pushed it in my direction.  “Read sections six to nine.”  With that he headed out the door leaving me with a document titled “Data Correlation Functions.”   I felt a bit like Samwell Tarly having just been let in the Citadel.  I was in maester training, but it was pretty much up to me and a book to figure it out. I read the sections. They were full of trig formulas with drawings of ellipses, discussions of multi-tiered databases and lots of comments about being Grabbag compatible. (Whatever the hell that was.)  Pretty much every page referenced something that required me to check out another document. After a few days, I had about 20 documents on my desk. Grabbag it turned out was just a data query language for data stored in Cyber Record Manager. I used to probe the stuff coming out of the Eye-dent-or. I eventually answered most of my own questions. I even figured out the Eye-Dent-or stood for Identification and Correlation which everyone just called the eye-dent-or. Actually, I figured out there were like twenty names for everything. I mean each field and program had several names, depending on who you talked too. It was a bit like a classified Tower of Babble. In the process I kind of decoded the meaning of the correlation score I had asked Sigi about.  It was a fairly straight forward totaling of calculations.  His program ran a series of tests, depending on the results, it added a calculated valued to the correlation score. Somewhere in the process, I noticed the scoring mechanism kind of overwrote itself, and blurred its results. I didn’t understand that.  It left me back at Sigi’s cube asking about it.

As I showed him the scoring overwrite and a segment of the Eye-dent-or code, he just frowned. His eyebrows narrowed. “Jesus, we have to tell Marge about this.”  We were up and walking the hallways again, landing at the cube of one Marge Tobias. Turns out she was one of the “Hidden Figures” women of our program. She started in 1962 and was pretty much responsible for a lot of the orbital mechanics and high-level math algorithms. Twenty years before SQL, she had invented Grabbag a data query language run on Fortran cards. She worked part time, but as Frank put it, “She spins circles around most of the engineers around here, and does more before one o’clock than most do in a week.”  About two thirds of the twenty documents Sigi had indirectly made me read, Marge had written. She was busily typing at her Wang producing another document I’d probably have to read eventually.  She looked up.  Sigi pointed to me.  “Stan here has found an error in the Correlation Score of the Eye-Dent-or.” 

“Oh?”, she replied. 

I handed her the code segment and talked her through what I had found.  I pointed out it probably only caused an error like one percent of the time.  -Not being sure if that was significant.  I’d only been there a week or so, I wasn’t sure how many times the Eye-Dent-or ran.  Most of my programs to date, ran once when I turned them into a professor. 

“That’s a lot,” she replied and started clicking on her Wang.  Next thing I knew she had the document up I had been reading.  “Let me fix that.”  She typed in some new calculations into the text. ‘Sigi, you can get that in the new stuff, right?” 

He nodded, then noted: “Someone’s got to fix the production stuff, and the upgrade version too.” 

Marge turned to us, “I guess we should write a CR, you can present it at the CCB, as you found it.”

Right out of college, first few weeks on the job, “CR and CCB” sounded like a Martian astronaut hybrid language.  Sigi had this look of dread on his face.  “Perhaps Stan should do it. He found the error.” 

Marge looked me up and down wearing my tie of the day. “How long have you been in here?” 

Reporting back to my team lead, that I was supposed to present a code change request to the change control board, made up of government officials, just made him laugh. “Son of a bitch, two weeks, and you are going in front of the colonels.”

It turns out, most of the software engineers were terrified of the weekly CCB meeting. Mainly because they ended up presenting stuff they didn’t understand.  It turned into a congressional inquisition a lot. That Friday morning, I had my one slide explaining a change in the Eye-Dent-or scoring along with estimates, I was up and down in two minutes. Sigi wasn’t afraid, he just didn’t want to be bothered with colonels and majors with some political agenda. But he stopped by my cube after. “Smooth up there. Beginners luck. Whatcha doin for lunch?” in is crow voice. Gandalf seemed a little less irritated by me. 

Pizza and BBQ.

There were two items that Sigi evangelized, proselytized, criticized and basically dorked out on: Chicago style pizza and barbeque.  (And Pink Floyd. More about that later.)  

