ESSAY

Oh Poncho...

Oh Cisco! You Are A Villain?

Do you ever feel like somehow you got selected to be one of those people things "happen to?" Not necessarily good things, not things that happen "for you." It makes all the difference in life, whether it is a tapestry of joy or a sea of pain. I suppose we all get to knit and sink, and life's "losers" have stories as nicked by fate as do life's "winners." That it is usually hard to perceive the karmic justice - that bad things happen to good people - only darkens the waters. That in our new age of social and professional networking we are engaged with strangers only perpetrates the surreal and increases the likelihood of the unexpected occurring.

Around the first of the year, I was sitting at my desk in the office of the engineering company I was working for at the time, when I started getting calls from this friendly guy named Bill Davis. Here is where the surreal part starts. Bill had found me on the Internet, where I have a big presence because I'm an Internet junky. You can learn almost everything there is to know about me on the Internet, I'm an open book. You can even hear me warble off key, if you've a mind.

Bill told me he had an opportunity for me as a Bid Developer with Cisco Systems. I'm perfect for the job, he said. It paid $104,000 per year and, among the benefits, I would work from home.

I am a California mortgage slave. I not only have to work, I have to make dollars almost out of the range of an English/Journalism major, even one with 30-plus years of professional experience. (Having a certificate in technical writing ups my market value.) Still, I'm screwed for anything beyond about $4,000 in monthly mortgage-related payments. I was working for a good firm, one that had made its reputation doing environmental remediation and cleanup projects. The people were pleasant. It was the kind of place where I would bring my kids. In fact, one pleasant graphics person there had Lego sets that "needed to be built," and my son Griffin would sit in a cubicle and go to town on the construction. One could hardly hope for a better company, except that they weren't quite paying me enough to keep me from sliding ever further into debt. It is hard to feel optimistic in an employment in which you work all the time only to have your fortunes decline. There is that disconnect again, that surreal aspect of modern life.

Which brings me back to Bill Davis. Bill, it turned out, is with a Florida company called K&J Consulting and he told me that his firm has a standing deal with Cisco Systems to provide technical support, and he needed to fill a Bid Developer position for his client. He repeated, "It's $104,000 per year..." In fact, he started playing that drum pretty hard. "$104,000 per year..."

Now $104,000 per year in California money isn't a great amount, purchasing-power wise, but it is more than I was making. Plus, this wasn't just some IT firm Bill Davis was touting, it was Cisco Systems. Cisco has "rigged" 70 percent of the entire existing Internet! More importantly to me, they are annually touted as "One of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in America," maybe even the best. 

I stalled Bill for awhile, while I thought about making a move. The company I was working for had just given me a raise, 100 percent of the maximum under their system of managing pay increases; it more than matched the rate of inflation. And around Christmas the proposal group treated me to an expensive night out with them at Bing Crosby's place in Walnut Creek, and they gave me a little gift over dinner. It was not easy for me to leave these people who had been really good to me, but Bill Davis was offering better money and "Cisco Systems" on my resume. He assured me that K&J was in good with Cisco and had maintained a client relationship for nine years, with no reason for it to stop.

Over Christmas break I went into San Francisco and met some "Proposal Experts." That is the name of the group I was being hired into - the Proposal Experts. The two experts I met with seemed like pleasant guys, which sort of cinched the deal. I decided I couldn't say no to Bill Davis and his $104,000, so I called him back to accept the offer, but not after first confirming what I thought I had understood to be "the deal." It turned out I had the salary right, but the benefits did not include health insurance. In fact, they only included expense reimbursement and two weeks paid vacation the first year.

Without health insurance, Bill's $104,000 package shrunk significantly, but I felt confident that we could purchase individual coverage health insurance and still be money ahead. Besides, my company at the time was offering Great Western health insurance, which is practically like having no health insurance anyway. In retrospect, I was lost in heedless optimism regarding the practicality of buying individual coverage health insurance, but it was part of a broad trend. I was headed into the weird realm of Cisco Systems and their dark underling K&J Consulting.

But First, A Message About Our Sponsors...

