Corporate America

How did corporate America become so messed up?

When I was six years old my mother left my father.  Soon we moved to the farm she grew up on in NWA (Northwest Arkansas).

Soon, my mother became a nurse and began working double shifts frequently to make ends meet.  We had plenty of food that we grew on the farm and Granny was an expert seamstress.

So, we had food and clothing, but not much more lots of times.  In fact, I had to start working on the farm to help provide those things not long after my parents had divorced.

When I was seventeen I started working at a job in Fayetteville at Bowen’s Family Buffet.  This was my first experience working for a corporation.

I learned that people in corporations were not trustworthy.  If they wanted to do something on your day off and promised to work in your place when you needed a day off later, then they almost never keep their promise.

Also, there was no sense of fairness at all.  If an event like a prom was coming up, then all of the high schoolers with two parents in the home would get off for the event, while those with one parent at home would have to miss the event or lose their job.

The company paid these people as little as the law allowed.  It provided no benefits other than one week of vacation per year.

The work was hard and far from safe.  I got cut and burned frequently.

There was no sick time, so most of the workers had little choice but to work unless they were too sick to get out of bed.  It did not matter that they would be bringing contagious diseases that would spread through the workforce and to the customers.

I had gotten a scholarship at the University of Arkansas, but it was impossible to study adequately with all the hours I had to work to just barely get by.  So, I ended up not being able to finish my degree there.

Nonetheless, I did get married while working there.  My wife knew how to get help from the government and that made things easier.

Most importantly, I had watched how the Man of Truth (Yeshua HaMashiach aka Jesus Christ) had completely transformed the life of my cousin Carl.  So, on November 13, 1982 I took the deal as well.

Then I enlisted in the US Air Force when I was twenty-two.

The US Air Force was better in every way.  It showed me how things should be.

The US Air Force emphasized quality based on standards in everything it did.  The work was too important and the stakes too high for anything short of excellence.

It took care of those in it better as well.  For the first time since my parents divorced, I had health insurance, could take sick days, and had more than a week of vacation per year.

The US Air Force also taught me life skills far beyond just how to do my job.  It seems like I knew nothing before I joined the US Air Force.

The US Airforce expanded my world in so many ways, including sending me to Greece.  It nurtured a heroic spirit in me.

However, life in the US Air Force was not good for my wife, so I could not make a career out of it.  Still, out of all the jobs that I would go on to have, it is the one that I am most proud of.

So, when I was twenty-six my time in the US Air Force was over.

I was looking for a job.  The skills I learned in the US Air Force had no value in small towns like those in NWA.

One ad looked promising.  It turned out that it was in New York City.  When the recruiter asked me what it would take for me to move to New York, I told him the Father of Truth (YHVH aka God aka THE LORD) speaking to me out of a burning bush.

I asked the Father of Truth if there was anything I could do that was not in another crime magnet like NWA or NYC.  Then my cousin Carl called and told me about a job that he thought I could do in Tulsa.

So, we decided to move to Tulsa.

The job only lasted long enough for me to get enough money to get an apartment.  After that, Carl told me that he thought I should go to the same community college that he had gone to and become a computer programmer like him.

I was not sure that I had what it took to go to college after my disaster at the University of Arkansas.  However, I worked only part time and made perfect scores in almost all of my classes.  I was in the career that I had been made for, and the Spirit of Truth (Ruach HaQodesh aka The Holy Spirit aka The Holy Ghost) was helping me.

Though it looked impossible to finish school and get a job, the Father of Truth provided everything I needed to succeed.  After I graduated, Carl got a better job in Kansas and helped me get hired in the vacancy created when he left.

In 1993, our third child was born with serious breathing issues.  We had to move into a house where we could keep her away from things like cigarette smoke.

Also, I needed better insurance and more money to deal with her medical problems.  The oil bust had happened in Tulsa, and IT jobs were still scarce.  There were far more unemployed developers than development jobs.

Still, I had faith that the Father of Truth would take care of us somehow.  So, I took out a VA loan and bought a house just a few blocks from our church.

Money was becoming tighter because my mortgage payments were larger than rent had been.  I needed more money.  I had worked hard at the community college but had not been promoted.

In fact, I got a certification in Software Engineering at the college and learned many ways that we could improve our productivity by automating the automation process.  So even though I was now a Level 1 Software Engineer,, the college was not interested in putting into practice what it taught in its own certification program.

I worked for the State of Oklahoma and promotions were based entirely on seniority.  The only way I could get promoted was if two other people left, but my co-workers were afraid to leave a secure job.

So, I prayed about it and the Spirit of Truth told me to look into becoming a contractor.  When I looked into it, I found that due to the wage differences I could be unemployed seven months per year and break even with what the State of Oklahoma was paying me.

So, I trusted the Father of Truth and left a secure job to enter the wildly unstable world of contracting.

I had surrendered everything to the Man of Truth because that is what he demanded.  His demand was not unreasonable, for he had surrendered everything to redeem my life on the cross.

My first contracting job only lasted six days.  I could not understand what I had done wrong.

While I was downtown watching a parade, a couple of developers from the same contracting firm who were standing next to me began talking to each other about their recently terminated contractors.  It was impossible not to hear their conversation.

They discussed what they would do next and the general dishonesty of the contracting firm.  Then one of them said that at least they had not been dealt with as deceitfully as this one new contractor.

They proceeded to talk about how this developer had been promised to do one thing in the contract but then was told to be trained to do something else when they arrived at the client site.  However, the client company had had been bringing in contractors to be trained and then laying off the employee who trained them.

They went on about how the employee refused to come back to work until the contractor that they were supposed to be training to do their job was gone.  So, the client company told the contracting firm that the contractor had to go – even though the contractor had done nothing wrong.

I do not know if they knew that I was the contractor they were talking about or not.  They could get released from the contracting firm for telling me this, so perhaps this was their way of letting me know what had really happened.

Soon, I was released from the contracting firm but at least I knew that I had not done anything wrong.  I was told that I might be able to go back to my old job since they were having trouble filling the position, but I knew that this is what the Father of Truth wanted me to do.

I soon learned that since I had only worked for six days, that I could not draw unemployment.  So, I worked at anything that my hands could find to do for the next nine months.

I made much less than I had before, but the Father of Truth kept me from going bankrupt.  My daughter was having a terrible time, and I was exhausted from taking care of everyone else.

(She was born with seven incurable and 100% fatal diseases according to medical science.  Three times, the Man of Truth stood between her and death.  For this reason, I call her “The Impossible Girl”.)

One afternoon after falling asleep from total exhaustion, I was awakened by the alarm I had set to remind me to pick up my other children from school.  Without thinking, I said out loud “Thank God I don’t have a job!”.

Shortly after that, I got another contracting job with another contracting firm.  They were the opposite of the first firm in every way.

Soon, I was on a contract with a new client.  While there I learned from a former employee of the first client the rest of the story about my first contract.

He told me about a group of developers in the finance department of this former client who had been caught embezzling money from the company.  They were very careful about any contractors being brought in to help them and had found ways to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

This former employee did not know that I was one of the developers that they had refused to work with when he told me this.  However, after I told him about how I fixed an error in a finance application that had allowed someone to embezzle money from the community college, it became apparent what had happened.

I had been hired originally to work with a group of developers in the finance department.  However, these developers had said that I could not work with them after looking over my resume and meeting me.

They had seen from my accomplishments in my resume that I would be able to see what they were doing.  They figured out from the interview that I certainly would report their embezzling.

So, they treated me deceitfully and caused me a lot of trouble.  However, the Father of Truth repaid them by exposing their embezzling through a series of unlikely events and putting them in prison.

Eventually, we were near the lifetime limit that our insurance offered on Savannah.  So I had to stop working for the best employer I ever had, to find someone else to work for and get insurance from another company.  This pattern continued until laws were passed to put an end to insurance companies being able to set lifetime limits.

So, I worked on many other contracts after this for many clients.  I observed that the kind of thing that happened on my first contract was more the norm than the rare exception in Corporate America.

I also followed the industry news for the industry of each client that I worked for.  I did the same for the IT (Information Technology) industry at large.

