Agile in All Caps

I'm a few days into the new gig, and I've already reverted to CorpMode.

Item one: the parking ramp. Headlights on ("For safety!") and then I'm crumping my way up the levels to find my slot. As ever, the nearest slots are reserved for people who are never there. Then there's a host of open slots I could park in, but are clearly poor choices because the early crowd passed them over.

It's all about proximity to the building, and with the ground floor reserved or taken - the sweet spot for all other levels becomes anything next to the main stairwell. Which is completely socked in by the early crowd. I'm in the second wave, so my choices will always be far corner or go up a level. None of which is a big deal - it's just funny how ubiquitous the parking logic is. If there's a ramp - this is how it is.

Funnier still, is how fast I've started forgetting where I parked. Which I'm sure isn't helped by age - but my current theory is based on Minority Report. In a typical day, I add 2 car parking memories:

Arrive in the morning AM 1.
Arrive after lunch/errands PM 2.

Two nearly identical memories layered onto my brain. Each day. 

1 - in the morning:

Drive into ramp. AM

Park car. AM

Get gear. AM

Walk to stairwell. AM

Enter building. AM

Done. AM

and 2 - returning from lunch:

Drive into ramp. PM

Park car. PM

Get gear. PM

Walk to stairwell. PM

Enter building. PM

Done. PM

Neither is particularly exciting. Commute = BORING. So the part of my brain that is responsible for tracking things for later use starts phoning it in. Which means at the end of the day, I ask my brain "where's the car?" and it coughs up:

Drive into ramp. PM

Park car. AM

Get gear. PM

Walk to stairwell. AM

Enter building. PM

Done. PM

-which results in me heading down the ramp to where my car was in the morning - and about midway down the ramp and not seeing my car I start looking around like a lost sheep.

And on the half visible level that is ramping up away from mine - I make out my license plates on a car that looks exactly like mine.

The number of times this happened back at CorpWorld was... well, humiliating. I spent serious time looking for a car only to realize I was in the wrong parking ramp. CorpWorld had two and if I was running late I would sometimes park in the A ramp - creating an A ramp memory that was utterly drowned out by thousands of B ramp parking memories. 

Where the F$#* is my car???

And you know it's your brain letting you down - not even a desperate thief would steal my car - but asking for today's parking memory just returns a "Drive into ramp B" highlight reel.

Thanks, brain. Way to go.

And here I am doing that again.

Only this time it's at my new Corporate gig - a place I'll call NerdHaven.

I should call it HighCeilings - because - well, DAMN they have some stupid high ceilings in this place. I mean, I'm not a terrifically tall person, but I'm used to being able to touch the ceiling if I try.

At NerdHaven? Not a chance. If I stood on a chair, maybe - but I'd probably have to jump. I'm thinking if all the floors in this building were made normal, they'd have room for at least two more floors without changing the height of the building.

And the doors are massive, too. Part of the school of design that says "OUR SH!T IS BIGGER THAN YOURS, FEAR US."

Oh, they'd never write that in the building's MLS, - but that's totally what they mean.

HEAVY doorknobs.
SOLID framing.
Carpet that says, Yeah, we could have bought cheap and durable - but then we thought 'Nah, blow another thirty grand. Why not? Who wants some sushi?

CorpWorld was a marvel - but NerdHaven has all the bling, plus style and attitude. These guys know they are cool. New guys wear khakis, the veterans wear jeans and tee shirts - with logos on them. I'm not sure the rank and file can get away with that yet, and there's more than a little of the "Yeah? I know this is borderline - but who's gonna get big about it, you? Yeah, I *thought* so."

 The first day was a trip. I buzz in and get some random soul who lets me in on my say so. "I'm starting work here today." Bzzzz! And in.

I meet a random staffer who immediately hands me over to tech support.

Mental note: NerdHaven does not have reception. You cannot call the operator, because there isn't one. You either know the extension you need - or you don't get anyone.

Tech support is ably represented by OneLetter - a football jersey wearing, easygoing breath of fresh air who is also in charge of making sure your slice of NerdHaven tech is up and running.

OneLetter gives me the nickel tour, points out the break room where coffee, tea, juice and soda are all complimentary.