A terrible thing has happened to the American Dream. You remember "the dream?" The central tenant of America's "land of opportunity" story was that every hard working U.S. citizen (every "male" citizen, in the original version) would be able to live in a home of his own, purchased with the sweat of his own brow. Not only could "Everyman a King" be a basic fact of American life, but every succeeding generation of Americans could toil with the knowledge that they would find themselves better off than had been their father's generation.

That bit of American propaganda was an outgrowth of the second industrial revolution in the U.S., which evolved in the 1940s as industry geared up to equip the military with the machinery necessary to defeat Germany and Japan in the second world war. And, for a time, the dream seemed real. Fueled by the G.I. bill, veterans returned home to attend college in previously unheard of numbers, higher education reaching deep into the American social well, and the modern American corporations rose up as centerpieces of America's unparalleled economic might. Why, the future was so bright you had to wear sunglasses! Mothers wished for their children to find secure employment in the powerhouse American corporations, representing lifetime passes to an upward mobility that had no ceiling. And for a time the rising tide did seem to lift all boats, and even guys who weren't able to take advantage of greater access to higher education found themselves in what felt like lifetime employment with major American manufacturing concerns. My father, an Air Force-trained electrical specialist without a college degree, found a job as an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry, working with the former Martin Marietta and then the Beach Aircraft corporations. In the late '50s he bought a new brick home in the Denver suburb of Englewood, Colorado, paying the modest amount of $12,000 as his investment in the American Dream. But something started to happen in the '60s, a slow sense of diminishing returns. In 1965, my father fled his little brick suburban "castle" out of fear that the magic corporations he worked for were determined to lay him off, and he retreated into the American backwaters, never again to benefit from the optimism he had felt around America's unstoppable economic might. He ended up doing well for himself, rising to senior executive levels in the banking industry, though now approaching 80 years of age he is still in the workforce selling real estate. Absolutely dedicated to the values of hard work and honesty, and stubbornly resistant to any notion that there is anything wrong with the heart of American "business," he has been laid off in a corporate takeover, and forced into early retirement by another corporation that he devoted himself tirelessly to for 20 years; though of course it wasn't really a "retirement," it was just a lightening of their payroll, a "youthing" of the company. After nearly 60 years in the workforce, he still doesn't have the means to rest.

America stalled in the late '60s, when growth in purchasing power stagnated and then started going backwards. This month the Associated Press reported that there has been "a 12.5 percent drop between 1974 and 2004" in median annual incomes as adjusted for inflation (this from the findings of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project). Household incomes rose in that period, but the reason is increased numbers of full-time working women. As we all know, American women, who during WWII entered the workforce out of patriotic duty have stayed in the workforce because 60 years later it takes two incomes to support a family of four. The impact on American family life, from having parents diverted from the roles they need to accept to build healthy families, is completely calculable. We see it in falling high school test scores and graduation rates, and in the jobs American corporations outsource to educated people from other nations (who work for less). We see it in the paralysis of our school administrators, who will not address failing students by confronting parents, too many of whom are single, poor and uneducated themselves. And we see it in the number of lawyers who are ready to bring claims against school administrators for their "mishandling" of student affairs.

Where we don't see the pain is at the top of the economic ladder. As the idea of economic mobility withered for the "average" American, the Pew Project reported that "CEO pay was 262 times the average worker's pay in 2005, up from 35 times in 1978," this based on their analysis of Congressional Budget Office statistics. 

And in the most direct rebuttal to the idea of an American dream, the Pew Project reported that citizens of Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and France all have a greater opportunity to experience upward economic mobility than do citizens of the U.S. 

Otherwise put, the American Dream had to sell its house and is now living in Europe. 

Old Europe, that is.