I could see that the things I saw going on in person were just not that uncommon in Corporate America.  In fact, as the years went on they generally became worse.

I watch new CEOs come into successful companies and send them into bankruptcy but walk away with a “golden parachute” of 300 million dollars.  I watched others destroy companies, only to be given a large bonus and a better position by a competitor - who was able to buy the assets of the destroyed company for pennies on the dollar.

Of course, when these things happened, the workers were laid off from the only well-paying job they could get in their market.  Some of them went bankrupt, many of them moved to other cities, and a few of them managed to find another job in the local area.

It was not just at the executive level either but extended down to the individual contributors.  People would lie to get people they liked promoted and people they did not like fired.

As a result, I watched completely incompetent people get promoted who went on to damage the business while extremely talented people were prevented from doing things to help the business.  Of course, this always took a toll on the business that resulted in layoffs.

However, since the incompetent and crooked people decided who got laid off, the business would end up in even worse shape after the reduction in force.  Eventually, another company that was better ran would end up taking over the business completely.

During this time, employees would ask me how I could stand the instability of being a contractor instead of having a permanent job.  It was not hard because I knew that in reality all jobs are temporary.

In 2000, the contracting market in Tulsa dried up.

Julie had created an entire network of people to take care of the many different medical needs of Savannah.  So, it would be very hard to move to another city.

So, I went to work for WorldCom at a lower paying job.  When my children asked me what my first day was like, I told them that the corporate culture was deceit.

I had found that the corruption that was in the school and criminal justice systems in NWA were rampant in the many American corporations that I worked at as a contractor.  It got to the point where I could get the feel of the culture of a company by just looking at the parking lot.

My co-workers had thought my assessment of the corporate culture was harsh since I had not even worked there for a week.  However, it proved to be completely accurate.

On September 11, 2001 on the way to work I heard of a plane hitting a tower in New York City and I immediately said to myself “it has begun”.  When I got to work, I could not get any work done because there was a constant stream of people coming to my cube asking how I knew this was going to happen.

I had endured for years being called an Islamophobe by people who did not call themselves believers and a false prophet by those called themselves believers for saying that America would be attacked by Muslims as judgement for it’s wickedness.  Even after my critics were silenced, Corporate America got worse and like the rest of America has not heeded the call of 9-11 to repent.

By this time, the company learned of my Software Engineering certification and had seen how I had automated many of the processes I was responsible for.  Soon, even though my official title was System Analysist, my job became automating whatever IT task that was being poorly done.

The company would send me to get certified in something like Database Administration or Cyber Security or Project Management and then put me to work in that area.  I would then automate the process and make it all much more efficient.

This continued until I had certification in over 30 areas of IT expertise and met the qualifications of a Level Two Software Engineer.  The experience in each of these areas met the requirements of a Level 3 Software Engineer.

Eventually, I and a partner created a software system that I had conceived to identify inefficiencies in the mainframe applications that were costing the company a lot of money in outsourcing fees paid to EDS.  My years of mainframe experience allowed me to not just identify the issues, but I also wrote instructions for how to fix each issue as well.

We had to start with some old servers that they were throwing away.  I had to install the BIOS one of them but my years of working on computer hardware in the US Air Force gave me the ability to do so.

So, we built an intranet application from the ground up by ourselves.  We took care of everything from installing RedHat Linux to creating all of the databases to the web interface.

So, I became a true Level 4 Software Engineer because I met the qualification of building an application from the hardware up using the skills required to be a Level 3 Software Engineer.  At the time, there were only about 100 of these in the entire world.

This project was very successful and saved the company over thirty million dollars in EDS fees.  In fact, EDS had to renegotiate the contract because they were losing money.

However, there was plenty of fraud, waste, and abuse to go around, so this was only a drop in the bucket.  Soon, WorldCom had the biggest bankruptcy in US history and the CEO went to prison for corruption in 2005.

Then WorldCom was rebranded as MCI, which was sold to Verizon and became Verizon Business.  I continued to work there from home.

Verizon was the best ran company that I ever worked at.  They actually ran their business as a business – which had become an outdated idea in most of Corporate America.

Like the US Air Force, they were very focused on quality.  They had high standards that were well defined and graded people on how well they met those standards.

They called their bonus incentive “Work for pay”.  The highest priority of their every decision was “What will help the company serve its customers the best?”.

People were promoted based on demonstrating competency in their job.  Those who proved to be incompetent or dishonest were fired.

At the time, Verizon was a Fortune Ten company.  It was not hard to see why they were able to dominate the telecom industry.

It was as if I had worked for three different companies because their cultures were so different.  I had worked with cutting edge technology and methodologies at each one, which proved to be a problem later.

Then in 2008, the stock market crashed. 

The companies that went bankrupt were the biggest customers of Verizon Business.  Soon, I was laid off – although Verizon had offered me a job working for the Department of Defense in Washington D.C. to keep me.

Thus began a two-year vacation during the first term of Obama.  I had worked solidly for eight years with annual promotions and raises during the Bush years while dealing with everything else.  It had left me exhausted.

I had needed a serious vacation, and I got one under Obama.  Things were tight, but it gave me a chance to improve my skills via working on open-source projects.

After two years, my severance pay had long been exhausted and my unemployment had run out.  IT jobs were scarce in Tulsa as usual.

However, the Father of Truth had sustained me through times of employment when I was a contractor.  I knew He would provide again, but I just was not sure how.

Then I saw a posting for a job for an Android developer and was led to pursue that.  So, I applied for the job and began preparing for it.

I heard of Android when I worked at Verizon Business.  The CEO had said that was their response to iPhone, after they turned down Apple to be the carrier for iPhone because Apple had too many demands.

However, outside of the telecom industry, no one had heard of it.  Blackberries were all the rage, and Android had a steep learning curve.  No one wanted to work on Android in Tulsa but me.

So, I read the Wikipedia article and took the Android tutorial offered by Google.  I found that it used a lot of other technologies that I had been teaching myself during my Obama vacation by contributing to open-source projects.

I could see how Android applications could be built quicker and better right away.  It was like I was made for Android development.

I went to the interview, and the iPhone developer who interviewed me was impressed at my knowledge and skill.  When the hiring manager asked me if I had any questions, I asked him for his phone number and I added him to my contacts.  The Spirit of Truth was witnessing to me that he would be offering me the job soon.

A few days later, I saw his name appear on our flip phone.  He asked me when I could start working and I told him I could be there in 30 minutes.

When I got there, he told me that their start-up was struggling, and they could not offer me as much as they had advertised originally.  He would understand if I did not take the job.

However, I knew I was called by the Father of Truth to be there, and I accepted the job anyways.  Even though it was the lowest paying job that I had taken since I stopped working for the state, I knew that He would work it out somehow.

I loved the people at the start-up and did everything I could to help it not go under.  When they needed to borrow my paycheck, I did not hesitate to loan it to them.

Then one day at work, I was introduced to a new co-worker named Neill who would help me with the increasing Android workload since I was putting in over sixty hours per week.  By the end of the day, we were good friends.

Then one day when I was out to lunch downtown with the iPhone developer and walking back to my car, the Spirit of Truth said this to me, “Time is short.  It is later than people think.  It is way too late for business as usual”.

Not long after that, I finally took an entire week off from the start-up.  I had always joked that if I left for a week it would fall apart.  Little did I know how true that was.

While I was on vacation, it went under and was sold to another company out of state.  I was now in need of another job.

Obama had been re-elected, and I was now in my second Obama vacation.

I did not have any severance pay from the start-up.  Android had exploded and was in high demand in most major cities – except Tulsa.

Tulsa had been one of the top ten tech cities in the world due first to the oil companies, then the airlines, and finally telecom.  However, it had begun falling behind after WorldCom collapsed.

So, Tulsa had stayed stuck in the past.  It was now about ten years behind those cities on the leading edge.

I was legendary in the Android community but could not get an Android job.  Companies thought my ideas of distributed workforces with no central office and everyone working from home were unworkable.

The churches of Tulsa had also changed for the worst.  Even though I lived in the buckle of the Bible Belt, I felt like I was drowning in a lukewarm sea.

