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).

Then I made the promise to Dad that in many ways set the course of my entire life.  I then learned the value of hard work from Uncle Ken and Grandpa.

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 Air Force 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.

So, I looked for jobs in the Springfield (Missouri) newspaper to be near Mom.  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 Veterans Day 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 on 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 – at best.

It felt like I was being treated like I had on my first contract again.  I was angry about someone baiting and switching me, 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, 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 CEO was replaced soon after I was hired.

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 (Jeremiah 29:7).  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 the business segment.  No one can have two bosses – they will have to choose which one to make happy and which one to make unhappy (Matthew 6:24).

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, disaster soon ensued.  An ITPM and her main adviser both ignored my advice, perhaps in part because I did not look diverse enough.

Then they were both promoted after wasting 200 million dollars on failed projects.  This is what happens when diversity is matrixed into promotions.

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.

Also, someone on the board decided that they wanted HCSC to stop being a Not-For-Profit corporation so it could be sold to a competitor.  I immediately began praying against this.

Since it was a company whose mission was to help people be able to afford the healthcare they needed, it forced other insurance companies to also provide similar benefits at similar costs to remain competitive.  However, if it was a for-profit company and taken over by a competitor, then the for-profit companies would all be able to offer less benefits for higher premiums to increase their profits.

Considering the way Corporate America works, the board member would have been rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars by the competitor that acquired HCSC, while all the people that HSCS helped would have suffered – not mention the layoffs that would have followed.  However, the Father of Truth heard my prayers and every effort to do this failed miserably.

Shortly after the new CEO started, 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 for the benefit of all.

I loved the project I was working on, so I 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.

Then I was told that our excellent RM in Tulsa was being replaced with ones that would come down every month or so from Chicago.  This sounded like a terrible idea, and it was.

Then I got my new manager, and I told my family that this man was trouble.

As soon as I met Chicago Man, I knew that he could not be trusted.  I thought about quitting that day, but my former RM said I should give people a chance first.

It soon became clear the real reason that someone decided to spend the company resources on sending people from Chicago to manage the people in Tulsa.  They wanted to coerce the people in Tulsa into drinking the DEI Kool-Aid.

They had thought that everyone would go along with their agenda to get along with their new RM.  However, they were terribly mistaken about me.

So, Chicago Man gave me a two out of five on my performance review in the “matrixed” system – even though 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, Chicago Man 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.

Chicago Man told me that people had complained when 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 Chicago Man 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.

Finally Chicago Man 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.

Chicago Man 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.

Chicago Man then told me that I needed to learn to play the game.  He gave no explanation of that either and it took a long time for me to really understand what he meant.

Chicago Man lastly 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 leftover after I paid my usual bills than before due to a series of unlikely events. This continued for every payday 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.)

That project crashed and burned without my guidance after I was kicked off of it by the ITPM.  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.

After that I got a new manager from Texas that was more balanced.

She was very different than Chicago Man.  She had moved from Chicago before “diversity” became the latest management fad and seemed to have not caught the brain-eating virus yet.

In our performance reviews, we are supposed to rate ourselves and then the manager rates us.  Finally we discuss the differences between the two with them.

Thanks to the soft skills training the Chicago Man made me take, I was able to figure out why he 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.

I was soon on a project that was in the red and looked like it had no hope of getting in the green.  The ITPM of this project was reporting the condition of the project honestly, so I was able to work with her to save the project.

(Honest reporting like this was rare in HCSC.  Most of the projects were “watermelons” according to the CIO – looked green on the outside based on the report of the ITPM but really red on the inside – actually in red status in reality.)

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).

She gave me a three out of five and overrode my self-rating of one.  She also gave me an overall score of four out of five that reflected the value I had to the company after saving yet another project from disaster by introducing static code analysis into their code deployment pipeline.

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 one day, we were told to work from home due to Covid.

This was not a big deal for most people since we had been working from home a couple of days a week.  It was not that big of a change for most of us.

Yet some people are just averse to any 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.

People like this are rampant in Corporate America.  That is why they will look for any justification to end working from home as quickly as possible – even when it is clearly beneficial to the company.