For Americans, it is more bleak a picture than perhaps a non-American can imagine. (There are bleaker pictures, to be sure: we still have illegals coming over the borders from economically immobile Mexico.) The "social contract" that resides at the foundation of the American workers' future has not so much been forgotten as circumvented. Sometimes America, and especially American business, seems like a snake swallowing itself by force of its own ideals. At the heart of its "ideals" is "free market capitalism," which essentially empowers corporations to prey on one another (and their employees), not only in terms of product market share but in terms of "social infrastructure." Health Insurance providers, focused on increasing profits for shareholders, continue to raise costs for corporations to provide health insurance benefits for their employees. As a result, companies have continued to increase the deductions on individual pay as companies pick up less and less of the total cost of the benefit, reducing in real values these companies' commitments to their workers. Under those predatory pressures, the potency of the social contract decays from the sides of both employer and employee, while at the same time America's recent conversion to a "service economy" has made 24/7 responsiveness to clients and customers an imperative. The "expectation bar," on that level, has been raised to where a company cannot compete unless it promises this extraordinary level of service delivery. That's why you can call almost anybody's tech support at all hours of the night, and why Raley's "honors our veterans on Memorial Day" by closing a whole two hours earlier than usual.

So here you have this bind that Americans, and American businesses, find themselves in. Companies are promising to do more for their clients, less for their employees. Under that calculation, the new American benefit is that now you can go to McDonald's anytime, all night long; it'll be there for you when your overtime shift is finally done, and it'll probably be all you can afford anyway.

My Hat is White, Poncho. Why is Yours Grey?

What, you may ask, has all of this to do with Poncho and the Cisco Kid?

It has to do with another evolution in American business: the rise of the "consulting firm." Consultants have, of course, always been around. They have tended to be people with extra insight into the machinations of things, people from the executive branches of institutions who have arcane knowledge that they dispense for a fee, and generally a fee far higher than would be paid to any employee dispensing the same stuff, were that possible. And more and more, that is possible because "consultants" aren't necessarily what they used to be. Certainly the top-end professional mercenaries still exist, the former government officials, like William Cohen and Colin Powell. But these days there is a new category of "consultants" who are not really top-end professionals and don't really "consult" in the traditional sense of the term; with them "consult" is used as a marketing term. They are more like specialized temporary workers who are brought in for defined periods to do specific projects. Working as a writer or editor, in various capacities (proposal and technical), I have been one of these types. There are tons of us in the Bay Area. We tend to work long days, but benefit from getting choice assignments and higher rates of pay. We benefit companies by providing "surge capacity," as the Defense Department might say. We provide the extra strength to get a job done, and then we get off the payroll without further benefit. 

I first became aware of this class of consultant back in the late '80s, when as a staff member with a corporate training firm I would find myself working with, usually supporting, some pampered character who would show up seemingly out of thin air for a period of time, contribute something, and then leave; usually, it seemed to me, with all the money. Companies' reliance on these folks tends to diminish the perceived value in being a "staffer" or an employee, so years ago, unable to beat them, I became one of them. I have peddled myself to software, hardware, architecture and engineering, university research, corporate training and financial services industries, and it had been a great way for me to work, providing the required level of income and flexibility to allow me to do other things with my life, like pay attention to my family and pursue creative pursuits, including this site.

Back in 2005, with our kids getting to the age where they needed to be in strong learning environments and in a school system that could provide the foundation skills they would need to go on to higher educational levels, my wife and I started looking into buying a home in Benicia, California. There you have one of the top 50 towns in America to live in, according to Sunset Magazine. To get the loan to cover a California-sized mortgage, however, I had to make the choice to take a staff position with an engineering firm. It did not help our income in any substantive way, but the loan officers at the bank liked that it looked like stable employment. I took the job and we bought a house.

Soon enough the old realities set in. My new firm relied heavily on consultants to come in and run the largest proposals we pursued, and so we would occasionally "surge" with this extra manpower. One couldn't argue with success, we won everything we went after. And, as usual, the consultants took all the glory and left with a lot of the money. Worse, the company's reliance on the consultants put a cap on how high the rest of us in regular staff positions could rise. The company owners "trusted" their hired guns (like Cisco and Poncho) a lot more than they did those of us on staff. Again, a tortured social contract; a situation akin to preferring the neighbor kid to your own off-spring.

In January I gave more than one month's notice to my employer of my intent to leave my staff position to become a Bid Developer with Cisco Systems, a "consultant," but not before confirming the offer one more time. In doing so, I made an error that, in retrospect, should have been revealing but slipped my attention at the time. The connection, I learned, between K&J and Cisco is seamless. I at first did not know if I was talking to a K&J consultant or a Cisco regular, and so when I sent an email to Bill Davis confirming the salary I copied people who turned out to be Ciscoans. I immediately got a harsh note back from Bill Davis telling me not to divulge pay information to anyone at Cisco.