I asked the Father of Truth what I could do about it and He told me to write this blog.  So, I soon began fighting against the corruption that was taking over American churches.

I also began teaching myself new skills that were more suitable for the Tulsa market.  Soon, I was very capable at developing server applications using Spring.

I soon had an interview with a company in the energy industry.  However, they wanted me to be available to work on the weekends.

I told them that I would not work on the Sabbath but was willing to work any other time.  They could not deny me a job over this and had to accommodate me under American law.

Nonetheless, I got an e-mail from the recruiter stating in writing that the only reason that they did not hire me was because I would not work after 5 pm on Friday (sunsets around 5 pm in the winter in Tulsa).  I knew from US Supreme Court cases I had studied that I would win in court if I sued.

I prayed about this, but the Father of Truth told me not to let my time and focus become consumed in a lengthy court battle.  So, I trusted Him to take care of me for another year.

Then I got a call from another recruiter for a contract at a local company.  Their server application was having serious threading issues.

After getting more details, I was sure that I could solve their problems.  I would be the only one working on this and I was fine with that as I had worked alone so often when unemployed or working remotely.

However, when I showed up on the first day, they told me that they had decided that they had something that was more pressing.  Soon, I found myself in a room as part of a team of eight.

As I looked at the team and most of the team were foreigners, which did not bother me since I had worked with so many foreigners over the years.  However, as I listened to the Americans explaining what the team would be doing and how it would be doing it, it became apparent that they really did not know what they were doing.

They were attempting to use Agile for managing their project, but they were not Agile in their thinking.  They also had various configuration and set up issues.  The architecture and testing of their application also needed improvements.

I realized that I could literally do every job on the team better than anyone else on the team.  As I started working with the foreign workers, I found that the situation was even worse.

Their recruiters had all had them contracted as Level 4 Software Engineers like me, but in reality they were not even Level 1 Software Engineers.  They were developers with little or no experience.

It felt like I was being treated like I had on my first contract again.  I was angry about someone baiting me and switching, so I had a bad attitude about the entire thing.

Carl asked how I was doing on the new contract, so I told him about my complaints.  He is a good friend who knows when someone needs a pat on the back and when they need a swift kick in the seat of the pants.

Carl said to me, “Didn’t you tell the Father of Truth that you would go wherever He wanted you to go and do whatever He wanted you to do?  Then why are you complaining about the situation He has placed you in?”.  Then I understood that I was there for His purposes and not mine.

After Carl helped me adjust my attitude, I made it my mission to help everyone get better at doing their jobs.  I started making suggestions about everything and they took all of them.

I fixed their configuration and set up issues.  Then I helped them improve their architecture and testing.

At first, I did almost all the development work for the foreign workers while they watched.  Then I had them do it and I helped them when they got stuck.

Shamira really took off and soon rarely needed my help.  She also had good people skills, so I had her do some of the Business Analyst (BA) work for the team as well.

However, Narender was really struggling, - despite having two masters in software development.  He was an example of the general ineptness of universities in teaching people how to be software engineers or even decent software developers.

Still, it turned out to be a wonderful time.  People are all that really matters and I made friends for life.

Then on Martin Luther King Day, it was suddenly all over.  The CEO had gotten the company in financial trouble and laid off all IT contractors – 85% of their IT workforce – to save money in a desperate attempt to save one job – his.

Then I started being prepared for my next job.

I had needed an operation to remove my gall bladder for ten years, but there seemed no way to get one.  When I had a job, the companies would never let me have the time off that I needed for the operation and recovery.  When I did not have a job, then I did not have any insurance to pay for the operation.

I asked the Father of Truth what I should do.  Then I got a letter in the mail telling me that I had to get insurance through the exchange under the Affordable Healthcare Act.  So, the Spirit of Truth guided me to the Silver Plan by HCSC.

While I recovered, I taught myself new skills that were more suitable for the Tulsa market.  Soon, I got a job at HCSC.

I had turned them down originally because they had wanted me to work on weekends, but I refused to work on the Sabbath.  The hiring manager was determined to hire me and created a position that did not require me to work on weekends.  He wanted someone who thought outside the box and would shake things up.

HCSC was in a mess.  It was having financial problems due to the silver plan that had made my surgery possible.  While they had been too generous, it reflected the seriousness of their commitment to helping people be able to afford the health care that they needed.

The entire IT department was terribly outdated – not just in Tulsa, but company-wide including the headquarters in Chicago.  While I felt like I was crawling compared to before, I soon found that I was years ahead of the company.

It had the worse project management system that I had ever seen.  I eventually came up with a name that described it best – “painfully awkward”.

Like every corporation with issues I had ever worked in, the biggest issue was the corporate culture.  A wrong company culture is the root of almost all issues that most companies have, but the last thing any company is willing to admit is wrong and almost is never addressed until a company has no other options.

The Father of Truth had told me to seek the good of HCSC just like He had told the exiles to seek the good of whatever city they were in ().  There was so much room for improvement that this was not hard to do.

So just like I had in my last job, I began looking for opportunities to help them improve things.  I soon started making suggestions to the CIO and the other executives during their all-hands meetings, usually in the form of a question.  I was surprised that they actually started implementing my suggestions.

During this time, HCSC continued to make improvements, but it still had corporate culture issues.

The company then decided that it needed to be part of the latest leadership fad and began using the latest buzzword “diversity” in all of its meetings.  This was just the latest fad to replace the last disastrous fad.  These corporate fads came and went as a result of their natural cycle. 

Someone influential would start them, usually to make money for themselves, and then the fad would spread through corporations – usually through new members of the leadership teams.  Eventually, the fad would prove disastrous, so it would be abandoned, and the leadership teams would be reorganized.  Then the cycle would start over with the next fad brought in by the new members of the reorganized leadership team.

In theory, “Diversity” looked like a good idea, but in practice it was disastrous.  The root of the problem was that it was “diversity” really meant “perversity” that was intolerant of anyone with a diverse opinion that did not conform to it.

Also the company began “matrixing” in things in its performance reviews that had nothing to do with the actual performance of the job.  This was part of a variation of RACI project management that leading IT companies had found disastrous and were moving away from.

RACI also looked good in theory.  The basic idea was to give all the stakeholders a voice in the project management process so the resulting product would better meet their needs.

In reality, a bunch of businesspeople ended up making key decisions about IT issues that they had no experience or expertise in.  They would then start measuring success in terms of how included in the process the businesspeople felt instead of how well the resulting product actually solved the problem that the project had been created to solve.  This is like considering the personality of each racer to determine who won the hundred-meter dash in the Olympics instead using only who crossed the finish line first.

Also, it created a position called an ITPM (IT Project Manager) who in essence had two bosses – the IT leadership team headed by the CIO (Chief Information Officer) was one line and the other line was the business owner with their line that went up to the head of business.  These two lines often had diametrically opposite goals. It was a terrible job, and I would have quit on the spot if someone had tried to force me to take the job.

This affected the developers and other IT workers as well.  Their manager stopped being part of a team but became an RM (Resource Manager) who might manage people from several teams or even only part of one larger team.  They had no opportunity to have any real understanding of what was really going on in a team.

The RM would then end up with the same conflict as the ITPM – especially if the ITPM chose the wants of business over the reality of the limits of IT that the IT workers expressed.  So, the RM would end up with two bosses as well – the line of the CIO and the ITPM.

The CIO would tell the IT workers to do one thing, but the ITPM would tell them to ignore the CIO and do what business wanted instead.  The RM then either had to back up the CIO or the ITPM.

The IT workers then ended up with two bosses as well – the CIO and the head of business.  No one can have two bosses – they will have to choose which one to make happy and which one to make unhappy ().

So matrixing in reality is to project management what recursion is to software development – the worst practice ever.  However, both keep getting used by incompetent people even though they both have a better alternative.

These factors guaranteed disaster from matrixing as many of the leading IT companies had already learned.  It is amazing how rarely companies learn from the mistakes of other companies.

However like so many companies, HCSC was more concerned about hiring “diversity” than competency.  Somehow a terrible idea would become magically a great idea if a diversity poster child advocated it.  This is completely contrary to the engineering principle of evaluating each proposed solution on its own merits without consideration of who proposed the solution.