So, this raised other questions:  Why was it so rare to find a company that had a workforce that was clearly better than their competitors?  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 from the African-American community by the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer) movement.

The term “Woke” was originally coined around 1995 by African-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 revoked, 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 LGBTQ 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 LGBTQ 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 LGBTQ 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, it was becoming clearer why people like me were such a problem for the New Woke.

I am committed to walking in truth at all times like the Man of Truth.  This is contrary to the entire New Woke agenda.

So, I am in this world, but I am not part of the world system (John 17:16).  Even though I have spent most of my career in Corporate America, I have never fit in with Corporate America.

However, living in truth all the time is not normal in Corporate America.  It conflicts with how most of Corporate America operates. 

This conflict soon became very apparent when I was put on a new project.  It soon became apparent that the ITPM and his boss, the CIO, were giving conflicting instructions to the IT workers.

His boss, the CIO, had made it very plain what he wanted the IT workers to do in our all-hands meetings.  This ITPM and his other direct reports were assuring him that they were instructing everyone involved in their projects to do as he had laid out.

However,  the ITPM was telling me to do the opposite of what he was reporting to his boss that he was having the team do.  I thought perhaps there was some sort of misunderstanding, so I asked him if he understood what the CIO wanted us to do.

He assured me that he understood but did not want us “wasting time” making our applications more secure and maintainable like the CIO had instructed us to do.  This was kind of business as usual, but then I saw the reports that he was sending to the CIO about our progress in carrying out his instructions.

He was reporting that we were spending so many hours per week on this, when in fact he had ordered us to not “waste any time” on doing this at all.  He was purposely lying to his boss to cover up his refusal to have the IT workers do what his boss had instructed him to have us do.  He was also lying about the overall status of the project.

I decided to give my RM a chance to handle this while I continued to spend some of my time each week making our applications more secure and maintainable as the CIO had ordered.  I made sure that I also completed all of my stories for the sprint as well.

A few weeks went by and nothing changed, so I asked her what was going on.  The ITPM had denied that he was doing this, but I had kept the evidence of this as I had learned in dealing with Corporate America.

So my RM had no room for doubt about him lying to his boss.  She said that she would handle this, so I gave her time to do so.

However, when I could see that he was still lying on the reports, I asked her if she had talked to him.  She told me that she had and the ITPM wanted me to not say anything to anyone else about it.

It became clear that he intended to keep lying to his boss and wanted me to go along with his lie to get along with him.  I was not sure what I should do next, so I began to consider my next move.

I had tried to resolve this quietly by giving him a chance to start having the team do what he was reporting to his boss that he was having them do, but he had refused to do that.  He even refused after my RM had let him know that I had the evidence to prove this.  He still wanted me to go along with his lie instead.

As I was on Facebook after work it was still on my mind, and I asked the Father of Truth out loud what I should do about this.  The words had barely left my mouth when a post appeared in the feed with the answer.

It said that if I knew someone else was doing wrong and I did not say something to end it, then I would be as guilty as the person who committed the wrong (Leviticus 5:1).  The will of the Father of Truth was very plain.  I was to never to go along with evil to get along with those committing evil.

So, I let my RM know that I was giving the ITPM one last chance to make things right.  Her answer made it plain that he was not going to do any such thing, and she had done all she knew to do to get him to do so.

So, I crafted an e-mail to his boss, the CIO.  I also copied my RM on it to keep her from being surprised.

I started the e-mail with the verse that I had seen on Facebook and explained that I would never go along with a lie to get along with a liar.  Then I told the CIO that the RM had been lying to his face week after week about having his IT workers carry out the instructions that CIO had given. 

I explained that I had exhausted all other options before sending this e-mail, but the ITPM had left me with only two options – go along with the lie or tell his boss myself.  Finally, I presented some of the indisputable evidence that the ITPM had been doing what I said he had been doing.

The CIO was very bright himself and undoubtedly had already suspected that this was going on with a number of the ITPMs.  However, people were still shocked that anyone would do what I had done and break one of the unwritten rules of Corporate America like this.

The CIO had met me many times and had many of my ideas implemented across the company.  He really had no doubts about what I was reporting being true and I was acting in the best interests of the company.