I can’t pin down the day when he first expounded to my engineering group the virtues of Chicago deep dish.  Probably just after the first Pizzeria UNO opened in the Bay Area. A few of us had lunch there.  We might have been extolling the novelty of it compared to Round Table. Sigi wasn’t having any of it.  “It’s a knock off. Yah want good deep dish ya gotta go to Chicaga.”

Parallel to this, I had a roommate, Bruno Pichinich from Long Island who almost nightly would criticize Bay Area pizza with the comment: “You want good pizza you need to go to New York!”  I put in the exclamation point because he always emphasized it with an upswing in his voice on the “New York.”  Upping tones with each word.  Much like Sigi emphasized almost every word he used.  He was a bit biting tonal in his conversations.  Direct tone. Emphatic tone. You almost felt like you were being poked with each word because you had dared to claim “chain” Pizzeria Uno deep dish was good.

“Nah. It’s crap.  The only thing that approximates real Chicago pizza in the Bay Area is maybe Zachary’s in Berkeley.”  He upped his tones like Bruno as he worked through the phrase: “Zachary’s in Berkeley.”  He used those same tone changes and crow squawking in design reviews or in conversation just drinking beer.  You had to develop a callus, otherwise they felt like needles. Sigi would eat Round Table, but he wasn’t going to discuss it, he’d switch the subject to Zachary’s.  “They have half bakes. I’ll have to bring one in, you don’t know what you’re missing!”

The other thing about Sigi is, when he ate, he smacked. Loudly. It was a peculiarity we did not begrudge or mention to him.  Though when he was excited on a subject of conversation and drinking, the smacks tended to get louder.  There was like a little smack scale to let you know how many beers and how passionate he was about a subject or the type of food. The rest of us just summed it up by occasionally making note of it when he wasn’t around. Usually when we had been drinking. People would ask how my evening with Sigi was after we went out.  I’d just reply, “We got to level six on the smacks.” 

Then there was the Queue. Not the Star Trek one, the meat roaster. Sigi loved the queue.  Ask him what he did over the weekend on Monday you usually got, “Ah, I threw some stuff on the queue.”  He did other stuff too, went to concerts etc. But what he grilled always got a mention. It was a bit like the Instagram photo’s of meals nowadays. Except at Lockheed it was covered verbally in the start of the week Monday morning two-hour bullshit session, not to be confused with the daily half hour BS sessions we started our days with.  There was a lot of bullshitting at Lockheed.

Early on in 86, right after I moved into my first apartment at Durham Greens in Fremont. (Think Office Space thin walls, cheap furniture and feelings of encapsulation.)

Sigi found out I did BBQ’s on the porch. That was the phrase. BBQ’s on the balcony would be more accurate. On weeknights we’d fire up the mini Webber and hold a bring your own meat event. There was a cavalcade of college friends who showed up. Mostly single veggie avoidant men who graduated from Keystone and discovered blended drinks.  At some point one of my roommates introduced me to a “Skip and go naked.”  His recipe: 12 ounces of frozen lemonade, 12 of tequila, and one beer all tossed in a blender.  Serve over ice.  The police visited a few times. One of the police visits, the mattress from my hide a bed ended up on the neighbors porch. Stories of these events peaked Sigi’s interest after I mentioned them in BS sessions.  “I gotta go to one of these.” 

They were not planned like a weekend event. More organic they seemed germinate at 8-9 o’clock at night. Well after I had left work. So, there were quite a few bullshit session BBQ on the porch debriefs followed by “Invite me to those,” statements by Sigi before we had one with a planned date.  Probably six months. Someone was in town visiting, so he got the invite. He showed up early bearing marinated chicken. It was “Queued” and offered around.  A certain amount of Sigi razzing was endured to some of the unimaginative plain burger grillers. He was wasting his pokes, to this day they still only BBQ burgers.  Engineers will venture into space, but not much in food it seems. Eventually we made a batch of “skip and go naked” and the Sigi’s razzing hit the 8-9 on the smack scale.  Not much else happened that night.  Though, the next Monday he stopped by my cube for the start of the week BS session.  “Nice set of friends. You place is little small; we won’t be hanging there much.”  Sigi’s one bed one bath place in Sunnyvale was smaller. When I visited it the first time, I repeated the “Your place is a little small line to him.” 