As a result of ignoring this engineering principle, I worked on some new highly visible projects.  However, the IT project manager did not take my advice - unlike the executive team.

This was frustrating, and I began keeping a spreadsheet along with collaborating evidence.  A pattern soon appeared.

When a problem came up, I would suggest a solution, another person would suggest the opposite, the IT Project Manager would take their suggestion, disaster would ensue, and then finally they would take my suggestion.  They did this over 100 times in a row.

It was like they got up every morning and took a stupid pill before starting work.  They simply seemed incapable of learning from their mistakes.

After they managed two different projects where they spent $100 million apiece on - with nothing to show for it - the IT Project Manager and the man that kept giving her bad advice were both promoted.  This is what happens when diversity is matrixed into promotions.

Meanwhile, I had produced more IT artifacts than anyone else on both teams and had solved most of their IT problems.  I had helped them improve everything and never had Quality Assurance find a single defect with anything I submitted for testing.

First, I was given a mediocre performance review and then I was blamed for the failure of their projects.  However, they were proven to be liars by the evidence that I had kept – but they suffered no repercussions for their blame shifting nor was my performance review corrected.

After that, I worked on a new team on a much larger project.  On this project, a number of the co-workers from India commented that I was the hardest working person that they had ever seen.

Like Neill, Shamira, and Narender, I found most of my India co-workers to be willing to work hard and eager to improve their skills.  So, I began helping them do that as well.

HCSC sent us to IT training, but my instructors ended up relying on me to fix all kinds of issues.  One of them asked why HCSC had sent me to the class since I could have been teaching it.

However, a lot of the skills were new to me, but I picked them up as if I had been doing them for years.  I knew that this was way beyond my abilities – especially since I was still crawling around on half the brain power I was used to.

So, when some of my co-workers asked me how I could produce so many artifacts without ever making any defects I told them that it was the Spirit of Truth helping me.  I told them that I did not know where I ended, and the Spirit of Truth began in the process.

I also would talk to them at lunch away from the office about the Man of Truth.  They had great interest in the Tribulation that was coming in the fullness of time.  Even though most of them were Hindus and Muslims, they could still see the signs of the times.

The company was doing great, but change was coming. 

The new CEO had just finished her second year of record-breaking profits.   So, the company did what all companies with a wrong corporate culture do – they fired her and replaced her with someone that was more “diverse” than her.  She was a woman, but she was still a European-American.

Shortly after that, there was a mandatory all-hands meeting to introduce the new “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” team.  This team then made a presentation about their vision of the new corporate culture.

Their “diverse” team consisted of one African-American woman, one Hispanic-American woman, and one Indian-American woman.  Their entire presentation was as racist as a Klu Klux Klan rally and as sexist as a woman-haters club.

At question time, I asked why there was no Native Americans or men on their “diversity” team.  I also asked them how their ideas of “equity” - where everyone got the same results regardless of their contributions - were any different than those of communism.

They were caught off-guard that someone would point out such things.  They really were not able to provide any good answers and basically told everyone to just trust them that this was the benefit of all.

I could see where this was going, so I began entertaining other offers.  However, every time I was about to accept one, the Father of Truth would send someone to tell me that I needed to stay where I was.  Sometimes it was a co-worker, but sometimes it was a total stranger - like an old woman in a grocery store.

Not long after that I got another new manager, and I told my family that this man was trouble.

I loved this project and often got to work early to get started solving problems and stayed late to mentor other people to help them do their jobs better.   Apparently, someone decided that this was a bad thing – typical corporate America.

He soon began to make my work life miserable.  He seemed determined to put an end to my outstanding performance.

This new manager was determined that soft skills were more important than hard skills.  He had drunk the “matrixing” Kool-Aid pitcher dry.

However, my job was almost entirely dependent upon hard skills.  Only minimal soft skills were needed to interact with other IT professionals – who were focused on working together to solve a hard problem.

The truth is that if my job was dependent upon soft skills, then I would have fired me from it long ago.  My soft skills had degraded from the seven years of working from home alone.

This manager thought he was really good at reading people, but he was terrible at reading me.  He could not tell if I was angry or amused when he was talking to me.  Good thing for him that I had promised Grampa to never gamble, because I could have cleaned him out in poker.

All people will shut their emotions off in certain situations to give them clarity of what needs to be done and the ability to do it.  For example, soldiers who experience post-traumatic stress much later after a battle from bayonetting some else to death, report that they felt nothing when they were doing it during the battle.

I figured out how to do turn my emotions off on purpose to get through crisis after crisis.  So, I began doing this every day when I went to work.

This manager managed to turn a job I had come to love into a job I came to hate.  There was no hope of things getting better under this manager.

So, I decided that I had to find another job.  I was even willing to take a job that paid less money - even though I was already working on the cheap compared to other offers I had been warned not to take or contracts I had worked on before.

Soon, I was close to securing another remote job for considerably more money.  However, the night before I was going to accept it, I was once again warned not to do so by an unlikely source.

I was watching a new Christian comedian for the first time on YouTube, and he was telling about this tough softball coach that his daughter had.  She stunk at hitting balls and wanted to quit because the coach only seemed to care about that skill. 

However, the comedian had made her keep her commitment to the team.  So she stayed and ended up becoming a great hitter due to this tough coach.

Then the comedian looked into the camera and said that there was someone watching who had someone put into their life like that tough coach.  He then said that the Father of Truth had put that tough coach into their life to make them better.  Finally, he said that Father of Truth is telling you to not leave and stay where you are – word-for-word what the old lady in the supermarket had said!

I could not deny that the Father of Truth was very clearly telling me to stay.  So, I said “not my will but yours be done”.  The next morning I went back to my job and gave up my efforts to leave.

Of course, my new manager knew none of this and I was not about to tell him anything that he might find a way to use against me.  I spoke to him as little as possible because I did not trust him.

I was soon proven right in my distrust.

This manager gave me a two out of five on my performance review in the “matrixed” system – even he had to give me a five in the technical performance section – the only part about how I actually performed my job.  I got a score of one in “reflecting company values”.

I contested that score, for as far as what was on paper I was very diverse.  I had good relationships with co-workers regardless of their gender, race, politics, or religion.  I had worked hard to help all of my co-workers become better and went out of my way to keep them from feeling pressure to do anything contrary to their values.

However, this manager stood firm on his score.  He told me that I was not really meeting their expectations, even though I was doing what they had written down.

This manager told me that people had complained that I refused to take part in the company “winter celebration” which was really just their participation in the global Christmas party.   I reminded him that the company said it respected diversity, so I had done nothing contrary to that policy by refusing to have anything to do with idolatry - except for showing love to idol worshipers.

Then this manager said that someone had complained that I told them that the Spirit of Truth was helping me.  I reminded him that they had asked how I could produce so much work with zero defects, so I had given them the only honest answer there was.

This manager also said that the ITPM and he could not trust me.  I asked for clarification of why they could not trust me since I had never lied about anything to anyone at any time.  I asked for an example of something dishonest I had done.

He did not have an example and really did not give me a clear answer on why they could not trust me.  He did not want to go on record with what he meant by that and hoped that I would figure it out without him actually saying it out loud.

This manager then told me that I needed to learn to play the game.  I had come to work every day as one of my co-workers described it “like a man on a mission” looking for ways to improve the company.  I had no idea that we were playing a game or what that game was.

This manager informed me that I would not be getting a bonus, or a cost of living raise this year, but I really could not have cared less.  It was obvious by this point that this was persecution for my obedience to the Father of Truth and He would take care of me.

(In fact, I ended up with about $2,000 dollars more left over after I paid my usual bills than before due to a series of unlikely events. This continued for every pay day until my next performance review – which I was given a fair grade.  There is no stopping the Father of Truth from blessing those who obey Him.)

This manager seemed to have been sent into my life to cause me trouble.  Perhaps my US government instilled superiority complex and admiration of my co-workers was causing pride to start rising up in me that needed to be killed for my own good.