They have a pizza oven.

While my brain is digesting that fact, One Letter scans me through a door into yet another massively tall hallway, another secure door and into my future project room.

It is immediately clear that Agile is the name of the game here.

*     *     *

At CorpWorld, we used to do Agile software development. As anyone in tech knows, there are many, many flavors of Agile.

CorpWorld's flavor went something like this: Someone in management heard that the there was this newnewthing called Agile (that had been around since the 90s) and we should probably have some of that.

Years later, project teams were formed to capitalize on this "emerging" trend - and my last big project was created to pilot its use at CorpWorld. We would do heavyweight waterfall development, but we would sit near each other and stand up for a half an hour each morning to "scrum."

In the eyes of the higher ups, this made us Agile.

I did straight waterfall projects for years before this and I never saw more documentation than when CorpWorld shifted to Agile. We did version-controlled user stories in Excel spreadsheets - stored on Sharepoint. I did mockups in Axure, took screenshots of them and then pasted them into Excel.

It was horrible, but eventually it became normal. I switched to Visio - which I thought made it less terrible, but thinking back - it was a giant bundle of insane. We should have abandoned the spreadsheets after the first sprint and done something, anything else - but the CorpWorld train was all about soldiering on, cost and reason be damned.

There were advances from the typical CorpWorld approach - it must be said. Their "Agile" approach had two genuine improvements - co-location and the scrums.

Co-location was the slow burn win for CorpWorld. A company that large is always going to have communication issues - but departmental fault lines had become so pervasive that any cross department effort was virtually hamstrung from the outset.

Departments grew insular - Why are you bothering us? was the typical first response, followed almost immediately by We like things they way they are.

Even with funding and the support of management, getting cooperation was frequently a nightmare. A unit might request endless meetings to discuss and revise baselined requirements. Or they might just be so slow to respond you'd give up and move on to someone else.

Or initial cooperation would turn into obstinacy when management wasn't around. Name a disfunction, CorpWorld had it.

But with co-location - all (well, most of) the resources your project needed were allocated full time. You weren't pleading with a group of developers in some other wing of the building, you were pleading with a group of developers right next to your desk.

My last project, we had analysts, testers, devs, and managers all in one big huddle of desks. You worked right next to them. There was none of this "I'm too busy right now to get to that, I'll get it to you in two weeks" crap. Whoever was asking for something could look over at you and see damn well you were screwing around on YouTube and give you grief about it.

Co-location was a big shift in how CorpWorld worked.

So were the scrums.

I know a lot of the people on my team hated the scrums. I did - off and on - but they did something that Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto crystalized for me. The book described a pre-surgery checklist with an item that seemed laughably basic: "the surgical team should learn each other's names before beginning the procedure."

Gawande points out that a surgical team frequently won't know each other's name - and this mental distance will make them less likely to contribute to the team. If I don't know anyone - I will speak less, I will ask for help less and - crucially - I will be less likely to intervene when I see a colleague do something questionable.

Our scrums forced our team to talk to one another. With zero practice or guidance, we were terrible. Most of us would blather on about this or that or make small talk or jokes until it was somebody else's turn. I can recall spending a good amount of time trying to come up with something to say that sounded useful - even if the truth was I hadn't done a whole hell of a lot.

This was defeating the larger purpose of the scrums - make yourself accountable to the team, make useful connections, and commit to units of work. Our managers used to stand in and listen in the beginning, but they were soon bored and stopped coming.

But there was another win there all the same. I learned who my teammates were. What they worked on - what kind of a person they were. In prior projects, people were resources- representatives of a given discipline like architecture - and they were the go between for a slew of people you'd never meet. "I have a question about this integration, who do I meet with?" Your architect rep wouldn't know, but they'd look into it. And another week would go by.

With scrums, you knew who to go to.
I have an integration problem - I go to Zero.
Anything with the proxy? - it's Lion.
System design? Rico Suave.
Main code base? Alpha, or more likely, Ace.
Main requirements? The Builder, Spock, or The Machine.

And so on.

At CorpWorld, this was a very new thing. Yeah, you had a contact list like that for other projects, but you didn't know those people - and they sure as hell didn't know you.