Over the years, we didn’t really hang at each other’s place.  Preferring bars or occasional barbecues at places with more than Sigi and Stan room.  More than once we ended up hanging out with Jeff Stewart and his wife at their condo. It was Sigi size certified. Sue Stewart made some sort of Oreo cookie crust cream pie once.  Not sure what was in it. Fat, I know that. After a barbecued stuffing and a few glasses of wine, I had a slice of the pie. Maybe two, I don’t remember. A complete pain took over my gut like that feeling Mr. Creosote had just before exploding in The Meaning of Life.  I assumed a full horizontal position Jeff and Sue’s couch, Sigi inquired to my health status, “This ever happen before?”

It had, just a couple months before in Chicago, when on Sigi’s advice I had hit the real Uno Pizza for a pie of what seemed like a disk of cheese with a smidgen of tomato sauce. Sigi was right, you want real deep dish, the stuffed in Chicago was great. But, on my second piece I suffered the malady which had me on the Jeff and Sue couch. That time, it had me on the couch of my friend Eric Runge. Who had similar questions about my health.  I gave them both the same answer: “It was that second slice.”

From the couch, I relayed my previous experiences. The led to me being the subject of the Monday bullshit session. Sigi squawked.  “That guy can’t handle his pies.” He loved retelling that story. I must have heard it mentioned a dozen times over the next few years.

Ironically enough, when I finally bought a house in the Bay Area, it ended up being just a couple blocks from Zachary’s in Rockridge. I suppose I should have invited Sigi up for pie, but by that time we’d fallen out. (More on that later.)  But now when I walk by a few times of week and get the whiff of tomato and basil in the air, I think of Sigi. Zachary’s is the only thing close to Chicago pizza in the Bay Area. I can also eat four or five slices without getting laid out on the couch. He’s still probably telling people in the afterlife I can’t handle my pie. 

Technical Prowess & Bullshit

Dorky computer types. Where do I start? Watch a couple episodes of Silicon Valley and you think, it can’t be like that. It’s worse.

I said earlier Sigi was Gandalf.  More like Gilfoyal a bit like Richard Hendricks. Arrogant, cranky and full of contempt for the lesser skilled. In the seven years I worked with him, I caught one mistake in Sig’s code:  The Eye-dent-or scoring overwrite. He never missed a schedule and always delivered quick code that worked first time. He documented well and wrote understandable specs and presentations.  A bit of a natural. He looked like Gandalf to his peers because they weren’t.  The crowd that surrounded Sigi had been labeled “The Common Software Group.”  In every IT company there are groups like them. The “Utility & Framework” group, “The Maintenance” group.   If Lockheed had been a construction company these people would be relegated to the more mundane tasks of window or toilet repair and swapping out garbage disposals.  They could fix something already in place, that needed a patch. A valuable job, but you don’t let them loose with design, engineering or skilled carpentry as they are quickly overwhelmed. The Common group had a bit of a reputation for being, how did Sigi put it, “Unable to program their ass out of a wet paper bag.” 

The first time I heard that sentence was just after I had been working with a recent Berkeley grad: MW.  (I’ll stick with initials. Those that worked with us know who I am talking about.) She was working on a code level upgrade.  She’d run some code through an auto converter and it had made the updates. All she had to do was compile and test.  Her code wasn’t working. This was a regular occurrence in the Common group. When I say “not working.” I don’t mean it had a bug; I mean it wouldn’t execute. It was the “blue screen of death” in modern terminology. We were looking at her code to determine why.  As I looked it over, I noticed she had a lot of errors in variable length declarations etc. Part of the upgrade was no implicit variable declaration. (Probably to geeky for you non computer types. In construction terms: measured the distance, cut to measurements. But have a plan set of dimensions before you start and don’t make dimensions up as you go.) Her code compiled but when it executed it overwrote memory etc. Boom. She seemed to have some fundamental weaknesses in the concepts of computer science.  I attempted to educate her.  (I was young and naïve.)  Sigi was in the cube next to MW.  MW and I spent probably twenty minutes discussing the concepts of memory arrays, their size declarations and how you reference their memory spots.  (Think rungs going up a ladder and how many rungs you have. What is the number of the sixth rung?) I could tell she was not comprehending. But I left her to her struggles.  She called back in an hour, saying it worked. I came back over. We ran the program. It didn’t blow up, but it gave the wrong answers.  I started looking at her code. I noticed she had declared the array bounds correctly, but didn’t seem to step through each rung  very well. I asked why she had declared the array bounds at 33 words.   She replied, “Sigi said too.”