This is similar to what had happened to Paul the Jew (Shaul aka Saul aka The Apostle Paul).  So, I started referring to this manager as “The Messenger of Satan” when I talked to people about what was going on at work because that seem to be the role he filled in my life ().

After this, this manager told me that he did not want me to work over forty hours anymore.  This took away the time that I spent after five helping my coworkers solve their problems.

On top of that, he told me that I was not to spend any more time on courses to improve my hard skills until he felt my soft skills were adequate.  Instead, he gave me a series of soft skills courses that I had to complete.

I did not like any of this, but the Father of Truth said for His children to obey their masters – not just the gentle ones, but also the harsh ones ().  So, I complied with everything this manager told me to do.

Not long after this, I was kicked off the project by the IT Project Manager. 

I had saved the company from making a fifty-million-dollar mistake according to the Deloitte consultants, but the IT Project Manager did not like being overridden in the process.  Per the corporate culture, he tried to blame me for not taking my advice in the first place.

The Scrum Master for our Scrum-of-scrums had once called me “the heart and soul” of the project.  He along with most of the project team could see that the IT Project Manager had just made a terrible mistake.

The project continually went downhill after that, while I continued to take the soft skills classes that my manager gave me.  The company gave me nothing else to work on and I was forbidden to work on improving my hard skills.

These classes made me think about things that I had avoided thinking about for years – like why I did not trust people until they proved to be trustworthy.  It was making me process some of the negative emotions that had come from Dad and from keeping the promise I had made to him.

The instructors spent a lot of time talking about non-verbal communication and how it made up at least fifty-five percent of all communication.  I began to see that it was like a secret code that I had never learned - probably due to being isolated on the playground.  This secret code could be used to convey things that people either did not want to say out loud or that people did not have the words to say.

This explained why there were often misunderstandings between me and a lot of people, but there was something that I was missing.  It did not all quite make sense.

Then there were classes about the four motivators – Acceptance, Authority, Accomplishment, and Autonomy.   I could see how different people I worked with had been motivated by one or more of these.

One of the instructors commented that not everyone was equally competent and referenced a government study.  I love to read government studies, so I read this one to see what they had found.

The study showed that 80% of all people are somewhat-to-very incompetent at their job.  It did not matter if their job was flipping burgers or President of the United States.  Then it showed various factors that accounted for that.

I began to see a pattern emerging between the four motivators and levels of incompetence, but it was not quite coming together completely.  I needed to give it more thought and research.

Also, I realized that I had known some of this stuff before, if not in quite so formal terms, and had used these skills to manipulate people before I had surrendered my life to the Man of Truth.  These skills seemed to have no honest use - just like skills to pick pockets or dissolve bodies.

Some of the instructors indeed acknowledged that these skills could be used to manipulate people.  However, they insisted that was not what most people were using them for in everyday life.

I had read a book years earlier called “How to win friends and influence people”.  When I had gotten half-way through it, I thought surely people are not so shallow and naïve that if you smile at them, look them in the eye, and say their name, then they will think that you are their friend.

I had decided to test this out on some real-life people.  I was shocked to find out that the book was right, and people really were that shallow and naïve.

The book had acknowledged that what it taught could be used to fake friendship and manipulate people, but it had insisted that this was not the intention.  However, my experience in corporate America showed me that was exactly what leaders and managers were using it to learn.

So, I call the book “How to fake friends and manipulate people”.  I thought perhaps this was the game that my manager kept telling me I need to learn how to play, but something still seemed to be missing.

All of the things taught in this book is contrary to what the Man of Truth taught and demonstrated about living honestly.  If they wrote a book about his people skills, then they would have called it “How to lose friends and irritate people”.

Then I got assigned to a new project and a new manager.

This new RM was very different than the Messenger of Satan.   She encouraged me to keep improving my soft skills but still valued my hard skills.

She was not assigned to manage people of a large team, but instead managed developers who were either part of one of several small teams or part of a pool of developers who could be brought into help various small teams on projects where they lacked the skills needed for the project.

So, it was in many ways similar to being a contractor again, even though I was still an employee of HCSC.  It was a lot different than being part of the team that I had been removed from by the ITPM.

The first several projects I worked with some developers from India.  The workers from India had developed their own network and they knew that I would treat them fairly and help them improve their skills, so they would ask for me to help them.

I ended up spending as much of my time teaching them how to improve their code as I did coding.  We were basically practicing paired-programming, and I was the navigator as often as I was the developer.

Some of them were very eager to practice the skills I taught them and would solve a coding problem that I planned to fix before I could get to it.  This would free up time to solve other technical problems that the project needed solving beyond coding problems and continue to improve my soft skills.

So, the nature of my work changed to one that relied less on my hard skills and more on my soft skills.  It was definitely less demanding than the project that I had worked when the Messenger of Satan had been my RM.

That former project crashed and burned without my guidance.  The company had spent 350 million dollars on it and nothing to show for their efforts – except for the webservices that I had built all by myself.

This is what happens to any project when a company values “diversity” over competency.  This is inevitable when project success is measured on how the business stakeholders are made to feel over how well the project will be able to provide a viable solution to their business problem.

I also began a COP (Community of Practice) to give presentations on how people could improve the UI (User Interface) of our applications.  This was the area that the developers employed by the company were weakest and the part of development that the company was most dependent upon contractors to do.

This was the best thing I could do to help HCSC to stop spending a lot of effort on projects that were doomed to failure – or that would be an endless maintenance nightmare.  It also let me practice my improved soft skills in a real life scenario.

I also began preparing to start a new COP on soft skills.  I began creating artifacts for my presentations based on independent research that I had done to figure out what it was that the Messenger of Satan and the soft skills instructors hinted at but would not say out loud.

Thanks to this training I figured out why the Messenger of Satan had given me a one on “Reflecting Company Values” even though I did exactly what was written and what they had said in their meetings.  What they really meant was how much my values – defined by my religious beliefs and political views – aligned with theirs.

So, on my next performance review I gave myself a one.  I wrote in the justification that I would never reflect the company values but would only reflect the values of the Father of Truth found in the Book of Truth (The Bible).

I did not know it at the time, but the Father of Truth was providing me with what I needed to deal with new problems on the horizon.  They would change my life in unexpected ways.

Then Covid-19 hit and changed the world as we knew it.

One day we were told to leave the office and not to return until we were told to do so.  We were instructed to work from home.

Covid-19 had begun hitting some parts of the US hard and some states had already issued shelter at home mandates.  Some cities even imposed martial law.

HCSC really did not have too much trouble transitioning.  The executives had been receptive to my ideas of distributed workforces with no central office and everyone working from home were not entirely unworkable.  As a result we had adopted a model where people worked from home a couple of days a week before Covid hit.

Soon, many companies – including those who had told me that this was unworkable – were doing exactly what I had been advocating for over two decades.  Their reluctance was not due to any hard issues, but rather to soft issues.

Some people are just averse to change – even in a field like IT where change is constant.  However, for many of the executives and managers it was really about their egos.

They simply liked being able to force people to come into the office – even it was detrimental to the performance of the employees.  They also got a charge out of seeing people carrying out their orders – especially if it was something that had no business value but was just them exerting their authority.

This is not to say that I advocated forcing everyone to work from home.  It is really about working in the most productive location and that varies according to individual situations and self-discipline.

However, Covid was providing a proven grounds for my ideas on a scale that I had not imagined.  Soon, companies were finding to their surprise that worker productivity increased dramatically.

The office is full of distractions – including co-workers.  When people find a place that is free of distractions, they are able to put more focus on their work.

This can be a problem for people like me though.  Managers worried that workers would have trouble working, but government studies have shown that the opposite is true – workers have trouble ending their workday.

When you think of an idea at home but everything to carry it out is at the office, then you have little choice but to wait until you get back to the office to try it out.  However, when you work from home you are already at the office.

So, the biggest problem is work life displacing home life.  It takes a certain amount of discipline that many people are lacking to maintain a proper work/life balance without a physical separation between the workplace and home.

So, I saw the soft issues were greater than the hard issues.  I had always said that this was not for everyone, but I did not realize how much less self-discipline that most people had compared to myself.

Then Covid became much more personal.

