Friday, July 27th, 2001 2554 Belle Cote Ave. St. Louis, MO 63114 Dear God, Reading an article debating the merits of the GNU Library (Lesser) General Public License, the author of that article made a good point about what the value is in Free Software. Jim Belton , on 2/4/1999 points out (in response to an article by Richard Stallman**): "2. Why do we use free software, anyway? Is it because its cheap? That certainly isn't the only reason. And "free" software still has costs. It takes time to download, configure and build. Its the quality of the software and the fact that new features continue to be added that make it valuable, not the GPL. I beleive this to be directly related to the fact that someone (or many someones) cares for it." Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with feeling about the word "value" or "valuable." Why is it that Monsanto would have wanted to use my services as a consultant? It is not because I am a human being, and therefore deserve or am entitled to have Monsanto want to use my services! It is because Monsanto would have found me to be a valuable member of the team, that they valued my services. Which Monsanto Dairy did for over two years. Towards my end of being part of Monsanto Dairy's I.T. area, it was becoming increasingly painfully obvious to me that Mark Jensen did not value the contributions I was continuing to make as part of the I.T. team. He was valuing less and less the kind of routine work that I had successfully done for over two years, and was pushing more and more for me to undermine the good administrative work I did by forcing me to set it aside in favor of documenting the systems. I wanted to continue being who I was, doing the job I had felt was given to me to do for over two years ... all the while, I was looking for more direct guidance as to what that job was, as it seemed that the duties of my position were subject to whim and change at any moment. Mark wouldn't let me, and continued to "hit me on the head with a brick" (his words) when I failed to move off the traditional roles I had accumulated and into the roles he was fashioning for me. Problem was, no one was telling me that the traditional roles and responsibilities I'd had had lessened in im- portance or crucialness to the operation of Dairy's I.T. systems. In a sense, I *was* I.T. Operations, in concert with some of the programmers who I worked closely with to resolve problems. I *was* I.T. Operations, in that I assumed responsibility for monitoring systems, answering users' questions about appar- ent systems malfunctions, fixing them, and enrolling the help of the program- mers and my boss to fix systems when I couldn't fix it alone -- or being en- rolled by the programmers of my boss to fix them when it was determined that I was the most logical person to do that work. Systems kept throwing us challenges, especially at the beginning of 2001 with partner systems throwing out invoice or billing dates of year 2010, among other large problems. Yet even though I was working as hard as I could (with the help of others) to keep the systems operable, make sure issues were being tended to, et cetera, my boss would still push me to put out plenty of documentation, even when I didn't have time to do so, in my work fixing crucial operations problems. And I didn't feel appreciated. I did not feel valued. Instead, I felt mis- trusted, blamed for not getting enough documentation written -- when writing documentation was not what I was hired to do in the first place, and so many other things were happening that threatened Dairy's ability to continue doing business smoothly. Mark was out of line. And when I tried to get him to face that fact, by asking him (perhaps angrily) to take the time to look at the detailed list of projects I had been urgently completing (including some not so urgent, but still necessary to keep users happy, like acknowledging their requests to look into something that seemed broken) -- he wouldn't do it. He would hit me on the head with the brick of accusation that I wasn't investing my time wisely if I wasn't getting the docs written in time. He was happy to do that. But when it came down to his having to face the facts, that there were 3x things to do, and only 1x of me to do them, he wouldn't even look at them. And what made it worse, is that he was going behind my back, enlisting the support of his supervisor, and my Ciber supervisors against me. He was being hateful, apparently doing his best to make my position at least uncomfortable. His actions were dishonest, manipulative, and were of a nature of cruelty that I, with my good work, and good reputation with most people in Dairy, didn't deserve. And under that pressure, and from that hostility, I finally broke. I felt I had to leave for my own mental health -- to at least maintain some rudiments of self-esteem. Or perhaps it was merely pride which was hurt. But pride in one's work is very important in Infomation Technology. The work of an Information Systems Technologist, especially that of an Operations Specialist, is very fluid, very fleeting, hard to pin down, very much work done with and for