They Invaded Poland First!

My attitude towards my German employers soured further over the following weeks.  A customer who had purchased a multi-million dollar Hell imaging system would call me for support with a PostScript job that had to be finished on a critical deadline to get a major publication to market like GQ magazine or Playboy and the Hell RIP would fail.  The customer would call frantically for support, I would try to get the job through the RIP myself but it was just too fragile for most real-tasks, finally I would have to contact the German engineering team in Kiel about the problems to which I would inevitably be rebuffed.

“Tell ze customer zat ze RIP is not designed to operate within zer parameters!  It is not intended for such use!”

I would then have to contact the customer account manager and give them the bad news.

“Nine! Zat is a million dollar account! Ve cannot tell ze customer zat ze product is defective, you must make it verk!”

Finally out of fear that I would lose my job if I couldn’t solve the problem I would work late into the night hacking up the PostScript code generated by Adobe Illustrator to nurse it through the RIP.  Given enough time I could eventually make it work.  Unbeknownst to me, I was apparently the only support engineer with the miraculous ability to make impossible jobs RIP, the other support people in other cities where failing all around me… but I didn’t know this at the time.  I just didn’t want to lose my job and had no idea that I was the only one who could actually hack PostScript code to make it work.  As time progressed, the more I fixed broken jobs the more the other support people came to rely on me, increasingly bringing me more and more impossible PostScript jobs.  I was virtually living at the office working nearly 140 hour weeks and sleeping intermittently at my desk.

Somehow word got around that the Boston office had a kid who was especially talented at making the Hell RIP work and it was concluded that I needed to train the other support people to do what I was doing.   I was given a company leased Cadillac Coup De Ville and asked to commute once a week from the Boston office to the New York office to train their support personnel.  Although it turned out that I was a good Unix instructor the task was futile, none of them were actual programmers.  All I could do was tell them to bring me the jobs that didn’t work.  It was Hell…

My manager, understandably, became worried about me and sat me down to ask what could be done to reduce my work load.  I confessed to him that I had been manually fixing the jobs to work which sparked an unexpected reaction.  “really?”  “er.. yes… I know I shouldn’t be but I just can’t get the Germans to fix anything…” “You’ve been modifying these jobs directly to get them to run?”  “Yeah, I’m sorry I guess I should have told you… I just didn’t want to get in trouble with them again…” After that meeting a few days passed and I got called in again.  “Do you know of any better RIPs that might do the job?”  I listed a few other PostScript clones I was familiar with including one being made by a small Cambridge UK company called Harlequin Ltd.

Shortly thereafter we were on plane to London to meet with Harlequin.  My manager did a deal with them to supply me with RIPs.  The deal was simple.  Every-time I handed them a job, IF they could process it Rick would purchase a $1500 RIP from them and I would install if for the customer.  Harlequin was a small struggling company with brilliant engineers. Every-time I handed them a tough job they would kill themselves to get it to work and hand me a RIP that would do the job.  After a few months I realized that I could do even better and started writing impossible test jobs for them to RIP, then when they made them work I would replace the German RIPs with Harlequin ones, circulate them to the other support engineers, train them on it and after a few months the support lines went silent.  At $1500 a pop it was a bargain.

As time passed the largest support complaint we were getting was simply that the RIPs were too slow because the Hell Ultrasetter was a relatively slow device.  After giving the problem some consideration I proposed a new architecture to the Harlequin engineers that I called a parallel though-put system.  They built it and the speed of the Ultrasetter tripled.  Sales of Hell’s faster high-end imagesetter collapsed as the Ultrasetter began to outperform all of them.  It was the dawn of the desktop publishing era and customers were buying Apple products and abandoning Hell’s giant expensive mainframes in droves.  Finally a day came when everybody in my office ( >150 employees ) were laid off and my manager and I were the only ones left in the otherwise empty Boston office.  I was very naïve about all of this and thought little of it, I was just grateful to have a full-time job.  I didn’t know that my manager had kept his deal with Harlequin a secret and that very few people outside of the support team knew that we were replacing the German RIPs with ones I had designed.

Finally a day came when it was announced that Hell Graphics Systems had been sold to Linotype and that the new company would be called Linotype-Hell.  I was informed by my manager that Linotype-Hell’s new President would be visiting the Boston office and wanted to meet me.  My manager seemed morose, apparently he anticipated that this would be the occasion when the office was finally closed.  Linotype-Hell’s new President arrived with an entourage and asked to meet with my manager and I together.  I recall him saying to me that he had heard many rumors about the support engineer that Hell employed in Boston and wanted to meet me in person to offer me the exciting opportunity to move to Kiel Germany to work under the tutelage of Linotypes esteemed German researchers.  I resigned that day.

A few months later I was living in Cambridge England working for Harlequin Ltd.  Harlequin swept Adobe out of it’s own high-end RIP market with cheap PC clone RIPs.  A couple years after that Microsoft recruiters came calling to recruit somebody to help redesign the print and graphics architecture for the Windows Operating System, which was how I eventually ended up at Microsoft.  My positive experiences with British engineers lead me to identify a UK based company called Rendermorphics several years later for acquisition by Microsoft to create the Direct3D API and several years after that to found WildTangent Inc. with one of my former Harlequin Ltd. Colleagues Jeremy Kenyon as CTO.  I still have the occasional German engineer inspired support nightmare to this day… sauerkraut… seriously… who thinks that’s food?

Comments

comments