|
Wooddale, Illinois.
Claire’s Boutiques is a large retailer of costume jewelry aimed at young girls. I think they had 1200 stores when I went to work for them and they were just about to enter the world of POS (Point Of Sale). They have over 1600 stores at the time of this writing.
Claire’s was a fun job but my employee discount didn’t do me any good. I got to be part of the effort to select POS equipment for the stores and I did a lot of work testing the dial-up communications and the processing of the inbound sales. Living so close to my office was not good. I would tell my wife that I was going out to the garage and I would sprint over to Claire’s to work on some code. I loved that job and I really liked living across the street from it. Claire’s was such a big organization and it impressed me that they had a full-time operations manager. My hands-on work with the System 38 seemed to be over. One day the operations manager failed to show up for work and wouldn’t you know it, we had a system problem. I told my manager that I could fix the problem so I went about my work and they looked for our operations manager. With the absence of the manager I had full access to the computer room and all the pieces of the data center. I was in heaven. A couple of days later I was reading the Chicago Tribune when I found an article that was enormously interesting. Our manager had been arrested for robbing a bank. Robbing banks was his weekend job and he was very good at it until he left his car keys on the bank tellers counter. Luckily he had a spare set of keys in the car so he drove home. For some reason or other he needed his lost keys so he went back to the bank the next day and asked if anyone had seen them. What the heck was he thinking?
I conducted the technical interview for his replacement and that person is still at Claries as of this writing. A couple of weeks after I left Claire’s I received a call from an old college friend (Joe) who I had not seen in about five years. He called to tell me that he was sitting in my old desk at Claire’s and he had taken my old job.
|