My son was hospitalized with Covid.  The problem was that he was part of a small minority whose immune system did not respond to it.

Doctors gave him no chance of surviving for more than a few days.  However, the Father of Truth told me that he would live, but he would have a long recovery.

The Father of Truth then told me that I had to post this on all the groups on Facebook and on my page first.  Only afterwards, would He bring it to pass.

So, I did as the Father of Truth said.  When the attending physician saw him next, he could not believe that it was the same patient that he had treated three days earlier before the Labor Day weekend.

However, this journey had just begun.  His immune system was still acting like nothing was wrong.

My son gave my wife power of attorney, and she was with him constantly in the hospital room with only a brief time off to come home to eat and get clean clothes.  Her past experiences kept her calm for she had seen the Man of Truth stand between Savannah and death three times.

I went into prayer and fasting mode.  Every day the Spirit of Truth would give me instructions for the doctors that I would pass to my wife who told them.

Against all odds, my son continued to get better as long as the doctors followed those instructions.  However, a department head doctor - who knew nothing about the case - gave instructions contrary to the instructions that the doctors on the case had given just to exert his authority.

That doctor placed his ego over the welfare of the patient.  This hospital had been taken over by an out-of-state corporation and now it was operating the same way as most of Corporate America.

Soon, my son took a serious turn for the worst.  He stopped responding to treatments altogether and went downhill fast.

So, I pled with the Father of Truth to save him as He had said would and vowed that if He saved my son and return him to his own home, then I would tell everyone that He had done so.  I would also make sure they knew that this was done to confirm the message of the Book of Truth:  That there was no god but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that this God has a son – the Man of Truth –who He raised from the dead and that there was no salvation without total surrender to His son.

Soon, afterwards my son died despite every effort of medical science to save him.  However, God raised him from the dead shortly afterwards.

The doctors were in shock.  Soon, the story got out and it was on two of the local news stations.  The tagline for the story was “Do you believe in miracles?”.

I was not, however.  This was not the first time that the Father of Truth had done something like this when I had prayed fervently.

My RM had been very helpful during all of this.  She had requested to be kept informed, and I had kept her informed every step of the way.

So, she knew about everything that had happened – except my fasting and my vow.  I had talked to her often about the Man of Truth and she saw firsthand the proof of everything I had told her.

This cycle of hearing instructions from the Spirit of Truth, my wife passing on the instructions to the doctors, and my son recovering against all odds as they followed those instructions continued.  However, several more times his recovery was delayed by someone who did know anything about his case making decisions wrecking his recovery by giving their own instructions.

My son had to go to multiple places during his long recovery and this happened at every single place.  My wife and I would then pray for the Father of Truth to remove the person from his case.  The Father of Truth did so every time.

So, the attitude of Corporate America was not isolated to just one department of one hospital.  It has spread throughout the medical industry like a cancer.

During this time, I caught Covid twice and followed the advice that I had given others.  So, I worked right through it without taking a single sick day.

Finally, my son came home – something that those who kept giving their own instructions said would never happen.  The Father of Truth had done what I asked despite the best efforts of Corporate America to kill my son.

I also continued my studies of soft skills during this time.

I was beginning to unravel the human mind.  What I was seeing was not pretty.

I had systematically taken notes from each source on the subject and a framework began to take shape.  The gaps left by the earliest sources began being filled in by later sources.

Several times the emerging framework had to be adjusted to maintain consistency when new information came in.  The biggest change was needed after reading the work of Kelley on follower types.

Kelly provided more than ample evidence that there were five types of followers that could be mapped to two dimensions – effort and critical thinking.  These five types of followers were Sheep, Yes-People, The Alienated, Star Performers, and Pragmatics.

In the corner with the lowest effort and lowest critical thinking was the Sheep.  In the opposite corner were Star Followers.

In the corner with the highest effort and lowest critical thinking was the Yes-People.  In the opposite corner was The Alienated.

In the middle was the Pragmatics.  The ideal Pragmatic would have fifty percent of the effort and fifty percent of the critical thinking of the group as a whole.

However, this conflicted with the principle of only four primary motivators: Authority, Acceptance, Accomplishment, and Autonomy.  Then I realized that there was a fifth primary motivator: Avoidance.

Now it all fit perfectly together with the government studies that I had read on competency and the Pareto Principle.

Pareto had observed in Italy that 80 percent of the land was owned by 20 percent of the people.  He then went on to create mathematical formulas and statistical models to explain the Pereto Distribution.

Later Joseph Juran used the work of Pareto to prove mathematically that the Pareto Distribution was not valid for economics and politics but was an underlying principle -similar to a law of physics – that could be applied to every area of human endeavor.

Juran called this principle the Pareto Principle and applied it to business management.  He simplified it for his business clients as “80% of the sales will come from 20% of the customers”.

However, the Pareto Principle applies to workers at every level as well.  Simply stated, 20% of the workforce will produce 80% of the work.

That 20% were the Star Followers who were primarily motivated by accomplishments  They were the twenty percent in the government studies that were not somewhat-to-very incompetent at their job.

The Sheep were the most incompetent group who were primarily motivated by avoidance.  They sought to avoid work of any kind – especially critical thinking.

The other three groups were somewhat incompetent being between the Star Followers and the Sheep.  Their competency level also mapped well to their motivators.

The Yes-People motivated primarily by authority worked hard but followed instructions blindly – even if it was plain that they would lead to disaster.  The Alienated primarily motivated by autonomy thought of better solutions but did not want to have to work with other people to implement them.  The Pragmatics primarily motivated by acceptance went along with whoever they were working with and avoided any improvement if it meant upsetting other people.

However, after thinking about how people I knew fit into each of these groups, I realized that there was variance within each group.  Even among the Star Followers some were barely competent and among the Sheep some were almost somewhat incompetent.

So, I came up with a diagram based on the work of Kelley, Pareto, and Juran that mapped out all possible combinations of effort and critical thinking.  I also mapped out these combinations for each group and found that they each fit in a range that covered 20% of the possibilities.

Here it is:

 

				Kelley Follower Type Distribution Diagram
				Level of Critical Thinking

It was plain to me that wise companies would hire only the Star Followers – which would let them produce 80% of the work for 20% of the money.  Even if they paid the Star Followers four times as much they could still destroy their competitors by leaving only the other groups for their competitors to hire from.

So, this raised other questions:  Why was it so rare to find a company that basically did not have a workforce that fits the diagram?  What was Corporate America looking for instead of competence?

I soon got a very clear answer to my questions.

The company had moved from DEI to full endorsement of Woke by this time.  There can be confusion about what this means because the term Woke had been hijacked by the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer) movement from the African-American community.

The term “Woke” was originally coined around 1995 by American Americans for a movement to end the very real problem of racial injustice done to African Americans by racist police and courts.  It seemed that most of the rest of America was asleep in doing anything to stop the problem, so one of the leaders to end this injustice said that it was time that America WOKE up to what was going on.

So even though MLK (Martin Luther Junior King) had gotten the unjust laws that institutionalized racism revoke, the problem of systemic racism still persisted in many of places.  In these places, African Americans (and others) were not being given equal treatment under the law.

However just like in the days of MLK, the Old Woke movement grew with the support of many European Americans who also longed for Liberation Day when all injustice would end.  However, many of the leaders were not willing to lay down their lives like MLK to end the injustice, but eventually formed Black Lives Matter instead.

Soon Black Lives Matter abandon the effective process of peaceful protest that MLK had used and began rioting in predominately African American communities that destroyed those communities.  It did nothing but harm the cause of the Old Woke movement as images of this criminal behavior spread across media outlets and social media.

Black Lives Matter may have started off with good intentions, but it did not end with them.  It turned into African Americans exploiting the pain of other African Americans for their own personal gain.  This became public knowledge when Black Lives Matter went bankrupt.

As part of that exploitation, Black Lives Matter joined forces with the LBGQT movement that had wealthy financial backers.  As a result the term “Woke” went from the name of a movement to end criminal behavior by racist law enforcement members to the name of a movement to decriminalize criminal behavior by LGBQT members.

Every society throughout history that has decriminalized and celebrated this criminal behavior has come to a disastrous end.  The New Woke movement has now become a movement to bring about the death of America.