What was the secret? I wondered.

I received a contract from K&J Consulting stipulating the terms of our agreement, including the $104,000 per year salary, and I got a Laurel and Hardy email welcome from K&J CEO Ted Davis. Another Davis? I must admit that a favorite movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai: Across the Eighth Dimension, flashed to mind, in which all of Emil Lizardo's spaced aliens share the same first name, John. 

A few days before I started work, I was informed that I would not be joining the team I had interviewed with, but rather would be interviewing again with another Bid Manager as a preface to joining her team. This threw me a little, but I was committed now, and after meeting the new Bid Manager in a telephone conversation I felt alright with it. 

And yet...

I Told Them to Go Fuck Themselves

Cisco Systems essentially sells network systems and they are big on "remote workers," people who work from their homes. They feature their products, providing instant messaging and desktop sharing technologies and telephone conferencing services. It all works pretty well. Cisco people have choices and they tend to determine which technologies work best for them, and ignore the rest.

My next K&J contact came through a telephone orientation. Originally the plan had been for me to report to the San Jose office for orientation, but the coordinator decided to just do it over the phone. They shipped a laptop to me that didn't arrive in time for the orientation call, but no matter. There was a PowerPoint presentation in email that we barreled through telling us how to do our invoices and reporting.

I took a trip down to Cisco's offices in San Jose to "be badged." Cisco's campus is vast and I was taken by how shabby it looks. The company chose a new logo for itself in 2006 and maybe they aren't doing maintenance on the old stuff until the new stuff arrives, but Cisco generally looks like it needs a coat of paint. The company hasn't got the strongest color palette to begin with and all the old signs seem faded. I found this oddly disappointing, having convinced myself that I was signing onto something great with this IT behemoth. The people I met seemed friendly and fine.

During the orientation conference call, I spent time chatting with another "new hire" while we waited for our hostess to get on the line. He turned out to be a guy like myself, another "proposal expert" who had years of experience in the architecture & engineering field. Somehow he too had been discovered and recruited by K&J Consulting, and he was actually in the slot with the San Francisco team I had initially interviewed with. I lost track of him after that, but noticed he did not attend the Proposal Experts Offsite in Vancouver, B.C in March. It turns out he hadn't lasted the first week. The job advertised itself as an opportunity to work on proposals from remote locations, but both of us soon discovered that wasn't at all true. "I told them my idea of working remotely on a proposal is that I take the proposal information I need, go off and work on it, and then bring it back done," he told me. "That's not what they want. They want somebody who is sitting there chained to their telephone 24 hours a day. I told them to go fuck themselves."

Working With an Un-funded Mandate

Focus On the Competition

Cisco, in fact, is a firm with a rapacious appetite. They put effective marketing spin on it, positioning themselves as constantly adding value for their customers through investments in innovations and the best new technologies, but in truth they are in a feeding frenzy. The number of employees they boast is growing robustly through the acquisition of competing firms, until now only two other companies, Jupiter and Foundry, really keep Cisco from a complete monopoly on network technology, and Cisco has an aggressive program to do away with them. Cisco hires former Jupiter and Foundry technical experts to man their "war rooms," or "Focus on the Competition" (FOCOM) teams. They dissect Jupiter and Foundry products and advise proposal teams on what needs to be said to undermine the competition and to build value for Cisco's more expensive line. These guys are tremendous. They can look at a scope of work in an RFP and devise a bid that mirrors what the Foundry and Jupiter account managers will likely offer. All that is required is a sense for what else the competition might offer to sweeten the deal. The Cisco FOCOM guys know when their competitors will be releasing their next product, and what weaknesses in their current product line the next release will address, which influences the way Cisco bids. It is high-tech hardball and extremely impressive.