people, communicating via email, phone, and other ways to make sure all is well with the data processing systems. Very time consuming, these communications, but very important. But very hard to pin down just how every millisecond of time is being used -- and hard to establish the value from the usage of each millisecond. And the fact of the matter is that as time went by, from November of 2000 through December, Christmas, New-Years, and the first week of 2001 -- my boss Mark Jensen, was more and more willing to impute my motives or way of working, to be (or act) dissatisfied with my ways of getting work done, when only months before in doing work in essentially the same way, he was praising me left and right, and insisting with my contracting firm, Ciber, that I must get a raise. I was confused and hurt. I did not understand the sudden change in heart and method. I was doing the best I knew how to do, and still bricks came. Maybe I wasn't flexible enough. Maybe I needed to just drop all other things, let the systems fall down if they had to, to get the documentation he required written. And I practically did, but couldn't, because tending to the systems, tending to the users' complaints, was too deeply embedded in my job descrip- tion to just turn them off. I tried, I worked from home some, I got permis- sion to work from another location at Monsanto so people wouldn't come by to involve me with their problems. But "being there" for the users, helping them with their challenges or questions; "being there" for the system's reliability, monitoring and reporting and fixing little things before they got out of hand --- all those time-consuming "being there"'s still required gobs of time and detailed attention. From somebody. And the only other somebody to tend to those things was Mark Jensen, and he wasn't about to. So I left in a huge hurry. I'd felt accused, my intelligence and integrity insulted, the quality of my work assaulted, by that Mark Jensen -- again, the very same Mark Jensen who only a couple of months earlier, and for the whole year before that, was very complimentary, and who seemed to want to see me succeed, and to partner with him. All of his actions lead to the conclusion that he was no longer interested in partnering with me, that he didn't care for me, and that he wanted to see me out of there. It's just that he destroyed needlessly any and all confidence I had built up since I had come back from the hospital in the summer of '99. It was a terrible waste. And what hurt the most? The feeling of being unvalued. The feeling that whatever my feelings were did not matter to him. The feeling that he was on some kind of rampage, and didn't care how much he hurt me or put me down, or kept me from learning with the team and feeling a part of it. He was only one person. Almost everyone else I can think of there valued me, respected me, was careful of my feelings as I valued, respected, and was careful of theirs. The difference, though, was that he was my boss, and that he seemed to have declared war on me somehow. And his actions and opinions were being used to destroy, in certain quarters, my image of professionalism. And I am still suffering the aftereffects of that unnecessary war. I am still afraid to even try to work in I.T., fearing that I will work for someone else just like him, who would be oh so willing to pull rugs out from under me, conveniently changing rules and expectations to make me off-balance again, to hurt again. I don't want to be subjected to such bullying again. I don't even want to admit the possibility of such treatment in my life again. Working for a mean man is a nightmare I will not willingly enter again. And Ciber left me there, out to dangle. Out to dry. They didn't help me much either ... but at least Amy Crane and Bob Borgstede were there to listen, and to respond when I said I needed a new assignment. Here it is over six months later, since I hurriedly left Monsanto. Here I am still feeling the fear, the hurt, the panic of even thinking of working in the I.T. field under people like Jensen. Here I am, sitting feeling like damaged goods, wondering if I will ever heal, if I will ever get over the fears of being hurt and abused. Here I am wondering if I am just men- tally ill, and if there is some cure -- or if I am mentally ill, am I doomed to remain this way the rest of my life, limited by my fears, acting the coward? Running away from opportunities ... scared to death of corporate politics. Wanting to do something worthy with my life, something helpful to other people, something rewarding and fulfilling ... but terrified of the fact that I would have to be working with people again? People with the power to devalue me, the power to dehumanize, hurt, deride, walk on, bully, and throw me away? Is my view of human nature to be permanently marred? Or is there something I am not letting go of that will surely kill me (or my spirit) if I continue holding onto it? Is it, after all, my own choice here? Am I a broken toy? Or am I one only inasmuch as I think I am one? What would Jesus, your son, do? What would he or you have me do? Love, David ___________ ** article at