I am not sure what he did about it, but my conscience was clear.  However, I was soon removed from that project and later a different ITPM was put over it.

I finally understood what my former ITPM and the Chicago Man had meant when they said that they could not trust me.  They could not trust me to go along with lies or to cover up deception of any sort.

In Corporate America, there is an unwritten rule that you lie or do whatever is necessary to cover up the lying or results of bad decisions of those you work with.  In Corporate America, it is being honest at all times that makes you untrustworthy.

Working in Corporate America was becoming unbearable.

Around this time the company calendar had arrived, but it was going fully WOKE.  Each month featured art created by children of the employees that promoted LGBTQ as normal.

I wanted to quit the company as soon as I saw it.  I thought I would be fired when I let people know that this was evil in the eyes of the Father of Truth and they needed to turn from this wickedness.

Instead, I was soon put on a project that was in the red and looked like it had no hope of getting in the green.  The ITPM of this project was reporting the condition of the project honestly, so I was able to work with her to save the project.

(Honest reporting like this was rare in HCSC.  Most of the projects were “watermelons” according to the CIO – looked green on the outside based on the report of the ITPM but really red on the inside – actually in red status in reality.)

I was soon hosting a Community of Practice to show how projects across the company could do the same thing by using tools like automated linting to not let garbage code into their code base to begin with.  This saved a lot of projects from failing which saved the company a lot of money.

So, the company ended up grudgingly giving me an average rating on my performance review.  I had made it plain that I would never sell my soul to the company for a higher review rating.

Those involved in the rating process had blindly followed orders like Nazi concentration camp guards putting people in gas chambers.  They could not understand why they could never get me to do the same.

Perhaps some in the company had thought that they could get me to come over to the dark side, but they did not know the power of the light side.  Corporate America has nothing that can compete with what the Father of Truth provides for those who stand with Him against evil like the New Woke.

Then a new project made it apparent why Woke means broke for Corporate America.

This project was almost entirely UI (user interface) work.  The problem was that I was the only on-shore worker but IT security was blocking all of the tools needed to carry out the actual UI work.

All modern software is built on reusable components.  Most modern web UI along with the applications that process the data entered on the UI and return the results to the UI are built using NPM.

While some of the processing might be done by something else on a server via a web service call, a lot of the processing is done in the client (web browser) including things like basic validation of input and populating data driven components like dropdowns with current information.  All of this is done using NPM on most web applications and this company was no exception.

So, IT Security blocking NPM from downloading node modules was effectively blocking IT workers from being able to do any Web UI work.  So, I talked to them about the problem that it was causing the employees who did Web UI work after verifying with other on-shore Web UI workers that it was not just happening to me.

IT Security responded that some of the node modules had security issues, so they were blocking NPM from downloading any node modules.  However, this had been the case for years and they had simply blocked the versions of those node modules with security issues until a newer version without the issue was created.

Also, somehow the off-shore workers in India were able to do their work.  So, I had one of them transpile some of my code that was being blocked on their machine, and it worked without being blocked.

This was the first clue that something was going on beyond what IT Security was telling me.  American law required stricter security for off-shore workers, but they actually had more lenient security than on-shore workers.

I pointed this out to IT Security and asked what they were going to do to bring the company back in compliance with government regulations.  I also pointed out that our software was no more secure if off-shore workers were using NPM than if on-shore workers were using NPM.

They seemed put out that I had figured out these things.  They really did not have a good answer but said that was the new policy.

As soon as I realized that I was being blocked from performing UI work, I asked for stories that did not require UI work.  I was told by the Scrum Master that since the sprint had started that they could not give me a new story – even though I had discovered a dependency in working the story that made completion impossible.

This was entirely contrary to the Agile methodology.  It said that if someone discovered that a story was unworkable after the sprint had started, then they were given a new story that they could complete to keep making progress.  Yet, they refused to give me work that I could do when this happened.

Also, the stories that were marked as not being UI work turned out to require UI work to complete.  Either a really lousy job was done during story grooming and refinement, or they were being mismarked on purpose.

Also I could not really help any of the off-shore workers with their issues since all of their stories were also UI work that depended upon NPM.  So, I contacted my RM for help in these matters.