What Cisco struggles with is rapid absorption of these acquired entities, and no situation typifies that more effectively than Cisco's acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta (S-A). S-A is the manufacturer of "set-top" boxes that decode cable television signals and control channel selection. Two years after Cisco gobbled up S-A, the two companies still are at arms length from one another. S-A employees behave like a conquered people, barely willing to acknowledge their Cisco masters. I shadowed a "deal" in which Cisco and S-A pursued an Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) opportunity in the Bahamas, which was an S-A account manager's initiative, but for some reason it fell to Cisco's Proposal Experts team to develop the bid. The engagement team swelled to at least twice, probably more, the size of a typical "virtual team," as Cisco ironically calls them. For every Cisco person there was an analog on the S-A team, not that the S-A people were going to contribute anything to the process. One S-A systems engineer provided me with the link to the system they use to identify hardware required for the scope of work, which translates into pricing. "Spec-ing a network system" was obviously not something I was qualified to do. The point is, the S-A people just couldn't muster the will to function under the new Cisco leadership. The proposal, which was run by my supervisor and functioned for me as a training and orientation exercise, was one of the worst "joint venture" (not in the technical, legal sense) type of proposals I have ever experienced, though "JV's" are generally pretty strange exercises. This one went so weird that Cisco eventually tendered an offer using S-A hardware and software from a chief rival, Jupiter. Cisco currently has no end-to-end IPTV solution, which is what the RFP called for, though software is in development. Cisco didn't feel comfortable with making a "beachhead" for their new technology out of S-A's Bahamas deal.

Vancouver Meltdown

As one might imagine, with 54,000 employees, most working from remote locations, Cisco is a really impersonal place beyond tiny pods of traditional office staff who do build relationships. (I think of them as the "core routers," a Cisco hangover. Language there is riddled with tech talk. "Do you have the time?" for instance at Cisco becomes "Do you have bandwidth?")  Once a year the Cisco Proposal Experts have an off-site in which team members from across the globe assemble to discuss current initiatives and get to know each other a little better. This year the event was held over four days in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The off-site was going to be the first time I had ever laid eyes on any of my "fellow experts," including the manager of the Proposal Experts, a Scandinavian with the unlikely name of "Bent Rye," which in my mind immediately translated to "Perverted Wheat." Bent is a tall, skinny, Ichabod Crane type, who is an "excitement seller," which is to say that his approach is to rev up the energy so that everyone gets excited about whatever it is he is trying to sell. He and his staff had come up with a theme for the offsite - "One World, Right Here, Right Now" - which struck me as extraordinarily dated, like maybe 10 years ago Bent had heard a Jesus Jones song that had been metastasizing in his brain as a marketing slogan. The "One World..." part referenced the Proposal Experts growth around the globe, particularly in the Asian and European markets.

After working through technical glitches, Bent showed us a video called "Viking Dawg," which featured him doing some execrable rap something along the lines of "You've never seen anything like this before, because there has never been a Proposal Experts before." He liked it so well that he played it twice, the second time for the benefit of some invited speakers, Cisco movers and shakers who showed up and struggled to think of anything to say. None of them seemed to have bothered to prepare anything, other than thanks for all the hard work. I had the feeling they felt obligated to fly in for a day, say some stuff, and get out. The agenda was packed, with one speaker or demonstration after the next, but it soon became apparent that it was going to be a long four days. The Proposal Experts provided a Yoga instructor to drop by and show us how to relax and re-energize. I couldn't take my eyes off Bent Rye, as he tried to duplicate the Yoga movements, looking something like a stork trying to midwife a delivery.

My attitude toward the proceedings was colored by having shown up with a "bug." I wasn't feeling well, but the first night of the conference I joined the experts at a Moroccan restaurant where we were entertained by a belly dancer who one at a time pulled conference attendees into her dance. It was fun, but it was the last of the evening festivities I attended, as I was feeling "sicker" by the second. I couldn't help but think of the ribald dance fest when on Wednesday morning the Viking Dawg stunned the conference by announcing that a K&J consultant had been fired and sent packing after inappropriate behavior at the Proposal Expert's Tuesday night party. Apparently a woman complained of some guy's advances and other women who had also had trouble with this guy heard about her complaint and came forward with their own. Apparently he had been making women uncomfortable for a couple years, but somehow it was only coming to light in Vancouver. Somehow the chatter in Cisco's global network, its "virtual community," hadn't surfaced this issue.