I paused a moment, “But do you understand why?”

She replied, “Sigi said too.”

I got a little more direct.  “What would have happened if you had set it to 27?”

She looked a little cross eyed at me. “Sigi said to set it at 33.”

“But why?” I replied.

She parroted back the same response, a little frustrated, with a tone showing she was growing impatient. “Because, Sigi said too!”  One does not question the great Gandalf.

The conversation continued for another twenty minutes without resolution. I might have been demonstrative.  MW could bring that out in me.  It took her a month to get her program working.  I think Sigi just took 20 minutes and fixed it one day.  Sometime after the “Sigi said so” session he stopped by.  A line of common group programmers was asking me how to fix their code. It was like office hours with the professor. Mostly problems with variable declarations etc. I finished with them and turned to Sigi.  I don’t remember what Sigi came by for but I remember is comment on the common group struggles.  He just said, ‘Let me cut to the chase, why do you bother?  Most of them couldn’t program their ass out of a wet paper bag.” He was loud enough most of engineering could hear it.

 I rebuffed quietly with “And why did you bother with MW? “

He just looked indignant. “Look I don’t know why you are an engineer; why aren’t you coding? You could be a fucking wizard in that group! You’re wasting your skills.”   He walked away in a bit of a huff.

I continued on my assignments. There were a lot of reasons why I chose the engineering job.  When I hired in, my boss, Frank Kirchman, showed me a few possible assignments. Coding was one of them, engineering (design and test) was another. I struggled getting my Comp Sci degree. Working my way through college and doing auto repair.  A lot of classes I took twice Various units in the Calculus series more than that.   The first four years had netted a lot of D’s and F’s. I joked years later, I learned advanced mathematics by osmosis. Sit in classes long enough and the information will just saturate the brain. At some point four years in, I realized working and trying to go to college was the issue. I quit and got student loans. The focus jumped my GPA. So divergent were my last two years Professor’s thought I should go to grad school. But in every class, there was always someone, the Sigi, who finished their assignments quicker and with more flare. My ego was damaged. When Frank presented my choices, Engineering looked like a good place to hide.

A week or so later, I was walking by Frank’s office. He pulled me in.

“I’ve been getting a little feed back on you.”   I was afraid my demonstrative tone with MW might have come back to haunt me.  She had started referring to me as “Gruff.” 

“What did I do?” 

 Frank just smiled. “We’re re-organizing a bit. Sigi and others have stopped by and I think we are going to reassign you to Marge Tobias as your lead.”  Bing, I was still in Engineering, but in the center of the action with one of the main design jobs. I wasn’t quite sure what to think. Gandalf had put in a good word for me.

To tie or not to tie, that is the question

I was basically the first male in my family to complete college. The Pisle’s and Dunn’s (Mom’s maiden name) are from farm and factory stock. One grandfather ran the lid making machine at the Dixie Cup factory, the other mined coal and farmed strawberries. Most family pictures seem to have men in overalls. Then there is this whole thing with growing up an Air Force brat with my dad being enlisted and not an officer. The officer’s college degree seemed to get the spiffier uniform with the tie and the better pay. Somewhere I equated the tie and the degree with leadership and success.  So, I wore them to work right out of college.

From the beginning Sigi was curious about them. Not in a positive way.  The first barbeque on the porch we were doing the twelve second tour of my apartment and he asked, “Where are all the ties?”  I obliged pulling back a closet door to reveal the wall mounted tie rack my grandmother gave me at graduation.  Organized by color and material, there were probably thirty on the rack. He noted my permanently up ironing board in the room corner, then sneered back at the tie rack, “I suppose you iron those in the mornings.”  I just shrugged.  He continued in the tone he used when he made wet bag programming statements. “Why do you fucking bother?”