My RM had me work with one of the direct reports to an IT executive to find a solution to the NPM problem.  So, I began implementing the various solutions that we came up with.

When we got the first one working, I tested it on one of the UI stories.  It worked fine on my machine, but when I tried to push it up to production, it was blocked by IT Security.

After that, it would no longer work on my local machine as well – because that also depended upon access through the company intranet.  IT Security had rolled out a new security policy to the lower environments that prevented it from working on those as well.

We tried several different things including using Docker containers – which were inherently secure due to their design.  However, every time we found a solution that worked IT Security would implement a new security policy that would prevent it from working.

It became clear that IT Security was purposely keeping anyone except for off-shore workers from being able to perform any Web UI work.  The only exception was one application area where Federal regulations required that only US citizens could perform the work.

The reason for the regulation was that this area required more security measures than most IT work because the information it processed could be used to create fraudulent claims to extract money from the US government.  Yet, IT Security waived all of the security measures that were placed on the rest of the on-shore workers thereby making it less secure according to their own explanation.

This made it plain that the entire reason given for blocking on-shore workers from performing Web UI work was a lie.  There was something else behind this besides sound business practices.

In the Tulsa office, about fifty percent of the IT work force had been H1Bs from India.  The H1B status gave them the right to work in the US and put them on the path towards citizenship.

However, the only remaining workers in the Tulsa office from India were ones who had already become citizens or were very close to doing so.  I brought this up to IT workers in the other main IT offices in Chicago and Texas, who confirmed that they had the same thing happening there.

Most of these H1B workers had done Web UI work.  However, with them unable to do that work, they lost their H1B status and were sent back to India – where some of them did the same work there as off-shore workers.

So, these new IT Security policies were really about forcing H1B workers to return to India.  It had nothing to do with making anything more secure.

When the company started promoting “diversity” it brought in a lot of H1B workers – especially from India.  However, when it went fully Woke it started making policies that removed a lot of these same workers.

I investigated and found that this same sort of thing had happened across many companies when they went fully Woke.  This had nothing to do with sound business practices, but with political manipulation.

Since the Civil War, the Demoncratic party had relied on immigration to stay in power.  The descendants of those immigrants tended to become conservative and switch parties once they had something to conserve.

However, this plan completely backfired with the immigrants from India.  As soon as they became citizens they overwhelmingly voted Republican.  Their number one reason was opposition to Woke and its efforts to normalize LGBTQ.

So, these immigrants from India had to be removed and replaced with immigrants that would go along with Woke.  So, hard working immigrants from India were exported and US border security along the southern border was virtually eliminated to import criminals who would vote Demoncrat when they became US citizens.

Most of these corporations had their headquarters located in states whose government were run by those promoting Woke.  So, Corporate America did what it could to show that it was on-board with these policies to avoid trouble just like corporations in Germany did when Hitler was rising to power.

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

However, I was physically wearing out and wary from dealing with Corporate America.  It had been the longest that I had ever stayed with a single job, and I needed to get some rest.

However my family begged me to keep working, except for my wife.  So, I announced that at work that I was quitting, and they begged me also to not leave so their project would stay on track.

I was resolute and going to quit.  However, shortly before my father had fallen very ill and I needed money to help take care of him.

I really wanted to leave Corporate America for good.  However, my father still needed my help.

So, I ended up not quitting for the benefit of other people.  It turned out to be a costly choice.

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 those glands 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. 

I thought I was done with the problems that Woke has caused Corporate America.

I soon found out that was not the case.  This became apparent as soon as I filed for unemployment.

When they asked why I was fired, I told them that I had not been given any reason.  However, whatever reason that they would have given me would not have been the real reason I was fired.

The intake worker said that they have heard this a lot recently.  In fact, it was why their caseloads were up, and the wait times were becoming so long.

When I tried to file I was denied because their records had showed that I had filed the previous year and used up all of the benefits for that year.  However, I had not done any such thing.

After verifying that it was not me that filed, they realized that someone had filed falsely under my name.  This had happened to a lot of people since the Woke protests began.

I asked if they were investigating this.  It almost certainly required help from someone inside the company.

The company had to verify that I had worked there previously but no longer worked there when the claim was filed..  Whoever did this verification in the company would have seen that I was still working for the company.