So, there are many Americans opposed to the New Woke movement. They know that the Founding Fathers of America had a better way to deal with crime.  They know that America had the lowest crime rate in the world under their system.

They know that LQBTQ rights under America law at the time of the Founding Fathers consisted of a speedy trail and a public execution.  They know this was still the case in the US Military until President Clinton implemented “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 1993.

They also know that DEI excludes from promotion - and even employment - anyone who will question decriminalizing perversity– especially the Children of Truth (those who obey The Father of Truth because they love Him).  They know it really should be called PIE (Perversity, Iniquity, and Exclusion).

So, most are more afraid of Corporate America than the Father of Truth, and they dare not speak out against DEI policies at work.  They are choosing to become fools by endorsing this foolishness with their inaction.

Wisdom and understanding comes from knowing and doing the commandments of the Law of Truth that American law was based on (Deuteronomy 4:5-6).  A nation that turns against those commandments will come to lack wisdom and understanding (Deuteronomy 32:28-29).

Wisdom comes from knowing these commandments, but understanding only comes from taking action to carry them out (Psalm 111:10).  Not taking immediate action against those who oppose these commandments only causes the foolishness of their criminal behavior to spread (Ecclesiastes 8:11).

So, America has become a nation of fools with Corporate America looking for compliance with the New Woke above all else.  It wants a work force of Nazi prison guards who will defend putting innocent people into gas chambers by saying “I was just doing my job”.

Yet, Corporate America cannot endorse the New Woke and promote people based on competency both.  The Star Followers are the group least likely to be deceived by DEI and most likely to leave to work elsewhere or start their own business to get away from it.

So, what makes Star Followers see things more clearly than others?

I have extreme pareidolia – the ability to see patterns that most people cannot see.  Even though, pareidolia can be a form of apophenia – seeing patterns where none exists – it is not always so.

In my case, often if I see images in something like a bathroom tile, then some people can see them after I tell them what I see.  However, if I take a picture of the tile and then literally connect the dots on the picture with a marker, then most people can see it as well.

So, the patterns are actually there just like in a connect-the-dots picture.  It is just that some people can see them easily and those who cannot see them tend to think that the pattern is not really there.

This does not mean that I see only the abstract pattern and not the real details.  For example, when I look at the moon and see a face, I still see the individual craters as well.

For me this does not just apply to concrete objects that I see, but also to abstract ideas as well.  When I discover a principle in one area, I find that it can be applied to other areas as well.

For example, the principle of balance.  In physics it is expressed as “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” but in mathematics it is expressed as “what is done to one side of the equation must be done to the other side of the equation”. 

It goes beyond math and science but into all areas of knowledge.  For example, the principle of balance in philosophy might be expressed as “what comes around, goes around” and in religion as “the Father of Truth will treat you as you treated Him”.

Since I operate by applying principles that I learn in one area to all areas, then these areas all become different facets of the same thing in my mind.  Math, art, science, religion, business, philosophy, economics. politics, and so on are all the same thing in my mind.

This has been very helpful in resolving problems that other people could not in IT.  In fact, they sometimes could not even see that there was a problem.

Most people often cannot really understand the solution either.  They only understand the difference that it made after it was implemented.

This is not uncommon among engineers.  It is the source of the adage: “An engineer is someone who provides a solution that you do not understand to a problem that you did not know you had.”

This ability to think abstractly and recognize emerging patterns is not something that can just be turned on and off.  Those who have it see everything differently and have inspired another adage: “They will never be normal.  They will always be an engineer.”

So, in my study of soft skills I began to study epistemology – the study of how people determine truth – to understand why people like me saw things more clearly than most people.  It did not take long for patterns to appear that connected what the soft skills instructors had hinted at - but would not say - with how people determine truth.

As I continued to unravel the human mind, I could see that the process was very similar to using a software rule engine to produce business outcomes.  Every person has a rule engine for determining truth.

There are four types of truth that people deal with.  The one that people determine by their internal truth engine is Believed Truth.

Real Truth is objective, absolute, and consistent.  It is factual reality.

Believed Truth is subject, variable, and inconsistent.  It is what each individual believes to be the truth.

When people talk about their truth, they are talking about their Believed Truth.  Their Believed Truth is not right or wrong on its own merit.

When Believed Truth matches Real Truth, then their Believed Truth is right.  Otherwise, what their Believed Truth is wrong.

Believed Truth is determined by their own internal Truth Engine.  A Truth Engine has a Truth Controller, several Truth Pipelines, and a Truth Store.

Information is assigned has one of five statuses that reflect what is believed about the truthfulness of it by the Truth Engine.  The information and the status of the information are the Believed Truth.  The Believed Truth is kept in the Truth Store to be retrieved when needed.

These five statuses are: Verified True, Verified False, Suspected True, Suspected False, and Indeterminate.  They are what is believed about the information and how strongly it is believed, with Indeterminate meaning that the information could not be determined to be true or false.

There can be more than one Truth Pipeline, but only one primary Truth Pipeline.  The other Truth Pipelines are used for re-evaluating the status of information when new related information conflicts with the stored status.

The Truth Controller controls which Truth Pipeline will verify that the new information is true or false.  It also determines what to do with information that the Truth Pipeline could not verify.

The Truth Controller may try to process unverified information through a different Truth Pipeline, or it may assign it one of the other statuses based on the Truth Score that the Truth Pipeline gave for how likely it is true or false. The Truth Store stores the status of information after it has assigned a status. 

Each Truth Pipeline has its own set of sequential Truth Gates that new information is passed through.  Inside each Truth Gate there is a sequential set of Truth Rulesets and inside each Truth Ruleset there is a sequential set of Truth Rules.

Each individual Truth Rule is a single rule that is applied to determine the status of new information.  Not all Truth Rules can be used for all types of information.

Information ceases to be processed as soon as a Truth Rule determines that it has a verified status.  It is not passed on to other Truth Gates, Truth Rulesets, or Truth Rules for further evaluation but is stored in the Truth Store by the Truth Controller.  Otherwise, processing continues until it is either verified by another Truth Rule or assigned a status by the Truth Controller and stored in the Truth Store.

People acquire new Truth Rules over time through three sources: experience, other people, and logical thinking applied to observed facts.  Each of these new Truth Rules are placed in a Truth Ruleset with other related Truth Rules or are used to start a new Truth Ruleset.

There is a Truth Gate for processing Truth Rulesets that contain Truth Rules from each of these three sources.   These three Truth Gates are Personal Experience, Collective Wisdom, and Facts And Logic.

People are all different and no two will ever have the same set of Truth Rulesets in their Truth Gates nor the same Truth Rules in their Truth Rulesets.  Furthermore, they will vary in how they configure Truth Pipelines using these Truth Gates.

Not all of these Truth Gates produce Believed Truth that matches Real Truth equally well  How well they match is called accuracy.

Studies have proven that Personal Experience has accuracy as low as 30% and Facts And Logic has accuracy as much as 99%.  However, the overall accuracy of a Truth Pipeline is determined by more than just this.

A Truth Pipeline can be either configured as a Simple Truth Pipeline or a Complex Truth Pipeline by the Truth Controller.  A Simple Truth Pipeline produces quicker results, but a Complex Truth Pipeline produces more accurate results.

As a result, using multiple Truth Gates in a Simple Truth Pipeline is less accurate than using only one Truth Gate, the chance of wrong Believed Truth being stored increases with further processing.  Conversely, using multiple Truth Gates in a Complex Truth Pipeline is more accurate than using only one Truth Gate, the chance of wrong Believed Truth being stored decreases with further processing.

As a result of this the least accurate Truth Pipeline has been shown to be a Simple Truth Pipeline that uses Personal Experience, then Collective Wisdom, and finally Facts And Logic to determine Believed Truth.  The most accurate Truth Pipeline has been shown to be a Complex Truth Pipeline that uses Facts And Logic, then Collective Wisdom, and finally Personal Experience to determine Believed Truth.

