Barbra Streisand - The Way We Were (1975)
The Way We Were youtube

Memories............ are so beautiful and YET.

Back in the day during the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas fiasco I had my own dilemma.

I was working as a contractor at IBM at the time. hmmmmmm and you aren't gonna believe my experience or maybe you will.

Anyways, I had been working there for about 18 months and the incident happened and it was a big deal on the news. Was he a womanizer or was she a shrew?

I had worked at IBM for a year and after a year back in the day, I had to be off from IBM a year. I worked in department B54 for Dan Malone, Dan Cheng, Gary Dunbar and Bob Sykes. It was ok but later I would learn to love another group that I worked for and this particular incidence is part of the reason I was moved.

Kay Murdock was an IBM technician I was friends with and she worked in Malone's group. She liked Dan but there was another technician in her group that was a real male chauvinist pig and he was nortorious for his hatred of women and always telling sexist jokes. Kay defended him a lot of the times but some times she couldn't handle his obnoxiousness (sorry for the spelling). This jerk's name is or was Jim Donaldson and he was truly an SOB.

.......... All righty then, to make a short story long here's what happened. As you know my name is Dedra and after a big argument in the hallway with Jim, I went back to my desk and there was an email from him. OMG!

Dear deBra the note started........ OMG, this after 18 months of working in the same department with 'him' who had never before called me Debra. hmmmmmmm, what the hell.

I printed the note off and walked angerly to Dan's office and placed the note on his desk as he was in a department meeting.

I waited and waited for him to mention it. I knew it was going to be uncomfortable and so I decided to reprint the note and walk to his office again. He was there this time and I gave it to him and sat down and started talking.

Dan's reply was that Jim wasn't smart enough to figure something like that out. I knew this to be a bold faced lie as Kay and I had talked and she shared with me his hateful ways. (She did share with me that if I made something of it, she wouldn't back me up.) Sooooooooooooooooooooooo

I walked out of the room pissed off and I called my contract company and the CEO of the company made an appointment to come to San Jose and she and another officer took me to lunch.

I was told they would back me up but they both knew I would lose. hmmmmmmmm
BTW, they both had worked as IBMers before going over and working at the contract company. They knew the lawyers behind IBM and they warned me that although they would back me up their loyalty was with IBM in no uncertain terms as IBM had gotten them good jobs and their pay was great. (REVOLVING DOOR, eh?)

The two women asked me what I wanted to do? They had told me that if it went to trial over sexual discrimination I would miss a lot of work and I would probably be in court for up to 4-6 weeks.

I wasn't prepared to do this and ask merely to be moved to another department and that really did work out better for me as the group I ended up supporting was a satelite (Once again spelling) group and they fought often with the product division I had just left and many of their cases were similar to mine.)

Actually, the new group was the group that reported directly to Louis Gerstner Jr. and so, the politics were different. I was in the headquarters group. There were lots of high powered women and they were very supportive of my situation.

.............anyways, that's my story and I'm sticking to it regarding the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas fiasco.

DJ Malone
EXCERPT:
Bio
Dan Malone received his undergraduate education at Cal Poly SLO receiving an Electronic Engineering degree in 1968. He later received an MBA ('73) and an MSEE ('93) from Santa Clara University and did further graduate work. He was an adjunct faculty member at Santa Clara University from 1993 to 1999 and taught classes in the Graduate School of Engineering. Dan retired from IBM in 2002 after 35 years where he worked in the development laboratory after holding assignments in circuit and system design, management and program management for the disk drive division. He also worked for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies from 2003 to 2005. During work at IBM, Dan held foreign assignments in England (2 years), Germany (2 years) and Japan (1 year) and various assignments in other parts of Asia. He holds 13 US patents. Dan is also an amateur radio operator (HAM – K6HPB). Dan has a wife and three sons that graduated from Cal Poly and seven grandchildren. Dan has been teaching classes at Cal Poly in the EE/CPE and Math departments since 2006.

Mike Workman who was Dan Malone's boss at the time this happened and Nancy Holleran was also in same area
EXCERPT:
Location
HQ in San Jose, CA (and development office in Longmont CO), European HQ in Ireland, offices in France, Germany, Switzerland and UK

Founded in
July 2001

Financial funding
$400 million by Tako Ventures LLC, a private equity firm of Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison that owns 85% of Pillar, the remaining being owned by employees

Main executives

Mike Workman, chairman and CEO
Nancy Holleran, president and COO (former VP of IBM's WW customer engineering group and VP of technology development and product engineering at Conner Peripherals)

Notice the date......... I worked at IBM then........
IBM and Monsanto
EXCERPT:
January 5, 1998
Monsanto Hires IBM For IT Operations
Companies also plan ERP consulting venture
By Joy D. Russell

onsanto Co. last week agreed to outsource some of its IT operation to IBM Global Services for 10 years. At the same time, IBM and Monsanto created a joint venture to provide consulting services to companies implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Separately, Monsanto, a maker of agricultural products, pharmaceuticals, and food ingredients, formed an alliance with IBM's IT research arm to develop technologies to map the genetic structure of plant groups and human diseases.

The companies didn't give the value of the outsourcing agreement, although IBM said it was one of its biggest outsourcing deals in 1997. Under the accord, IBM will handle data-center management, help-desk operations, and support for 8,000 desktop systems, in cluding LAN and WAN management. IBM is hiring nearly all of the 152 IT employees in Monsanto's St. Louis headquarters, leaving Monsanto with about 300 IT employees at other sites.

The ERP consulting venture will seek as customers other companies in process-oriented industries, such as pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Monsanto believes that much of the development work it has done on its own implementation of SAP's ERP systems can be reused by customers of the venture, without giving away too much proprietary information.

"Out of all the companies we looked at to partner with for a solutions center, IBM best understood how to keep our intellectual capital and work with our reusable system design," says Bob Barrett, former leader of Monsanto's SAP project, on which work began in 1994. Barrett is moving from Monsanto to become director of the ERP joint venture.

Daniel Colby, general manager of products and telecommunications for IBM Global Services, says Monsanto's expertise will strengthen IBM's prese nce in the competitive SAP services market, which includes providers such as Andersen Consulting, Ernst & Young, EDS, and Price Waterhouse.

"When you look at alliances," Colby says, "this is a good example of what two companies can get from each other and what they both can pour into R&D."