So, they would have to provide the phony verification of my employment and departure from the company.  It may have required multiple people to lie about this if other people provided cross-verification as standard good business practice demands.

The only other option for someone in the company committing fraud was that someone had spoofed the company.  Then the phony company would have provided phony records.

However, that would have required a major security breach to get the data required to perform such a spoof.  For such a breach to go undetected, would have almost certainly required cooperation from someone in IT Security.

This did not just happen to me, but to millions of Americans during the time of the Woke protests.  When I proven that I had not filed for unemployment previously, they understood because it had happened to so many people before me.

There are only a few ways for this to happen on such a scale.  One was a lot of Woke supporters committing the fraud from inside a lot of companies without the companies having any knowledge of it.

However, the companies themselves could have been doing this on purpose to support Woke protestors.  That sort of thing has happened many times since I began working in Corporate America.

A third way was that a third-party vendor used by multiple companies might have had access to the necessary data in the course of it operations.  The fraud could have come from within it – with or without its knowledge.

Lastly, people inside the government itself could have been the source of the fraud.  The government already had all of the data necessary to submit fraudulent claims that would not be caught by their own verification systems.

One thing is certain about these fraudulent claims:  they could not have been made by individuals making guesses about the information required on the claims.  Fraud on this scale that was not caught for months or even years was a purposeful and sophisticated effort.

This is one of many ways that Woke protestors managed to keep protesting for years without having a job.  Lying and stealing from other people instead of working really freed up their time.

Even after this, Corporate America gone Woke caused me trouble.

When I was finally able to file my claim was denied.  So I appealed, which forced the company to give a reason for firing me.

They claimed that I had been fired for not meeting performance expectations.  This term is so vague as to be meaningless.

I had prepared for this before I was ever fired and had more than adequate documentation to prove that I had worked very hard for them.  I also had kept proof that they had given me work that they would not allow me to complete.

I had kept records that showed my efforts to resolve the issues and their determination for the issues to not be resolved.  I was tired and weak, but I still had some fight left in me.

It was clear that I had been fired for not going along with their New Woke agenda like a good Nazi.  This was the real performance expectation that I had not met.

So, I contacted a civil rights lawyer for advice.  Basically, I was told that I needed to have a hearing and then I could pursue civil action if I was still denied after the hearing.

However, the company did not show up at the hearing, so I was awarded benefits by default.  I learned that this also happened a lot since Corporate America went Woke.

I was ready to go all the way to the US Supreme Court over this.  The people in the company that had dealt with me before knew that I had prepared extensively to prove my case when there were false accusations against me.

So, Corporate America had developed a strategy of just not showing up to appeal hearings even though that meant paying unemployment compensation.  It was cheaper than lawyers and kept things that were done to promote Woke from becoming public knowledge in court cases.

I had recovered from my health issues enough that I thought I could resume working.  I had several very interested companies in letting me help them with all kinds of IT issues.

However, when it became clear in the phone interviews that I would never go along with Woke, that was the end of the interview.  The brain-eating virus had infected most of Corporate America.

However, I did find a job site called Red Ballon that specialized in companies that were standing up against Woke.  Unfortunately, I could not find any opportunities there that were a good match for my skills.

Still, it was a glimmer of hope that not all of Corporate America had completely lost its mind.  So, I continued looking for that elusive match between my skills and one of the last bastions of sanity left in Corporate America.

However, just after my unemployment ran out I ran my head into a tree injuring my brain.  Just like that, my time in Corporate America was over.

However, life after Corporate America has been better than it was in it.

The Father of Truth has taken better care of me for standing up against the New Woke than Corporate America ever did.  I have done things that I never could manage to do while working in Corporate America.

I finally took a real vacation that was not a medical vacation in over twenty years.  The Father of Truth did for me what Corporate America had never done for me.

When I asked the Father of Truth about money for paying my utilities, He reminded me about my promise to my wife to take her to Hawaii some day if He made it possible.

So, I told my wife and Savannah that we were going to Hawaii – when we did not have enough money to pay our utilities for the next month.  The Spirit of Truth guided us every step of the way and we had a fabulous two-week vacation there.