After months of the scrums - nobody was afraid to talk to anyone in the group. Well, plenty of people were afraid to talk to Alpha, but that's why everyone went to Ace.

We worked together. It was slow, it was awkward - and it sure as hell wasn't Agile, but we managed to release a solid app into the wild.

Because, in the end, we were a team.

*     *     *

NerdHaven does Agile. The full blown affair - and while there are definite risks to the Agile approach, watching someone actually do all the things my CorpWorld team missed out on...

Well, its a hell of a thing to see.

We are all in a single project room. Co-located cheek by jowl in the way that says "if you're screwing around, everyone will know." So, you don't screw around, at least, not without the group buying in.

There are team rules. You don't talk on the phone in the project room - unless it's a conference call for the team. Any time somebody needs quiet, there's a STFU indicator on the wall they can set so that everyone knows that loud time is over. No shout downs, no calling management - just a mutual understanding that anyone has the right to muzzle the room if they need it.

Respect.

That's what this depends on. Done badly, this could be a bunch of rules enforced by some managerial type - which would suck. But in this team environment - we're pretty much our own law so long as the velocity is good.

Build it on time - and you get to rule your own room without interference.

And the group looks to be pretty solid. By unspoken assent, the leader of the group is BigDog - an immensely capable coder who has passed that point where they need to scrap for respect. You listen to the BigDog, because the BigDog knows things. And they're not a jerk about it. I listened to the BigDog read out the prime directive of our team - a really mature statement of "we are all doing the best we can with what we know at the time" - and I really think this is how they see it.  Be up front, and expect your team members to be the same.

If you get to a point where you suspect your team members of malicious intent then you're part of the problem. You should be calling them out with direct questions and learning what is up - not holding back and inventing malicious intent to fill in the resulting gap. Don't wonder - ASK.

Today I watched the retrospective and planning session and there were a lot of familiar moments that were just done better than we'd ever done at CorpWorld.

The team share out was a case in point - a quick icebreaker with the stated purpose of "once you've spoken to the group, you're more likely to contribute later. So speak now, even if it's something stupid. There is value in this."

And there was. I barely know my group, but a few minutes in and we're picking a team nickname and poking fun of each other's choice of animal totems. And later, when it comes time to share work info - everyone is involved. Method to the madness - realized.

I can see lots of macro mistakes to Agile - chunking everything into tiny bits can allow for a lot of big picture goofs - and (as I am now seeing) a ton of inconsistent UI - but this is part of why they brought me here. To work on that. The team needed something, so they asked for it. And management made it happen.

Seeing stuff like that happen in such a short span of time is disorienting for a veteran of CorpWorld. I'm sure there will be a massive amount of adjusting on my part.

But, honestly?

Kinda looking forward to it.

And free coffee definitely helps.

Last One Out, Close the Door

Back when I was in CorpWorld, Ruby called a meeting.

Ruby was about to be let go, but was good with it. They'd had an opportunity come up that they could take only if CorpWorld would let them go.

Almost on cue, Smiler lowered the boom on them. I'd have loved to be inside Ruby's head when they got the news they were free.

I'd imagine some kind of dramatic scene, but these things were handled remotely - by staffing companies.

Ruby probably did a victory lap anyway, and then settled down to be a pro. They wound down all their project work and - since they were part of a now extinct wing of the UX group - they handed over the keys to all the testing and legacy UX files.

Which was what the meeting was about.

Stimpy and I were given access to a raft of directories containing the blood, sweat and grief of a bunch of people who'd been canned - or were about to be.

Ruby guided us through what the files had been - but basically threw up their hands. "There's no one to keep these files anymore." 

The UX group had websites - detailing standards and design patterns - that were seriously good. These used to be maintained by at least four people. Ruby had been the lone caretaker.

Now the files were passing to Stimpy and I, and the fact that neither of us had the dev skills to maintain them was the small issue. The real problem was neither of us could get buckets - nobody would pay us to do the work. 

The three of us were sitting there in the room realizing that the bulk of the UX group's work product was sitting idle and aging into irrelevance. None of us had any illusions that this handoff of files would change their fate. These files were going to get archived - then deleted. We were just changing their "notify next of kin" data.