I just smiled. “They are the keys to the gates.”   He probably said something else snide after that, but you get the picture.

Sig wasn’t the only one ribbing my ties. Even Sinbad the comedian harassed me at a club in Fremont. I showed up right after work one night.  Sinbad walked out on stage took one look at my tie and said, “What the fuck are you wearing a tie to a comedy club for? “   Sigi was with me and I felt him poking me in the side. I just shook my head.  Then Sinbad poked at me again, “What, you aren’t going let me harass your ass?”  I shook my head again. He just laughed. “You’re probably the smartest guy in here.”  I shook my head again. Sigi was shaking his head too. The whole audience laughed. 

One of my friends on seeing me in a tie the first time, just said, “Christ, you look like an adult.” In a way that was what I was going for. I didn’t really have to shave till I was 30. At 36 my prematurely gray 37-year-old boss thought I was 23. So, the ties were a distraction from the youth and inexperienced look.

The truth was, just about everyone in the building had some dorky uniform they wore to work. There seemed to be a division between degreed and non-degreed people. We had several groups:  ex-military, people with B.S. degrees in something and hired out of college, and people with PhD’s. The non-degreed ex-military dressed a little better than the degreed. Catch someone in a tie, he was probably ex-military, with his first good paying job.  One guy, Spike Hisey, (I never knew what his degree was in, as he only displayed his high school diploma in his office) wore blue Levi’s, a blue button-down shirt and a navy blue V-neck sweater every day.  Another guy who managed to drop the fact he graduated from Harvard into a conversation once a day only wore a dull light green button-down shirt and green plaid pants.  One non-degreed coworker actually asked him if he washed the same clothes every day, or if he had five sets of the green garb.  The guy was just about cube height, you could see his bald head turn red as he walked away.  Spike who sat next to me, just looked over and said, “I have five sets.”  Sigi was a bit above all that, wearing low key but professional slacks and shirts I’d say bordered on party button down. But it was the 80’s. I think he thought I was worshiping relics.  It took me six years to get a degree, so I saw myself as non-degreed with my first good paying job.

Truth was, it’s hard to say if ties gave me an advantage or not.  The logic of why people rise up in the ranks or not has mostly to do with ability. When I met Sigi, he was an engineering grade six. “Senior Developer” or something.  Not the top, but well up the ladder. Spike was an EG-12, though he had been at Lockheed 25 years. I started as an engineering grade two. “Associate Engineer.”  I suppose in my mind my promotions were slow. In reality, only one person got promoted faster than me. She went off and got a Master’s degree in the process which gave her a six-month nudge to EG-4 over me. I bought into the bullshit of dress for success. It’s really all an issue of choosing your costume. I have with great amusement watched senior executives of major corporations in the last 20 years move from tailored suits and ties to jeans and a suit jacket, with button down shirt. No tie in sight. It’s supposed to be casual. It just looks dorky and out of touch. But it’s the costume.  Sigi had great contempt for mine. I always got the impression he thought I was dressing above my station. Outside of ex-military, only department heads wore ties. Though he couldn’t help notice I did a lot of presentations for others. This had more to do with my ease of speaking in front of the colonels. Two years on the speech team will get you that confidence. He was a bit envious of that skill. I wasn’t above having Sigi sit in the audience and look to him for signals if I wasn’t sure a question posed to me. He called it cheating. I called it using resources. “--Whatever tie boy,” would be the response.

Mostly, he enjoyed picking on my ties after a few drinks.  When it was just the two of us griping about wet bag trapped programmers. One night we were somewhere in Sunnyvale and he was in a bit of a mood.  I don’t remember what all he’d had to drink, but he looked me over after a few. You know the up and down look, like he was in full evaluation mode.  He paused. Then spoke in his intense probing crow squawk voice, “Stan, why the fuck do you wear those ties?  You realize you look like a dork.”

We were both a little lit, so I paused a moment, all philosophical.  Then smirked. “We all look like dorks.  We all are. Shall I go through the dorky features of each of our co-workers?”

He got a little frustrated, “Just answer my fucking question.”

I smiled, “What did you get for your last raise?”

