Out of Gas

by Randy Dyess

  There were also issues brought on by high-speed trading kicking in and buying or selling based on information normal humans did not have time to digest. Because of their massive amounts of buying power, they would move the market one way or another before average investors had a chance to react to those trends. Mark’s research led him to determine he needed to stop watching the financial news and checking on his stocks each day. What he needed to do was to learn how to do his own research and get the longer term picture and not react to the “splash” of the day. He realized this was similar to what he did with the capacity and performance of his servers. Watch them over long time and then trend them to help determine when the servers would be over-utilized or under-performing based on long-term numbers. Like he would do with information obtained from his servers, he put the economic numbers he wanted to study into a spreadsheet. This allowed him to analyze them over the longer term. Finding past numbers was easy, he was able to input more than the last few months of data to get a more accurate picture of the trends.

  At the same time he was studying economic indicators, Mark spent some time working his way through what he called the “doom and gloom” crowd. This group of web sites discussed various conspiracy theories; the web site editor’s hatred of the current president and government, and the various end-of-the world scenarios these editors believed in. While Mark didn’t believe in the majority of what was on these web sites, he was able to gleam a few things off of them that concerned him. He had no clue at this point in time if he would need to react to these various theories, but he did not want to discount them just yet. Overall, these groups provided him with background material more than anything else. They would react to a headline from the major news sources and often provided a link to base materials used by the authors or the news reports. This allowed Mark to read or listen to the underlying paper, poll, interview or speech. He wanted to see if the main news sites were telling the whole truth. Too often he found they were trying to make a splash by just reporting on a few sentences and taking those sentences out of content. Something Mark found disturbing was that it happened so often and no “real” news source tended to do any independent research before they jumped on the bandwagon. He often found dozens of articles rewriting one single article. If the reader back-tracked the articles, they would have seen dozens of reporters repeating what one or two people actually thought.

  After learning how to do his own research, Mark learned the global economy was not doing as well as the news media portrayed it to be doing. Factory output was down over the last several months and fuel prices were rising even though consumption had fallen due to the ongoing recession. Unemployment, and more importantly to Mark, underemployment and discouraged workers were growing in numbers. He had learned of two different figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and compared those to get the real story of the employment picture. The first was the main unemployment rate or U-3 number reported by the media. This figure was the number of workers in America who had looked for a job during the last four weeks before the phone call survey. What he considered more important was the U-6 number. This number, in his opinion, gave a better understanding of the employment situation. It was not just the number of unemployed who had looked for jobs in the last four weeks. The U6 number also included those who had given up looking for work or settled for part-time employment when they wanted full-time. This number was usually a much higher percentage of the total workforce and it might rise even though the official unemployment rate stayed the same or even fell.

  Eventually, Mark put two and two together and turned his research to the overall fuel shortage and what affects it would have on prices. What he found chilled him to the bone. He knew the fuel shortages would be behind the sudden increase in prices of the gas, but may have been reason for price increases of other items. While the government kept saying there was no real inflation to be worried about, Mark started doing his own little version of the Consumer Price Index. He found out there was a 10-15% inflation rate on most of the items he and Kelly bought each month. These rises included the prices at the golf course to the price of the meals at their favorite restaurants.

  At the same time Mark was learning about the direction the global economy was heading, he understanding how easy it would be to out-source the entire IT department. Mark understood not only was Plains able to out-source his whole department without disrupting operations the move would not be as hard as he thought. Over the last several years virtual technology had made big strides forward and these advances would make moving all of his servers somewhat simple and easy. What he determined they needed to do was to virtualize all their servers. Once they finished the virtualization, Mark would have his staff move the virtual images over to new hosts in the data centers of the outsourcing company. Moving the servers in this way would recreate their entire computer infrastructure in another country without having to redo anything to the connections between the end-users and servers. All server names would stay the same. Software would be the same and on the same servers. Connections to databases would remain the same. Even the administration tasks would stay the same as what they would have been with actual physical servers. By virtualizing both the database servers and the application servers, the whole division would be shipped off somewhere else with very little problems. The only thing missing after the move would be the institutional knowledge of key players to put the Plains Airlines spin on things.

  The hardest item on the rough draft of his outsourcing plan would be to figure out how he would keep himself critical to the company after they completed the move. He was also a little worried about retaining any of his staff after this was all over. The company’s business analysts could easily transfer IT’s way of doing things into requirements for out-sourced administrators and developers. Mark also started to feel a little guilty about not telling any of the other employees about the upcoming move and the probable loss of their jobs. He swore that if he everyone would be let go and the economy was as bad as he suspected it was, he would tell as many of them as possible. He wanted them to start finding other jobs. He just needed to figure out how he could do that without jeopardizing his own job. Mark also did not want to hurt his bonus if the project failed and his staff all seemed to figure it out and left the company before anyone else did. He correctly assumed he would need as much money as possible to secure his family’s immediate future.