After the meeting, I spent some time poring over the files. I tried to remove the clearly unneeded files - maybe a smaller overall file size would help save the archive - but there was just a staggering amount of subdirectories. I moved around a few things - and then I renamed the parent directory.

I called it 

/Last one out close the door/ 

And I was.

And I did.

*     *     *

Today was a strange sort of encore, although for very different reasons.

Last time, I was leaving CorpWorld. 

This time, I was going back.

And while I truly feel I've made the right choice, I can't say there aren't a host of regrets.

My colleagues at this gig are an odd bunch. 

BigMac is my favorite. A veteran engineer - loud and unabashed about everything. Days when BigMac was out were the loneliest days at this job.

BankVet was great, too - but they were all the way at the end of the hall and didn't seek out a lot of conversation. If you had a reason to chat with them - the chatting was good - but there were days I'd come to the office - do my stuff and never see another soul.

Which is why I was on Twitter so damn much. I've come to realize that a certain amount of social behavior is required to keep my mood up. At CorpWorld there was no escaping other people. It could be isolating, true. But you would always be dragged in front of your peers. My requirement meetings would always devolve into a good amount of shooting the bull.

Getting to yuk it up with the group doesn't seem important until you find yourself truly isolated.

At the MacShop, the IS group is based in a secured wing of the basement. Each team member has their own office - with doors that lock. Most of the doors sit open - but nobody other than BigMac ever comes out. 

SilentOne spends the entire workday in their office with the lights off. Standing. You can just see their eyes over their monitor. They are nice enough, but the overall appearance is not welcoming.

BankVet's office is lit, but they are either in it or off at a remote site. 

The Prospector's door is always closed. No one knows what they are up to. When I asked BankVet what Prospector does, they replied "Hopefully... nothing."

Morlock's office is outside of the secured wing, owing partly to a desire for a larger office - but no doubt because there is a lot of bad blood between Morlock and the rest of IS.

Morlock comes in after lunch and works well into the night. Communication with Morlock is on their terms and can obliterate your schedule once it starts. 

Morlock. 

Cannot.

Summarize.

Truth? If I had a lot to do, I tried to avoid them. A simple "Hello" could turn into a three hour encounter.

And then there was the Boss. I like the Boss. A lot. But they are almost never around and there is no way that I've found to track their schedule. They show up like weather. Which led to some odd dynamics - the IS group would swarm on them with every deferred need they'd stored up over the past week. And then - poof! - they'd be gone again.

All of this added up to a lot of alone time. Time I should have used to do development work. The Boss asked me to do a single development project during my tenure. And while I'd been assured that nobody would push me to get it done in a hurry - I surely was behind schedule.

Getting the new Corporate gig forced me into the deep end. I couldn't let the Boss down on this. So I would try to learn a host of things I knew very little about.

Like Unix.

The Boss had asked me to do a relatively simple thing like automate some file transfers between a brace of servers. But to a UX guy, this is like asking me to build a bridge. I'd taken exactly the wrong approach - which was to be SERIOUS.

I would buy books and learn about Perl. I would buy a book about shell scripting. I would read them methodically so that I would understand the subject before I just waded in and did something stupid.

From the outside, Unix is a sick beast. A cryptic landscape of /bin/ and grep and awk. 

Read the man page!

Seriously, anytime I see that on a 'nix help forum I want to kick somebody's teeth in. Save your smug RTFM BS for your wargaming buddies, kay?

Man pages are crap. As in 

Here is every possible option for this command explained as tersely as possible. You will never need 95% of these options, but read them all anyway and try to guess which 5% are worth knowing.

Let's begin. 

Command [filename] [option1] [flags] [location] [underlined text] [pointless elipses]

And so on.

YES. Once you know what you need from a command or why the hell you would use it over some other command, then the man pages are invaluable. Does the flag get set by default? And was it Capital R or lowercase r?  These are things man pages help you with.

How will I parse out my log file? is not something a man page can help you with. Man pages are not for people starting from zero.

Me? zero - rather:

ZERO.

But I'd tried to grok the whole of these kinds of things before starting. Read an entire chapter about grep before having the slightest idea what I would be grepping. This was worse than man pages. These were man CHAPTERS - and knowing exactly nothing about what I needed - getting hooked up to the how-to firehose was paralyzing me.