In fact, there is a great deal of entropy in the communications of any community of 54,000, let alone one as "virtual" as Cisco's. One is dealing primarily with strangers, or at least people who know each other only superficially, so the professional veneer that is the default for those types of business communications is seldom cracked. Much goes unsaid. I recall my first conference call with my new teammates. I was introduced as the guy who was replacing some other guy whose name I forget. I asked what happened to the previous guy, which got a second of nervous titter, but no answer. It was meant as a joke, but the tortured response made me wish I hadn't sounded so rhetorical. What did happen to him? There were things I would never find out, teammates I would never once meet.

I approached Wednesday in Vancouver with enthusiastic curiosity, because I was curious to see Ted Davis, the CEO of K&J Consulting. He was scheduled to speak that day and after sitting through two days of people droning on about their plans for marketing their services - Bent Rye unveiled a Cisco prototype of a proposal designed and produced to look like Vanity Fair Magazine, another irony - I was stumped as to what Ted Davis might say. The "Proposal Experts" K&J is providing are not really "proposal people," as my snotty friends in the proposal field call a certain elite class. K&J's people are administrative assistants who have been "sold" as something called "Proposal Experts," but that's just the Viking Dawg's marketing talk. In truth, the Proposal Experts are "virtual shut-ins" whose performance metrics include the number of minutes it takes for them to call an account manager once they have been assigned to "a deal." They do scheduling and organizing and they set-up and sometimes lead conference calls. They run checklists, format Word documents, import graphics, cut-and-paste text, and they type. To be sure, the Cisco account managers love them because they function as dedicated servants, alleviating the administrative burdens they might otherwise have to handle themselves to put together a proposal. The Proposal Experts send out a ratings request following each completed deal and distribute kudos broadly when people get all "5s" (top score), which they mostly do. Again, it's all part of justifying the existence of their "un-funded" group. 

As it turned out, Ted Davis called in sick. He did call in, though, in the Cisco tradition. He rambled on for five minutes or so, first apologizing for not making it to the off-site - he "really wanted to be there" - and then talking about how much K&J values Cisco as a customer. The only thing I learned from Ted Davis' call was that he is a former Marine, a factoid that I would come to find particularly galling.

Raging Wire

At the Vancouver offsite it was determined that I was ready to "take my own deal," which seemed overdue to me but put me ahead of the usual 3-month wait. The first thing that came in was a network hardware design request for proposal (RFP) from RagingWire Enterprise Solutions (RES), an emerging Internet Service Provider (ISP). RES was trying to evolve from an existing system, and Cisco's objective was to unseat the incumbent company, which was Foundry. I engaged the account team, which was exclusively comprised of "Cisco people" and they were great; knowledgeable, certain of their vision, and pleasant to deal with. The development of the proposal took us through FOCOM for Foundry and Jupiter, finance, and legal reviews. As was always the case in my Cisco tenure, I would clock in to Cisco's Same Time Instant Messaging system by 6 a.m. every day and would always be on until at least 10 p.m., sometimes after midnight.

Besides helping to organize the technical information that came out of the FOCOM sessions and handling the other standard "Bid Developer" responsibilities, I rewrote the introductory text that accompanied the electronic submittal of the proposal. This is not typically work taken on by Cisco's Proposal Experts, but the account team appreciated it. I encapsulated the themes and the benefits stated in the Cisco proposal in a few easily digestible lines, incorporating the key words that would capture the attention of the client. We submitted the proposal on a Friday morning, with about two hours to spare before deadline, and then I helped the account manager pull together some material for his meeting that day at RES. 

I let my supervisor know that the deal was submitted and she requested that I immediately file the final documents in the proposal archives and then use Cisco's system for "closing out the deal." Something odd, though. I archived the docs successfully, but when I went into the system late in the afternoon to do the close out I couldn't seem to get my profile recognized. I contacted my supervisor who told me she would go over that process with me "at a later time."

That Friday night I was copied on an email sent by the boss of the account team on the RES deal. He was thrilled. He acknowledged how much work we had all put in on the deal and expressed optimism that we would win the contract and help make the team's revenue goals for the quarter.