  Due to his research into the fuel shortage situation, Mark started to wonder if his future with Plains Airlines was as secure as he once thought it was. Even if he was able to get a different job at Plains, he wondered if Plains would even be around in three years. Would the airline be able to operate or would it have to shrink and become very lean to survive the fuel wars that were coming up? Would Americans and the rest of the world even be able to afford to fly if the price of everything kept its staggering rate of price increases? As he progressed further into his research, Mark felt like he needed to talk to someone. If he brought this up to Owen or any executive, they might think he was trying to sabotage the IT move or he just wasn’t willing to “play ball”. He was convinced the executives already knew most of this and were hiding it from the rest of the world so the stock price would not plummet. Most of the executives’ salaries came from stock options and there might not be anything some of them wouldn’t try to protect their own financial situation. Mark did not want to become a corporate whistleblower. Those people were hounded by the media, treated like criminals by companies, and almost ignored by the government. Mark was not financially secure enough to end his working career on something like this fuel cover-up situation. He also knew he could not bring this up to Kelly just yet. While they were close, Mark had often gone off on his little tangents about one adventure or another. Kelly, being the smarter and more logical of the two, would have to rein him in and remind him of his responsibilities to her and the girls. She would just look at him and tell him he was not a care-free college student anymore. W
hile it may be fine for a twenty something to take a summer off and backpack around Europe it was not fine for someone with kids and a mortgage. No, he would have to prepare his speech to Kelly before he would be able to convince her things were about to fall apart. He needed her to realize they had better do something before they found themselves circling the drain like the rest of the world.

  Mark also knew he couldn’t talk to any of his staff. He did not want word of the possible move to get around before they were ready to announce it. As with most employees in today’s world, many of his staff would just give up doing any of the harder work. They would only do whatever work was required of them and nothing more until they were let go after the project was completed. The only reason these employees would do anything was the hope they would either be transferred or given huge severance packages for sticking around until the move was completed. Other staff members would start using up all their remaining vacation days looking for different jobs and then leave before Mark was finished transferring their work assignments overseas. Those without vacation time or who did not want to use their vacation time looking for another job would start calling in sick more often. In the past these employees would either come into work no matter how they felt or they would work from home instead of coming in sick. These actions would have the combined effect of delaying the movement of job functions overseas and Mark would have to work additional hours to make up for the delays.

  Mark was thinking about his problem when one of his DBAs came in the door. “What’s up Ted?”

  “Did you see the headlines this afternoon? They are canceling another thousand flights and blaming it on the system. We can’t seem to find any server that shows a problem.”

  “No, I have had my head down and didn’t see anything. Let me look into it and try to figure out what is going on. Keep trying to find out if anything weird is showing. See if we can nip it in the bud before it grows,” answered Mark.

  “Funny how this always seems to be at the end of the month. I wonder if the timing has something to do with the cancellations or bug.”

  “Might be. Start seeing if you can figure out if anything going on at the end of the month would cause this,” Mark replied. He secretly hoped someone would make the connection between canceled flights and the fuel situation. He doubted it they would figure it out. His staff would not know about the fuel delivery issues and the global fuel supply unless they were doing the same research he had been doing the past month. Mark had to “break” into the financial systems to put the picture together. He had all the security permissions he needed to view the data, but as the old security saying goes, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” Not many of his staff had the same level of privileges he did or the same ability to hide their actions from others like Mark could. Not that anyone would question him if they saw him in any of Plains’ computer systems. No one knew everything he did on a day-to-day basis.

  At the point the computer system was being blamed for another round of flight cancellations, Mark knew the company was going to blame IT for all the cancellations. He drew the conclusion that after blaming the current system on the cancellations, the brass would hold a press conference. They would tell everyone they were not happy with their current IT systems and would start moving all the IT systems to a “specialized” company. The press conference would help delay anyone nosing around for the real truth and give the company more chances to hide the fuel issues for a little while longer. They would do this by using the move to justify more cancellations as bugs happen. After that they would use the new firm as an excuse for a few more months. They would say things would take time to settle in and the new company needed time to learn the systems. All-in-all they could buy another 24-30 months before having to come up with another set of excuses if the fuel situation did not get better. They might even try announcing they would bring things back in house after the cancellations continue to occur at the new company. Mark was cynical enough to think the executives were waiting for the stock price increase after the company announced layoffs before they would cash in their stock options.