With three weeks before I left the job, I was forced to plunge in and start scripting.

Which is what I should have done in the first place. Once you have some bits that do something, it becomes easier (at least for me) to see what other bits I should reach for next.

And I had spend a bunch of time defining the problem - requirements analysis was my thang. Now, I just had to search for the commands and syntax that would make those things happen.

If I were cooking - this would be getting my ingredients together. What I had been doing before was like trying to make tonight's steak dinner by reading books about animal husbandry.

I'd stupidly tried Perl first - which is a fine choice, but required a lot more rampup - and had the added danger of being Morlock's language of preference. If Morlock would bend your ear for two hours about how you should be doing a home improvement project you'd mentioned in passing, they would be positively omnipresent when they found out about your perl script.

Shell scripting seemed more approachable and - as it turned out - a hell of a lot of fun. Yeah, it's not true programming, but you can do a truly SICK amount of things with shell scripts.

Next thing I know, I'm grepping like a total dork and getting jazzed on making a multipart email work with an MD5 boundary. Oh yeah, I'm on this... Which I'm sure is hilarious to true unix/linux types. But really-the first time you see your tiny blob of text turn into a perfectly formatted email that arrives in your inbox, you feel like a sorcerer.

But this is Unix, so there is always hidden lore lurking in the wild to make you humble. No two servers are alike - so after I get things working on one machine, I find the other machines turn their noses up at my noble little script. I spend days trying to figure out what kinds of permissions I need to do what, and where this key should be stored and howInGodsName I can get sudo on a remote box when I'm coming over as admin without a password?

CHRIST.

But eventually I wrangle together something that does what I've been asked to do. And none too soon. I'm literally getting the first scheduled use of the update two days before I leave. 

And it works - mostly. So I spend the next day cleaning it up and polishing it.

Which leaves today. My last day.

I'm writing up the instructions so that other people can use this thing. I've had several successful tests, but one thing that MacShop is truly bad at is documenting procedure. Information does not flow freely and each worker is an island.

I want this script of mine to be something people understand and can use. So I spend a stupid amount of time illustrating exactly what people need to do to make it work. Then I have BigMac test it out. Then I revise it because there are all kinds of mistakes.

I'm four hours away from being done with this job, and I need to wrap up everything with a bow. The scripts are done, the documentation is done - I need to get my files cleaned up.

I chuck all my digital cruft. Move all my spreadsheets into common locations so they can be used by the IS group. I zip archives of my scripts (we SO need git) and then I'm doing all the follow up work for the database scripts I ran in the past week. BigMac pops over to say goodbye. They leave in the middle of the afternoon, and their day is done. 

I wish them well. I'll miss them. And not just because they throw chocolate at my head on a daily basis.

Back to the file cleanup. Running low on time. The Boss was going to be back at 3 but they never show up when they say they will. I need to give them my keys and badge. 

I start a checklist.

Timesheet! I need to get my timesheet sent in. I'd managed to get it signed, but forgot to send it in.

Boom, done.

I start the ssh-keygen process for the next stage of this process. Stuff I'll never get to do, but stuff that will help the Boss when they take the next logical step.

And Morlock walks by. I make a point of speaking to them. Yesterday was my goodbye lunch and - naturally - the IS group neglected to invite them. As Morlock is utterly paranoid, this is not only hurtful - but is guaranteed to figure in their next round of calculations about who is out to get them. This was a willful omission by IS - and I should have thought to ask them to come. 

I have failed Morlock. And they are verbose, blunt and hard to deal with - but they deserved better.

I chat them up and soon we are half an hour into a discussion about database record locking. Morlock urges me to put my keys and badge in the Boss's office, and I do. Morlock abruptly wanders off in mid-sentence like they always do. At least I got to shake their hand. 

I'm still thinking about that when I realize SilentOne's door is closed. They went home. BankVet didn't come in today. I guess I made my goodbyes with them at lunch. The Boss sends me a text to tell me they won't be back until after I go home.

Which is sad, but leaves me with a more immediate problem: with my keys and badge locked in the Boss's office - I'm now a prisoner of the secure wing. Every door is now a one-way door.