My house had been damaged by an earthquake twenty years earlier and my homeowner insurance did not cover it because there was no coverage for earthquakes in Oklahoma at the time.  There had never been any earthquakes worth mentioning in Oklahoma until President Obama authorized fracking.

I had the money to fix it several times, but I was hindered from getting it done as long as I was working in Corporate America.  That money was long gone when the Father of Truth told me it was time for my house to be repaired.

I had no idea where to get the money for the repairs or who I could even trust to do them.  However, the Spirit of Truth again led me every step of the way and my house has been restored to better condition than it was before the earthquake.

Although, we have many of the same challenges at home that we had while I was working in Corporate America, life has become better in almost every way since I retired from Corporate America.  In general, we are happier and freer despite having considerably less money coming in.

This freedom has allowed us to focus more on the things that the Father of Truth wants us to do.  Ironically, it was the efforts of Corporate America to suppress my opposition to the New Woke that made it possible for me to oppose the New Woke more effectively.

So, are you ready to put your trust in the Father of Truth instead of Corporate America?

Corporate America wants you to believe that you cannot have a good life without it.  It is part of their strategy to exert control over you.

Corporate America relies on lies, intimidation, and manipulation to get employees to toe the company line.  Fear is the strings that they use to get their puppets to do what they want without ever saying it out loud.

The last thing that Corporate America wants is someone who has placed their trust in the Father of Truth.  They simply have no way to control them.

If Corporate America was focused only on maximizing profits by providing the best possible goods and services, then the Children of Truth would be highly sought after.  Those who do what the Father of Truth says in the Book of Truth and are led by the Spirit of Truth will always produce better results than anyone else.

When someone is led by the Spirit of Truth, it is like having someone who knows the answers to all questions giving you the answer to every question.  It is an unfair advantage that cannot be overcome.

However, the business is only a means to an end in most of Corporate America.  A strong business is able to pay bribes in the form of campaign donations to candidates that will give it an unfair advantage over their competitors.

However, it is not just as simple as giving the largest donations to whoever makes the corporation the best offer.  It is putting people in office that will be able to promote the social agenda of the corporation.

It is also about not falling out of the grace of whoever wins the election.  Once in power, the candidates are in a position to either help or harm the corporation.

This means that corporations are also dependent upon those in office and are subject to showing support for their agenda by their corporate policies.  So, corporations will sponsor corporate events and do things like issue corporate calendars that show their support for the agenda of those in office.

Yet the signs that the New Woke is still causing problems for Corporate America are everywhere.  It is apparent to me that internet applications still do not work as well as they did before Corporate America started going Woke.

So, Corporate America needs the Children of Truth to run their business well but also despises them when they will not go along with their agenda.  The last thing that Corporate America wants people to realize is that they do not need Corporate America to take care of them.

Corporate America does not realize that it has a 100% chance of losing everything.  The only thing of real value that is in Corporate America are people who need to know the Man of Truth.

The Father of Truth does not need Corporate America to be able to give the Children of Truth what they need to carry out His will.  He sends them into Corporate America to bring about His will.

If I had not worked in Corporate America, then I never would have met thousands of people that I shared the Gospel with during my lunch time.  They never would have seen the difference that the Spirit of Truth living in someone makes through my work.

I could not go to all of these countries spread across every continent (except Antarctica) to bring IT workers the Good News. So, the Father of Truth used Corporate America to bring them to me.

People coming to know the Man of Truth is why I was sent into Corporate America.  The Father of Truth will always take care of those who take care of His business.

So, you can work in Corporate America without putting your trust in Corporate America.  When you put your trust in the Father of Truth then He might send you there for His purposes.

However, when you are trusting the Father of Truth to take care of you instead of Corporate America, then He might never have you in Corporate America.  He does not need it to take care of you.

So, put your trust in Him and come into the House of Truth.  If that causes you to leave Corporate America for good, then you will not miss it.

Make the Man of Truth your lifelong CEO because you believe that the Father of Truth raised Him from the dead (Romans 10:9).  When the Father of Truth is your source of contentment, then you will be content with or without Corporate America (1 Timothy 6:6-8).

Come into the House of Truth!