Lotus



Lotus is the last place I had a real job. Lotus is a subsidiary of IBM, with a history of being a hippie software company from Cambridge Mass. IBM bought lotus in a hostile takeover about a year before I started working there, and by the time I quit, IBMs rigid corporate culture had completely assimilated any free wheeling culture Lotus ever had. For example, we used to have a beer cart on Fridays, and people would occasionally be tipsy by 7:00 when we closed up shop. We had a building overlooking a beautiful section of Town Lake, running thru Austin. People used to take their pets to work. Then we were sucked into the main IBM buildings, which looked like pink granite versions of Borg spaceships on Star Trek. No more beer cart, no more pets at work. I've heard that now they got rid of the free coffee.


I'll quote from my resume which summarizes my tenure there:


Started off as an intern taking calls from end users on desktop products. I was promoted internally 3 times, and eventually became the Worldwide Leader of the Internet Products Team. My responsibilities included assigning incidents to analysts on my team, writing and editing Technical Documentation, handling the most difficult issues and dealing with the most irate customers and big spenders at Lotus/IBM technical support call center. I also gave training seminars to other analysts, as well as sales and marketing teams.


I worked very hard at Lotus, often studying material at home to get better at taking calls. I took advantage of the free training they had available and passed all the certification tests to make me a Certified Lotus Professional. I had a good reputation as an analyst among my peers, management and Account Managers.


Eventually, though, I got bored with being a support analyst, and decided to try being an independent contract programmer. I took the first job offered to me in Austin which was working on the Tivoli (another IBM subsidiary) web site. I was in nasty depression at that time and I couldn't figure out what my bosses wanted me to do, so they terminated my contract after only 5 weeks. I haven't worked since then.


Sometimes I wonder if my brain has gone soft with all the inactivity since last summer. Good thing I'm only taking one class per semester this summer!