Packing up is now first priority. I bin all the printouts I'd pointlessly made and kept. All my gear goes into my bag. Coat, scarf, hat - all on the bag. Everything in one place. 

Simplified.

I scour the office three times. Anything I leave behind I won't get back. Just like a hotel. There's always something obvious you forget...

Mostly satisfied, I begin drafting the epic send off email - Here's where I left things. Here's where all my files are. Here's all the things that are done. Here's the one thing that isn't. Here's how that should be handled. It was great working with you.

And it was. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of learning and doing. Sh!t got done and I made it happen. I'm about as on top of things as I have ever felt at a job. 

Wrapped up in a bow.

I send the email and look up. It's 5:01.

My phone bongs with a text from my Boss. They are great. They thank me for my work and apologize for being absent on my last day. They say a lot of nice things.

It's after quitting time, so the place would be barren anyway - but it's a Friday. So there's double-nobody here. Add to that, the schools are closed - so anybody who was fool enough to think of being here killed that thought weeks ago.

It's dead quiet. I close all my applications, shut down my ginormous iMac monitor, and get my things.

By chance, I notice my name plate - the one I've lugged through three jobs - is still sitting on my shelf. That nagging part of my brain relaxes and I put the name plate in my bag.

Coat, scarf, hat, bag. That's the essential four. The notepad and pens they can have.

I leave the secure wing.

Morlock went out to get food - so the MacShop is quiet as a tomb. The lights are off and I stand there for a while, thinking about the life I could have had at the MacShop. The Boss could surely use the help. 

But idle thoughts aren't doing anything for me. I've done everything they asked me to do here and next week I'll start full time UX work. Rusty or not, here I come. I put in the earbuds and click. 

Leave your past at
   the front door
      and run away like
         you did before...

Blood Red Shoes. Go figure. It's got a good riff, anyway.

I'm standing there, looking at the way out of MacShop - thinking the obvious thing.

And I was.

So I did.

Free Lunch

On Wednesday, April 20th of 2005 my wife and I drove across town to so that a former college football player could tell us how best to manage our money.

Because he brought me lunch.

That was about the extent of our my thought process when it came to money back then.
Anything is better than what I'm currently doing - which is nothing.

E was sweating our finances at the time and had repeatedly made noises about getting a financial professional to have a go at our cash flow and see where we could stop the bleeding.

Aside from wanting to hire a professional who would not be paid on commission ("My advice is to buy all the crap that I sell!"), I had very little idea of what would make for a good choice.

Which is why I ended up picking a football player.

A designer I worked with at the time offered the entire department a free lunch if we listened to a 1 minute spiel about financial planning.

It sounded dumb, but free food is free food. The financial planning guy would pick up food from wherever we wanted and deliver it to us.

I know. Score, right?

Footballer walks in with a stack of food containers. He passes them out along with a single sheet of paper that shows the effect of compounding interest on various amounts of money invested over varying periods of time.

He didn't seem terribly polished, but he was true to his word. He spoke for one minute, told us the fairly obvious fact that investing early and consistently really pays off over the long haul - and then he was gone.

We ate lunch, and afterwords I picked up one of the man's business cards. Perfect timing, right? I mean I'm looking for a financial advisor and one shows up to give me lunch. I called him up and we set up a preliminary meeting.

I got Footballer to lay out the terms of the deal, we'd pay him a flat rate and he'd provide a full review of our finances along with a plan for managing our money going forward. We told him we weren't interested in crazy investment schemes - we're just looking to get a grade on where we were at and look for areas where we should improve our use of what we had.

Footballer said he was totally on board with that, but he had the annoying habit of using pat phrases that seemed laughably simplistic.

As in

Footballer: Would you like to make a lot of money with your retirement investments - or would you like to [store your money in a mattress/get 1% return on your savings/be poked in the eye with a sharp stick]? 

Us: Uh... the 'make a lot of money' one?

We signed a contract and Footballer told us that we could pay when we received our financial plan - and that there was a satisfaction guarantee. "If you don't like the service you receive, let us know and we'll waive the charges."

