When that cold call came from an IT recruiter, it was the perfect time for me. The leadership change in my agency was clearly leaning heavily back into the “big iron” mentality and away from the innovative work that was my forte. My department, which was reporting directly to a deputy director, was moved into another department that was a horrible match. I didn’t realize how bad the match was until the recruiter described the work that I would be doing--- creating Total Compensation websites for customers of Automated Data Processing (ADP). I would be working in a subdivision of ADP called "AG Consulting". These sites allowed employees of companies that had outsourced their HR, benefits and payroll to ADP to look at their payroll information and all of their benefits in one location online, rather than sending this information through the mail. The Total Compensation concept was brand new and ADP was in the process of designing and developing this functionality through their AG Consulting Division. I thought that this was cool innovation.
So, at the crack of dawn on October 2, 2000, I was on a plane to San Francisco, where I would go through the onboarding and orientation process in the AG Consulting headquarters a few blocks from the Transamerica Tower. Since I was to be a project manager, my onboarding included training in the Project Management Institute's project management protocols and more training in the use of the Microsoft Project Management Windows application that I had begun using at the Office of Information Resources. I was to become a “road warrior”, operating out of my home office 50% of the time, and in ADP's or a client’s headquarters the other 50% of the time.
By first project was to build a Total Compensation Page for BellSouth out of Montgomery, Alabama that required trips to Seattle, Montgomery and the ADP data center in Ann Arbor, Michigan to work onsite with the development team. That project lasted until the spring of 2001, so that was my first exposure to northern winters.
This is the ADP data center in Ann Arbor Michigan with all that snow. It was also my first experience working in a large commercial data center with rooms of batteries making up an Uninterruptible Power Supply and generators that could support a small city.
This is a picture of Jim Byrd, the manager on the BellSouth side in front of one of the several generators at the ADP Data Center in Ann Arbor.
The rest of 2000, I was working on my second project, changes to the Total Compensation site for the annual update of BellSouth’s payroll, HR and benefits package. This was hosted in ADP’s Des Moines data center and brought my second exposure to snowy weather. I saw more snow in Iowa than in Michigan for sure.
Everyone remembers where they were when they heard about a pivotal event in history. I had already had three of these; my first was September 3, 1959 – The Day the Music Died. My second was November 22, 1963 – The Assassination of President Kennedy. My third event was September 11, 2001 – The Attack on America. It was a cool, sunny day in Des Moines and I was working at my desk in the ADP Data Center on the corner of University Avenue and 50th Street. I had not noticed that it was getting quiet all around and that many of my coworkers had left their desks. I got a call from my wife telling me that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York. After we hung up, it dawned on me that everyone was away from their desk. I went down the hall towards the cafeteria and found everyone there watching the coverage on NBC on WHO-TV.
I had a seminar scheduled at the Alabama Certified Public Accountants Conference by my client Jim Byrd of BellSouth the Friday after 9/11 for one p.m. The conference was mainly local, and my client needed me to be there because several other speakers could not get there due to the grounding of all civilian aircraft in the aftermath. So, the Thursday after 9/11, I began a two-day drive to Montgomery from Des Moines. Alone in my rental car, I tuned-in to as many local radio stations as I could on the trip. Every single one of them was running live DJs and doing something special like raising money, blood drives, food drives, etc. in support of New York. I thought at the time that was why I loved local, live radio, and it made me miss it.
After resting overnight at a Mariott on I-65 in Nashville, I met my client in Birmingham, and we convoyed to Montgomery where we arrived at noon just in time for lunch. Jim and I were seated at the head table where the conference coordinator told me that the speaker for the second seminar was unable to get out of the city. He asked me if I could stretch my discussion of the opportunities the internet afforded accountants to cover an additional one and a half hours. I told him "no", but I had a second PowerPoint with me about internet security that I had developed while at the State of South Carolina that I could present. So, I spoke from one till 4:30 p.m. with a half hour break. I then got back into my Hertz Subaru and drove to the Columbia airport where my car was parked, arriving at 11:30. 1,376 odometer miles in two days and two seminars. I was a tired puppy.
I tried several times to reach Hertz the day before my drive from Des Moines to Montgomery and could not reach them. So, I decided to go anyway. I finally reached Hertz from the road near Champaign, Illinois, and they said that I could turn the car into the counter at Columbia Metropolitan Airport and they would only charge me the daily rental fee for the extra day.
I saw a lot of the country between 2000 and 2008. I also ran projects in New York City, Jersey City, Roseland, New Jersey, Minneapolis, Alpharetta, Georgia, New Orleans, Hicksville, New York and Houston, as well as trips to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, Jacksonville and the ADP data centers at Ann Arbor, Des Moines and Alpharetta. During that time, I was promoted to program manager of a new ADP division, Complete Outsourcing Solutions (COS). This division handled extremely large projects when companies outsourced their HR, benefits and payroll divisions to ADP. One of the last projects I ran was the splitting off of ADP’s brokerage division to form a new company, Broadridge Financial Solutions, in 2007. At the time, ADP, then Broadridge, through its computer systems, actually performed three fourths of all the financial transactions on Wall Street. No pressure there at all!
I had initially planned on spending two years on the road with ADP, so by the time eight years had rolled by, I was ready to find something at home. I took a consulting position with Systemtec Inc here in Columbia and went to work as a contract project leader at Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina. By this time, I had already reconnected to radio, part time.
I was born in a great radio town, Jacksonville, FL. So it was only natural that I joined WUSC (AM at the time) in my first semester in 1963. I went on to a career in commercial radio and television in Columbia, working with WCOS-AM & FM, WIS-TV, WIS Radio, SCETV and PBS. I'm retired now, giving back since 2010 to the station that started my career, WUSC-FM. If you did the math, you would know that I celebrated the 60th anniversary of my first radio show ever in November 2023.