Morning Prayers

My first contract as a self-employed consultant was to begin when the Ice Storm of 1998 struck. It was just as well I hadn't had my contract approved yet and so could not begin work until the proper committee met because I needed to be home during the next two weeks during long periods with no power, no telephone, and three children unable to attend school. My wife, meanwhile, braved the bizarre weather and highly dangerous road conditions to drive to work, combined to and fro, up to four hours each day. She did not miss a day at the office, unlike probably hundreds of thousands of others.

After two weeks, the worst of the storm damage cleaned up, I was due to start at Transport Canada at 7:30 on the Monday morning. Despite my best efforts, I did not arrive at the downtown office tower until 7:35. The meeting I was to attend was already in progress and I was told that I could not interrupt it. I waited. The meeting ended some twenty minutes later and the attendees filtered out. My contract manager was a ferocious-looking fellow with blazing red hair and huge mustache. He always seemed to be angry about something. When he saw me he said, "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. You are to be here at 7:30, not 7:31."

I mumbled apologies and set about learning about my new position. Being self-employed I had a lot of overhead expenses that employees do not have. For example, I had to pay both the employee contribution and the employer contribution to the federal CPP plan. I had to pay the Goods and Service Tax (GST) on any money I made. The really expensive part that employees probably never think about was that I had to buy my own medical and dental coverage. Individual plans are far more expensive than the group plans that companies get. After income taxes (which I also had to pay out of my income--I had no such thing as a kindly employer holding back funds to cover that sort of thing), medical insurance was my biggest expense. Though Canada has Medicare, it does not cover subscription drugs, eye glasses, dental work, and other expensive procedures. I also paid for long-term disability insurance (which resulted in a long legal battle a few years later that I sort-of won. In other words, I never got the coverage I paid for, but I did get a sizable settlement from the insurance company.)

For the rest of my self-employed career I heard grumblings from regular employees that I worked alongside about how much money I was making. But, when you got right down to it, after all my expenses, I had about the same after-tax income that they did. Add to that that I was not entitled to Employment Insurance which meant that when my contract ended I had no government-backed income to depend on. And, self-employment contracts were much, much easier to break than employment contracts. At any moment I could be told, "Sorry, Ron, but we don't need your services any more. Please clear out your desk." I had no union or government regulations to protect me from arbitrary decisions. Oh, and I had to be very careful about how I ran my business so that Revenue Canada never got the idea in their heads that I was really an employee in disguise (which it did in a major crackdown after I was out of the business--a move that cost both sides of the contracts a lot of money.)

So, the title of this piece Morning Prayers could refer to the insecurity of being self-employed, but it really refers to the meetings at 7:30 at Transport Canada. At that meeting representatives from the department across Eastern Canada "met" in a conference call to discuss any technical problems encountered the day before. It was called "Morning Prayers" because one (especially me) had to be prepared to discuss any event in detail covering a multitude of related issues. If you weren't fully versed in all aspects of the problem, you had better have said your prayers.

That, in a nutshell, was my job: to know in detail about any technical problems and issues and what was being done to rectify them and ensure that they did not repeat. I spent my day getting ready for the next morning's meeting. To do this, I was to monitor two independent IBM systems watching for new problems, and, progress on existing problems. One system was for the (contracted out) engineers who filled a warehouse on King Edward Avenue; and the other system was for Transport Canada's employees. I had to ensure the two systems were in sync--except I could not make entries in the King Edward system. I had to get the engineers to make the appropriate entries in their system first so that I could then update the Transport Canada system. (I was told that someone previously in my position had been fired on the spot for violating that protocol.)

In other words, my job was to nag. Engineers generally hate having to put things down in writing--and, fair enough--sometimes they are just too busy. Though I became friendly with many of them, they still did not look forward to hearing my voice on the phone because it meant that they would have to do something they hated to do. I tried to keep everything light and casual, but I had enormous pressure behind me. Transport Canada was one of those government departments that ran on rules and procedures. I rarely heard a friendly word on the floor I worked on; employees were overly-stressed from watching their backs and worrying about inadvertently crossing a line somewhere. An old friend of mine worked in the same floor in a different section. I was told firmly that I was to have nothing to do with him during working hours because his section somehow rivaled the section I was in. (There were other issues with my friend, but they aren't relevant to this story.)

However, once the Prayer meeting was over and the problem-tracking systems were up-to-date no one cared what I did (unless it was to chat with my friend). By 3:00 in the afternoon, a lot of employees had disappeared for the day. Fair enough, as they had to be at work before 7:30 am. I soon learned that I had time to join the gym in the hotel next door and work out for an hour in the early afternoon (by calling it my "lunch break"), and, after showering and changing, return to my desk to check the postings on the two tracking systems. If everything was okay, bugger off.

I hated the job. First, I do not like the kind of pressure I faced where I was responsible for what someone else was doing but I had no control over them. Secondly, I had to use IBM systems which I had never been comfortable with. Everything to do with IBM was overly-complex and obscure and intuition simply did not work. Third, I missed programming. In my previous position I had been a full-time C programmer for almost two years before being appointed Project Manager (with programmers reporting to me) for six wonderful months before the company self-destructed. I kept in touch with my team and held meetings with them in a coffee shop, listening sympathetically and giving them advice as if I were still their boss. I guess you could say that I was grieving after finally making it to a dream position.

So, when an opportunity to came along for a contracted systems analyst with programming skills in a non-IBM environment, I jumped at it. Six weeks had been more than enough Morning Prayer Meetings for me.