Which seemed odd. Also, Footballer wanted to take us out to dinner for a "client appreciation night." We could invite other friends, and their meal would also be paid for.

Which also seemed odd.

But again, I figured this was a pretty transparent attempt to get other people to meet with Footballer so that he could sell more financial advice.

Because he was in the business of selling advice. That's why we were paying him.

I should point out at this point that Footballer worked for American Express Financial Advisers Inc.,  currently called Ameriprise.

As in, Yeah, this guy's a football player who brought me free lunch, but he works for American Express - so it must be okay.

With a choice thus justified, we'd dropped off a copy of pretty much all of our personal financial data with him and made the April 20th appointment to get our plan.

Huzzah! A plan! We're buying a financial plan!

We'd arrived at the nondescript office ready to hear the news, good or bad.

After checking in with reception we were greeted by Footballer who looked deathly ill and informed us that we would be meeting with a colleague of his, as he needed to go home and lie down.

I know what you're thinking, but I believed him. He had the look of a man who has just returned from throwing up in the bathroom. We did not shake his hands and let him go.

The meeting we ended up having had only a few memorable bits:

1. The person we were meeting with had almost no people skills
2. Our financial plan said we were in pretty good shape financially, but that we needed to buy more insurance.

The bulk of the rest of the meeting (at least, in my memory) was NoPeopleSkills getting us to fill out an application for Variable Universal Life Insurance.

We were not interested in buying any life insurance that didn't begin with the word "term." Because UVL is a terrible investment for just about everyone. NoPeopleSkills seemed to be on rails and E and I just let him roll along until it was time for the meeting to end.

At some point - I can't remember when - Ameriprise suggested that we refinance our home. I know this because while cleaning out the basement the other day I came across the binder they gave us with our "Financial Plan." 

Written on one of the pages are the words "refi, 3-5 yr. ARM."

Understand - this was in 2005.

We were trying to buy financial advice from a professional. 

We had given them all our private financial data.

-and the sum of their advice was "Buy universal variable life insurance (from us) and refinance your home into an Adjustable Rate Mortgage."

There was never any chance that E and I were going to go for an ARM, we both sort of nodded our head at this suggestion like "no way in hell" - but it's striking at how shameless that Footballer and NoPeopleSkills were.

E's reminding me that at one point they told us that our home equity line of credit was "like having a savings account."

Mind you, these were people who represented themselves as financial experts. These were people whose expertise we were on contract to pay for.

"Yes, NoPeopleSkills, now that you mention it - I suppose that borrowing money against our home is just like earning interest on money in the bank. Yes. I see that now."

I'll quote Tim Minchin: Oh wait, my mistake [that's] absolute bullsh!t.

E and I left that meeting with an unspoken agreement that Footballer, NoPeopleSkills and American Express/Ameriprise/whoeverTheyWere were full of crap.

We never went back. We've never received a bill, either - not that we'd pay it.

Which only serves to illustrate that Footballer and Ameriprise were never selling advice, they were selling their investment products. So much so, that they couldn't be bothered to even ask for the money we'd agreed to pay them. 

I'm throwing all their crap out of our house (along with - it must be said - a lot of other things) but I wanted to write this down so I can remember how utterly terrible Ameriprise was.

Think back to 2008.

All those people who lost their homes in the wake of the meltdown.

People who saved their shekels in the hopes of buying a home - who then had the misfortune to run into some slick "advisor" who sold them financial ruin.

Makes me ill.

I looked Footballer up on LinkedIn - they left Ameriprise in 2006 and went to work for JPMorgan Chase.

And left JPMorgan in 2008 - right about the time Wall Street was imploding.

They ended up working back at a nonprofit wing of my alma mater - doing youth outreach and promoting academic achievement and healthy living.

*     *     *

Footballer?  

If you were to somehow read this - I'd like to say I genuinely hope you've turned your life around. I see that you went back into banking. 

I hope you've changed your ways. That you give sensible advice and treat your clients honestly. I suppose that's possible. 

But mostly, I'd like you to know we never took any of your advice. That the only reason I kept your financial plan this long was because I wanted a souvenir of my own foolishness. 

But with this blog post, I can have my souvenir and still give your advice what it deserves 

- a long, long overdue trip to the recycle bin.