On Saturday morning, like clockwork, I attempted to log into the system for another day's work. The Proposal Experts work seven days a week and are available practically any time day or night. Something odd again, I couldn't log into the system. In fact, the whole San Jose site seemed to be down. Having put in 80 hours over the previous 5 days, I didn't think much about it and took Saturday off. Then on Sunday morning I tried to log in with the same result. With nothing on my plate, I took Sunday off, too.

...And Don't Let the Door Hit You On the Way Out

On Monday morning, after being unable to log in for the third straight day, I called Cisco's internal help desk. The Cisco network had been up all weekend without interruption, I was told. But someone had revoked my access privileges.

I had only just hung up from the help desk, about 7 a.m., when I got a telephone call from a lackey at K&J Consulting telling me my contract was terminated over funding issues. "This is always the hardest part of my job, telling people that their services are no longer required..." he told me. Then he told me to return the Cisco laptop I was using post haste.

I was stunned to speechlessness.

I acknowledged the goof who called from K&J and then fired an email off to Ted Davis in Florida, the K&J CEO whose name is on my contract. He sent back a curt two line email confirming that K&J had been informed that the budget for my position had been cut. I emailed back, incredulous, and asked what would happen with my contract; you know, I had this deal paying me $104,000 per year.. Did they have another firm they would place me with? Ted again responded with a two liner indicating that K&J had nothing for me and he wished me luck with future endeavors. Soon thereafter I received an email from the K&J payroll administrator, a regurgitation of what I was beginning to recognize as the company line - "We have no way of anticipating our clients' budgeting from quarter to quarter..." She told me to go ahead and invoice for the week, which I guess amounted to my severance - $2,000. A little later in the day, Ted Davis forwarded a careerbuilder.com listing to me. It was a K&J Consulting listing to provide a "Content Developer" for the Cisco Proposal Experts team.

I applied for the position, which came with a significant cut in pay, but never got a response.

Surge Strategy and Unethical Behavior

I am vastly experienced with "surge strategies." Surging is something firms do to beef up for short-term engagements. As a consultant, I have ridden these waves for years, which can be done gracefully if you know what you are a part of and what your role is. Cisco, back in the last quarter of 2006 and the first of 2007, was overwhelmed with proposal work and the Proposal Experts needed to either expand to handle the ever increasing number of requests from account teams - the Proposal Experts made a big deal out of the number of proposals they had done in the past year, and the increased number they are expecting to submit in 2007 - or surge to handle the immediate load. No doubt K&J was under pressure to provide for their client experienced proposal people who could come in and provide immediate assistance. That would explain why me and my experienced friend referenced above - the one who didn't last the first week - were recruited so aggressively using the "$104,000 per year" pitch, the one they didn't want anyone at Cisco to know about it.

The Proposal Experts gig was never positioned to me as a "surge" effort that would last only a short amount of time. I am no longer able to ride the surge roller coaster, and would never have taken that deal. I have taken on bigger fiduciary responsibilities and larger financial burdens, and I cannot afford a consultant's down time. I certainly would not put at risk my home and my family's financial security.

I didn't have to, as it turned out. K&J Consulting did that for me with their annual salary pitch. Jobs that are done as part of a surge are billed by the hour, not annualized. They could have told me they'd pay a flat $2,000 per week for as long as the gig lasted, but that's not what they said. K&J sold the job as a $104,000 a year position, never giving any indication that it wouldn't continue for as long as there was a Proposal Experts group. 

To give K&J Consulting the benefit of a doubt, maybe they are not privy to quarterly budget planning within Cisco. That is their explanation now, but an ethical firm would have disclosed that up front, and not to do so represents a flat-out deceit.

It is also possible that someone within Cisco just didn't like me - some decision maker, like Bent Rye or his manager Carmen Ells - but then that would not be "a budget issue" as K&J claims. The thing is, I will probably never know the whys of my sudden denouement.

What I do know are its effects.

Road Kill Along the Path of Free Enterprise

It took almost a day to fully comprehend the situation I unexpectedly found myself in. I was, to put it mildly, poleaxed. My family had about enough money in our accounts to cover one mortgage payment and one month's worth of bills, including groceries. Did Cisco care about the Rice family and the impact of their "budget" decision? No, obviously not, but then "Cisco" really doesn't know us, we are just a number on a deactivated security badge, a former "virtual team member." One might have thought there would be some communication from my supervisor at Cisco, but there was nothing. The line just went dead. Surely Ted Davis and the rest at K&J must feel terrible at what had transpired, but there was nothing forthcoming from them either - no sincere apology, no offer of another position, nor even an offer of a letter of reference.