He paused a second, then squawked with a little pride. “I got eight percent.” He was almost defiant.

I rebutted. “I got sixteen.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, then kind of nodded his head. “You might have something there.”

The smirk came back to my face, “So you wanna run down to the mall after this to shop for ties?”

“Fuck no,” he shot back, “You still look like a dork.”

“Fuck You Stan”

I was not a morning person. One of those guys who had three alarm clocks to wake him up, I was late to work in the auto center in college for three years. My boss tolerated it, because as he said, “It was a predictable late.”  Scheduled at 8:30, I consistently showed up at 8:42 or so.  From the point where my alarm started till I pulled out of bed was regularly 45 minutes. I might manage a grunt for the first few hours. I could walk and drive to work, but higher cognitive functions like talking didn’t engage till at least 11:30. Quite literally at the auto center if I was required to talk to a customer before 11, I struggled to form words. So it was at Lockheed. We had flex hours, so I solved some of the problem by coming in around 10 and working till 7:30 or so. But I didn’t always register people who spoke to me. All brain power was dedicated to navigating pathways between cubes.

Sigi was one of those “Hi” guys.  You know, the people who think they need to acknowledge you as you pass. He’d expect a reply.  I’d manage an oomph, a nod, or something in response. Course he’d “Hi” you every time. If you had just passed him in the hall ten minutes ago, no matter, he’d say “Hi” again.    It was a bit tedious. Especially early in the morning for a person with mouth motor issues. I figured if I had managed a grunt at 10:15, I was done for the day. How many times do you have to grunt before 11:00?  Apparently seven or eight. Once on the way in, then on the way to the bathroom, the doughnut tray, any meetings you had to go and on the way by to see what the boss wanted.  

But as I said, Sigi wanted a response. If I didn’t answer, he’d stop in place turning, “Stan!  I said hi!”  Waiting.  You could hear the wait. Probably it was his impatience in breathing. Sometimes I thought it was him drawing his gun (he had one, more on that later) getting ready to pull the cocked trigger if I didn’t respond. I had been warned.  Comply or die. I would manage a grunt followed by a single syllable form of the name “Sig.” There would be a frown, but he would allow me to pass. Though I could swear I could hear Sigi’s frown and head shaking as he proceeded from where we passed. He would mention my “Hi” crimes to my coworkers.  Like I said, his voice pierced, so he might be ten cubes down, but I could here, “We need to do something about that guy’s rudeness!  Can’t he manage a simple Hi?”

Most people at work just realized I wasn’t a morning person and were amused at my zombie walks before 11:00. Slacker programmers would comment it was better to have me in a design review in the morning, as I didn’t have much to say, in the afternoon I’d find every error.   Even my first and fifth period teacher my junior year in high school compared notes once and decided I was not the same person.  My noisy evil twin took over my body in the afternoon.

Anyway, one morning a couple years after I was hired, I was walking down the hall, passed Sig, got the usual “Hi Stan.”  I grunted my response. There was a quick, “Fuck you, Stan!”  No waiting, gun cocking, or demand of response ceremony.  It was kind of refreshing. I might have smirked.  As I headed towards my desk, people seemed to be making a point of saying, “Hi.”  It was like a Japanese business meeting, “Hi, Hi, Hi,”  I had to issue five or six grunts in fifty feet.  Each grunt was followed by a quick, “Fuck you.”  Not with the piercing Sigi crow voice. But a fuck you that let me know something larger was operating. MW even said, “Fuck you.” Though I could tell she had rehearsed it for a week.

With all the ex-military in the building, swearing wasn’t that unusual.  Neither was being gross.  Our department manager Willie Bell, who ran the Advanced F Program, a $500 million sub-contract of a $2 billion system we spent two years on, said after the final readiness review, “Signing off Advance F, was like jacking off and shooting all over yourself.”   