  As he drove home that night, a thought came to his head. “They’re not going to get away with this are they? Someone will put two and two together and expose the fuel shortage. The company will be under a SEC investigation before we know it. The stock price will plummet to nothing as the company files bankruptcy to try to figure out how to operate with less fuel and lower budgets.” Mark had been through a bankruptcy with Plains before. The stocks he had from his 401k matching, employee stock purchase plan and what he bought on his own became almost worthless overnight. After more than ten years the stock was still only worth about 40% of what it was when he bought it. Mark figured he had lost more than $300,000 in his retirement fund and outside stock accounts from the bankruptcy alone. Although he had diversified over the years, he was still heavily invested in his own company and wondered what another bankruptcy would do to his retirement funds. Along with the losses from the recession, he wondered if he would even be able to retire when he wanted to.

  Later that night, Mark was with Kelly for their traditional drink when it occurred to him he needed to fill her in on what was going on at Plains Airlines. He wasn’t ready to tell her tonight, but he did need to gather his thoughts and tell her when they had more time together. Maybe he could tell her more on Sunday when the kids went to their grandparent’s house for the afternoon. Saturday was his weekly golf game with the boys at the club and Kelly spend Saturdays at the spa with her friends. He didn’t want to spoil the good mood both of them would be in after their weekly indulgences. He would have to wait until Sunday to fill her in on his research and suspicions.

  Chapter 3

  Mark arrived at his usual time at the club on Saturday morning for his weekly golf game with some of his college buddies. As he walked through the club, everyone was already having a drink in the bar.

  “A little early, isn’t it? We usually have drinks after we play and not before. Not that I’m complaining,” Mark joked before he noticed everyone seemed to be down in the dumps.

  “We felt like it was a good time to have a drink,” Bill responded.

  “What’s up and where’s John?” Mark asked.

  “You’ve haven’t heard?” replied Bill.

  “Heard what?”

  “John committed suicide yesterday. Susan found him sitting in his car in the garage with the motor running. The exhaust fumes were so bad she almost fainted after rushing in to check on him.”

  “What? Why?” Mark whispered as he sat down.

  John was one of Mark’s oldest college buddies. They had roomed together at North Texas and shared a lot of good memories over the years. Even though they both studied computer science, John decided to go to law school after graduation while Mark went into corporate America working at Plains Airlines’ computer division. Over the years, even though they had different lives, John and Mark still kept in touch as much as possible outside of their weekly golf game. In fact, John’s lifestyle was Mark and Kelly’s private dream. Mark and Kelly used John as the measuring stick on how they were doing in life. They wanted to match what John and Susan did and often spent money beyond their means to try to emulate them. It did not matter that John’s income was larger than Mark and Kelly’s combined income. If John and Susan did it and there was any way Mark and Kelly could afford it, they did it. John and Susan had a condo in Colorado for skiing, a beach house on an island in the Bahamas, and a hunting cabin in Wyoming. John loved classic cars and had a garage full of them. Some of this was out of reach for Mark and Kelly, but they did go on the same first-class vacations all over the world with John and Susan. Mark and Kelly really did not need one, but since John and Susan had a full-time maid and gardener, Kelly and Mark had a maid and gardener. John had money and was not afraid to show he had money. He set the bar high for the rest of his college buddies to try to reach. Mark and Kelly were willing to work insane hours and go into la
rge amounts of debt in order to try to reach that bar. It did not matter both of them were in their early forties and probably would never have a chance of coming close to John’s lifestyle.

  Bill broke Mark from his internal dialogue when he continued by saying John’s life was all smoke and mirrors. John and Susan never really paid for anything. Even though John made large amounts of money, his and Susan’s lifestyle cost more than they actually made and they had large amounts of debt to show for it. Everything they owned had been financed one way or another. He borrowed money against his stocks to finance trips, they financed furniture with no money down, cars where leased, and houses had multiple mortgages on them. Bill even found out John had made several advances against his salary. When he was laid off, he didn’t get any severance package as it went to make up for the advances.

  As Bill was talking, Mark thought “So what. Everyone is like that.” It dawned on him he was in the same boat as John. Mark and Kelly really didn’t own anything either. His house had three mortgages on it. The first one at 110% they took out when they bought the house ten years ago. Since then they took out a second and third mortgage against their equity to pay for their lifestyle. Mark’s leased his cars. They constantly maxed out credit cards to purchase the latest and greatest gadget. At least he didn’t use his stocks to borrow money like John. He realized if Plains hadn’t gone through its bankruptcy years ago, he would have taken a loan against his stocks as well. He always wanted a large boat to use on Lake Texoma during the summers.