I began to total up the Cisco/K&J balance sheet in terms of what I had contributed to them, and they to me. I had email after email from my Proposal Expert teammates thanking me for the help I had given them on proposal after proposal, and from Cisco thanking me for volunteering for special projects. My supervisor had sent comments more than once on how much she appreciated my clear communication technique and the way I interacted with our virtual teams. She referenced skills in me "that could not be taught," and acknowledged that whenever she needed to reach me I was "always right there." There were emails from the RagingWire team acknowledging my contributions. From Ted Davis and K&J Consulting, however, there was nothing. Figuratively speaking, they just left me lying like a squashed opossum on the side of the road while they continued their exploits acknowledgement-free.

Postscript

The Cisco account manager for the RagingWire deal called me the other day, ecstatic at having landed the network hardware design deal. He didn't know that I was no longer part of the team, and he was surprised. We had been building a relationship, anticipating that in the future we would pursue many deals together.

K&J has communicated with me only through a couple administrative people. I didn't exactly rush their computer back to them, knowing that once it was returned I would never hear from K&J Consulting ever again. I didn't expect that they were somehow going to redeem themselves by offering more work, but I didn't think they should get off the hook without having to feel any discomfort whatsoever regarding their business practice. I suggested in email that they could at least offer a letter of reference. After all, this was a firm I had represented well, even bringing in a $1 million design contract. You might think at least a "thanks" would be in order. What I got was a threatening phone call from a K&J lackey, and a letter from a K&J lawyer threatening to bring charges against me for stolen property. He told me to "govern yourself accordingly," apparently inured to the profligacy of his own organization.

Do these people we become engaged with in our new "virtual world" get that we too are people with people who depend on us, people with families? Do they realize that their actions can result in damage to the lives of innocents? That through carelessness they can put a family on the street? There seems to be no protection in our society from this level of "domestic" violence, which may be getting worse in the impersonal Internet age. In retrospect, I kick myself for not being smarter, for falling for Bill Davis' initial pitch ("$104,000 per year..."). I wish I had been more like my friend and "told them to fuck off." That I didn't is a shame, but only for me, my wife and kids, not for K&J or Cisco.

Does Ted Davis get that? I wonder. Does K&J Consulting or Cisco, whoever is responsible, understand what they have done to us?

Many aspects of this awful story gall me, but in this time of "war," when we are ever so careful to make certain to show our support for the troops, Ted Davis' status as a former Marine really takes the cake. The Corps is proud of its code of honor, that it does the right thing, but does that ethical standard not apply to the American families they take an oath to protect? Is that just some marketing baloney only in affect on foreign soils?

The other dispiriting aspect of the whole thing is that my kids are so upset, in the way that kids become over "injustice." They've been told "life isn't fair" but still they don't understand how "those people" could treat their father that way and, by extension, them. It mirrors my own childhood in a way you wouldn't want for your kids. I grew with bitter feelings over the way corporations had treated my father, who is one of the most honest, competent, hard working and kindest people you could ever meet. That's why I told his story above. Now some stranger or strangers have committed a similar violence against another generation, introducing my kids to disillusionment, which they have no natural right to do.

That is a form of domestic violence that Americans, in service to our system of predatory capitalism, are inflicting upon one another through basic indecency and lack of a shared higher objective.

The Rices will be fine, we'll recover. We may lose our home, and we will struggle for awhile. We have already lost our health insurance, which puts us at the greatest risk of financial ruin. We started with a credit rating over 800, in the excellent range, but that is now in jeopardy through no fault of our own. Again, K&J/Cisco did that for us at no apparent cost to themselves. It is just us who are suffering, but we will marshal on. We have been diminished, though, by our brush with a company touted as "One of the Best Places to Work in America." 

To Cisco Systems and K&J Consulting I would ask, is this is as good as we've become? (June 2007)

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