Advanced F had been trouble. Probably sixty percent of the software didn’t work on delivery. When Frank Kirchman reassigned me to Marge Tobias, he put me right in the middle of trying to debug and sort out what did and did not work.  This led to more than one meeting in Willie’s office with a set of software engineer’s claiming I was an idiot and just didn’t know how to run their software.  Add in pressure from what I called the “bullet point chart crowd.” People whose sole duty seemed to be to report status each day in morning government briefings. They were complaining my test results were keeping their percent complete charts from changing. It was all my fault. There were two system’s in particular, the Composite Database and another called OI History where the bullet point guys made me run formal tests I knew would fail.  “Maybe something will pass, and we can at least change our charts a bit,” was the reasoning.    Nothing passed.  The Lockheed centralized software pool wet bag trapped programmers attempted to get the government auditors to transfer blame to me. It all came to a head in a meeting with Willie one day.  It was like nine people against the most junior guy. Willie kind of looked the situation over, then looked down the table at Marge, Frank and Sigi in the corner, “This kid know what he’s doing?”  They all nodded.

Willie kicked everyone out of his office.  Then, me in tow, headed over to a couple programmers of Sigi’s status just outside his office:  Dave and Jim.  There was a short conversation about how long it would take to stuff the data that was suppose to be in OI History and the Composite database into the new relational system we were experimenting with.  The answer was a few days.  The wet bag trapped had worked on the stuff for over a year. Willie just pointed at me, “Work with Stan, he’s the only guy that knows how the fuck it’s suppose to work.”

So, on the mass “Fuck You” morning the last guy to say hello to me was Willie. Being the guy that controlled my raises I had brain reserves that could kick in an emergency.  I blurted back.  “Good morning Willie.”  He was a bit dumbfounded, hesitated a second, then went to small talk, “How have things been going with that, --ah,” he pulled, “Composite database,” out of the air.

I hesitated, “Its been done for a couple months?”

“Oh,” he replied, “Keep up the good work.”  And quickly ducked into his office.

A half hour or so later, Sigi stopped by my cube. “Notice anything different this morning?”  He had an intense but satisfied look on his face. Wobbling his head, and squinting his eyes so much, they pushed is glasses out on his nose.

I looked up from my computer screen, “The department seems to have developed a explicative response policy?” 

“That’s right, we had a meeting, until you learn to respond to our Hi’s we are just gonna say, FUCK YOU in the morning.  Even Willie agreed.”

Assuming the department meeting was really a bullshit session prior to 10:00 AM, I just said, “Willie didn’t mention anything regarding fucks.  Just the composite database.” 

I could see Sigi was a bit perplexed. But he persisted. “You get the point, right?  It’s the new operational plan till you comply.” With that he left, stopping my Willies office. 

I didn’t hear what Sigi said through the open door, but I heard Willie’s laughter, “He said, good morning, what was I suppose too do?”

Anyway, that afternoon, as I walked by Willie stopped me, “Stan!”  I popped my head in his office. He gave out a sigh. “Could you do me a favor and say hello to Sigi when he says hello to you?”  We need his talents more focused.”

Thereafter I made a point to respond.  For Sigi, he got a full on. “Good morning (or whatever part of the day it was) Sigi.”  With a up tone on the syllables of his name for good measure. He usually just frowned at me, and finally just stopped saying hi.

(There is no place to fit this in, but Willie was connected. He talked to our local congressman a lot, and his daughter Sheila married Mike Espy who became the first African American congressman from Mississippi since reconstruction and Secretary of Agriculture under Bill Clinton.  Willie also taught me a lot about how to rise above the fray.  When about 75 percent of the Advanced F project was passing tests, there were a lot of people dragging out fixes to the nth degree before we launched.  Estimates showed we might slip another year.  Willie just advocated we put it up as is.  Within a couple weeks we’d fixed the stuff that mattered. Rather than trying to fix everything to perfection.  Most software companies use that method today. Issuing software with known bugs. Willie was a true pioneer.) 

Stories to come:


Hook me up
My discovery of how many burners worked at Lockheed via Mr. Bigelis.

Pink Floyd Proselytization
The guys was addicted to the Pink.

Sigi got a gun.

Polygraph Avoidance
A lot of us took lifestyle polygraphs to work on projects. Sigi avoided them.

Sigi's love interests.
He had a few.

You ruined my career
Sigi's short stent in a leadership position and why he blamed me for stifling his career.

The Sigi Bigelis Enlightment Society
A little prank we played on Sigi for a few months.