However, using a Complex Truth Pipeline with three Truth Gates can take significantly longer to process than using a Simple Truth Pipeline with only one Truth Gate.  So, the most accurate Truth Pipeline is a little more accurate than a Simple Truth Pipeline that uses only Facts And Logic at the cost of a lot more time.

This matters because of the OODA loop discovered by Colonel Boyd of the US Air Force.  In air combat the pilot with the fastest OODA loop is often the one that shoots down the other plane.

OODA means Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  It means when new information is observed, like the presence of enemy aircraft, then orient by determining the significance of the information, decide what action is needed based on that significance, and finally immediately execute that action.

The Simple Truth Pipeline that uses only a Facts And Logic processes as much information as possible with very high accuracy.  This is the primary Truth Pipeline used by the Star Followers that are nearest the corner of highest competence (100% Effort and 100% Critical Thinking).

However, this is also the rarest primary Truth Pipeline.  The most common is a Complex Truth Pipeline that uses Collective Wisdom, then Personal Experience, and finally Facts And Logic to determine Believed Truth.  It is often used by the center band groups: Yes-People, Pragmatics, and The Alienated.

In fact, most people use a Complex Truth Pipeline with three Truth Gates as their primary Truth Pipeline.  The least common primary Truth Pipeline is a Simple Truth Pipeline with only one Truth Gate.

Also, the most common first Truth Gate is Collective Wisdom and the least common is Facts And Logic.

This is why Star Followers near the corner of highest competency are only about three in ten thousand people.  Their secondary Truth Pipeline is usually a Complex Truth Pipeline that uses Facts And Logic, then Collective Wisdom, and finally Personal Experience to determine Believed Truth because it is the most accurate.

In fact, all Star Followers use Facts And Logic as either the first or second Truth Gate in their primary Truth Pipeline.  The most common Truth Pipeline among them is a Complex Truth Pipeline with Common Wisdom, then Facts And Logic, and finally Personal Experience to determine Believed Truth.

One other thing that sets Star Followers apart is their normal response to new information that shows their Believed Truth does not match Real Truth.  When this happens, then at least one of their Truth Rules is inaccurate.

One response that other groups use is denial of the Real Truth, and they keep on using the inaccurate Truth Rule that is producing Believed Truth that does not match Real Truth.  A second response is to justify the Truth Rule as accurate and deny that it is producing Believed Truth that does not match Real Truth - so they keep using the inaccurate Truth Rule.

The third response is disorientation where the Truth Rule is acknowledged as inaccurate and removed from the Truth Ruleset - leaving no Truth Rule available to process similar information.  This results in formerly verified information being updated to Indeterminate status.

The other groups will have one of these responses due to their primary motivation.  They will sometimes use the fourth response if there is no conflict with that motivation.

The Sheep will have one of these responses to avoid the effort needed to update the status of previously stored information and take action to prevent future similar information from being inaccurate.  The Pragmatics will do the same to avoid conflict with others who want to continue to use the inaccurate Truth Rule.

The Yes-People will have one of these responses to avoid admitting that a Truth Rule given by an authority was inaccurate.  The Alienated will do the same to avoid admitting that a Truth Rule given by an authority was accurate while their own Truth Rule was inaccurate.

The fourth response is improvement of the Truth Ruleset.  The old Truth Rule is acknowledged as inaccurate and replaced with a new Truth Rule that produces Believed Truth that matches Real Truth.  Then all previously stored similar information is re-evaluated using the new Truth Rule and the status of it is updated.

This is the response that Star Followers will normally use because of their primary motivation is accomplishment.  They are continually looking to produce the best possible outcome and that requires using Truth Rules that produces Believed Truth that matches Real Truth.

It was becoming clear why the Messenger of Satan could not trust me.

The closer someone is to the middle of the distribution diagram (50% Effort / 50% Critical Thinking), the more people there are that can relate to them.  Conversely, the closer someone is to one of the corners, like the corner of extreme competence (100% Effort / 100% Critical Thinking), the fewer people there are that can relate to them.

So, the Star Followers that use a Simple Facts And Logic Truth Pipeline as their primary Truth Pipeline are rarely understood by people of any group besides other Star Followers.  Their thinking is simply too different than people of the other groups.

In my case, there is an entirely different factor as well.  I am committed to walking in truth at all times like the Man of Truth.

So, I am in this world, but I am not part of the world system ().  I have spent most of my career in Corporate America, but I have never fit in with Corporate America.

The Spirit of Truth that lives in me guides me into all truth as he promised ().  So, errors are brought to my attention and corrected before my Truth Controller ever stores new information in my Truth Store.

This is no different than the principle of “keep garbage from ever getting in” used in sound software engineering.  When followed consistently there simply is no inaccurate Believed Truth to be corrected.

However, other Star Followers without the Spirit of Truth – or that have not learned how to follow the leading of the Spirit of Truth – cannot understand how someone can continually create defect free software at a rate that is faster than other people.

However, living in truth all the time also means not going along with lies to get along with liars.  This frequently conflicts with how Corporate America operates.

 

Now it was time for me to fulfill my vow.

 

At the same time, I was having a terrible time dealing with my heart issues.

Due to the Covid backlog, I had trouble getting an appointment with any heart doctor.  The quickest appointment of the one recommended to me was five months out and I took it. 

However, I needed to see a heart doctor as quickly as possible.  So, I also asked to be put on the notification list of several cardiology facilities.  I would see their heart doctor if a sooner appointment came open.

The policies for disability leave had been written before Covid and had not been adjusted to meet the reality of the Covid backlog.  So, Human Resources (HR) was demanding a diagnosis letter before it was possible to see a cardiologist to get one.

Eventually, HR gave me an ultimatum – return to work or be fired, even though I was not being paid.  So, I went back to work.

Not long after that, I finally got to see a heart doctor.  He had an unexpected opening due to a patient dying suddenly and could see me if I could make their appointment.

The doctor was very scripted in his examination due to being only allowed a short amount of time per patient.  It probably worked fine for the eighty-five percent of cases that were most common, but it really could not deal with outlying cases like mine.

The first medicine that he gave me made me completely unable to function.  It impaired my judgment just like the warning label on it said that it would.  It was only safe for me to drive in the afternoon when the dizziness wore off.

HR told me that they could not let me come in the afternoons unless I got a note from the doctor.  They agreed to give me a short amount of time to get the note from the doctor.

However, the facility of the doctor that had prescribed me the heart medication decided that they could have me see a Physician’s Assistant (PA) instead of the doctor for this.  They told me to come in right away, even though I told them that I needed to wait until afternoon for it to be safe to drive there.

They told me that I had to come right away, so I got them to agree to the latest possible time that day.  Then with the help of the Father of Truth I barely managed to drive there without getting into a wreck.

The PA talked to the doctor, who put me on another medicine.  I could drive safely while taking the new heart medication, but it soon caused other issues.

The root of the problem had been that my adrenaline gland started pumping out adrenaline like I was in danger all the time.  This caused my heart to act crazy.

The first medicine was supposed to keep my adrenaline glands from getting signals from the brain to produce adrenaline.  This caused the dizziness.

However, the new medicine was supposed to stop the adrenaline glands from producing adrenaline.  However, since they sit right on top of the kidneys, they began affecting my kidneys as well.

Soon, I got bray lines on my fingernails due to my kidneys not working correctly.  I asked another doctor about this and was told that I needed to get off that medicine right away.

This medicine left me feeling very weak as well - probably because my kidneys were not working correctly.  So, I managed to get another appointment with the PA.

The PA told the doctor was out of ideas - except to increase the dosage of my blood pressure medication.  He had not really wanted to take me off the medication – as if it was a win if I died from renal failure instead of heart failure.

Later, one of the admins there admitted that the reason that they would not fill out the form for my disability was because the federal guidelines had become much more stringent since Covid.  Covid and fraud by Woke protestors had put a terrible strain on the system, so the federal government required a lot more effort to get disability declared.

The facility really did not have the time and people to do everything the government required except in the most extreme cases.  If I really wanted to get my disability approved, then I would have to get a disability lawyer.

Yet, my health was getting worse, and I knew that I would soon have to quit my job.  I hoped to make it to June, so I could resign in protest of Pride Month.  However, the company fired me first in May of 2023.