Sometime near the end of April 2001, I got a call from Alton Cousino of the Hillsdale Housing Commission. He had a complaint about the MERS Wage and Service Program, which he used to prepare the monthly wage and service report. Often when closing out of the program, he got a message saying the program had performed an “illegal operation” and would be shut down. I had always told customers to ignore it, that it did no harm. Al said he was just an amateur programmer, but he believed that it did do harm. Part of the program remained in memory until the PC is rebooted. We chatted some more about the program and after the call ended, I e-mailed him a document written about a year earlier by IBM consultant Dave Ceccoli. It was an analysis of the issues involved in converting the MERS Wage and Service Program to a later version of Microsoft Access. I thought Al, as a programmer, would be interested in what Dave had to say, and I wanted to hear what Al thought about Dave’s analysis. Dave was the author of the original MERS Wage and Service Program. A day or so later, Al replied by e-mail. In his memo, he incorporated Dave’s analysis and responded to it point by point. 

The reason Dave had looked into converting the program is that we thought it was the solution to a problem that several municipalities had been having. Some municipalities who upgraded to later versions of Windows or Microsoft Office could no longer run the MERS Wage and Service program. Dickinson County Library was the first to report the problem, in August 1999, and by the time a solution was found, the list grew to about 24 municipalities. They either had to continue to use their old PCs or send the report on paper. Former IS directors Brian Smith and Chris Neff tried to solve the problem, as did programmer Peter Kong and I. When we could come up with no other answer, we assumed that the problem was that a program created in Access 2.0 would not run with later versions of either Windows or Office. So we bought the software for Access 2000 and attempted to convert the program. We got nowhere. Finally, sometime in 2000, we had Dave Ceccoli take a look at it, and the analysis I gave to Al Cousino was his report. 

In the end, it turned out that there was another solution. On November 17, 2000, Therese Humphrey of Huron County Behavioral Health installed the program for the first time and ran into trouble. The symptoms she reported were the same as those experienced by the other 24 municipalities. I explained the situation, but encouraged her to re-install the program before we gave up. Later the same day she called back to say that she had gotten it to work. In the detail of the error message she was getting, she saw a reference to a file. In a book she happened to have, she looked up the file name and found that it had something to do with “graphics”, and this led her to the solution: She slowed the “hardware acceleration” in Windows. In the next few days, I called all the other municipalities who were having the problem. Adjusting the hardware acceleration fixed the problem for all of them. 

On June 4, 2001 I sent Tama Allen, the new IS director hired in April, a memo with Al’s memo attached.

On June 6, when I went to my weekly conference with supervisor Ron Beaton, I was surprised to find Tama there also. Ron said that they and Anne were very disappointed that I had shared Dave’s notes with Mr. Cousino. I was being put on 30 days notice. At the end of 30 days, my responsibility for dealing with the monthly payroll reports submitted by municipalities could be taken away, and I would be writing procedures only. I got angry back and said that they were making an issue out of nothing. They might just as easily have commended me for getting some free advice. I said there appeared to be a pattern of harassment - first, the completely inaccurate performance review last January (see Performance Review), now this. 

Ron later sent a memo to document our discussion. In our meeting, Ron had made clear that the “disciplinary action” referred to on page 2 of the memo was dismissal.  

I was ready to fight back. I started a letter to the Board. I contacted an attorney and discussed a lawsuit. In the end, I took no action. I had Tama and Ron review e-mails before I sent them to municipalities. Jason Smith of Information Services requested documentation - which was already written - of the MERS Wage and Service program and my procedures for doing report corrections, and he began observing and taking notes on what I did to deal with rejected payroll reports. That went on for a couple of weeks. I did my best to stay out of trouble and no further “disciplinary action” was ever taken. 

In his memo, one of the reasons Ron gave for the seriousness of my indiscretion was as follows: 

MERS has modified our direction concerning update of the wage and service reporting process and as a result of receiving old information, [Mr. Cousino] has assumed facts that are no longer relevant.

This sensitivity to any questioning of our “direction” for the wage and service reporting process was seen as early as October 2000 in a memo to me from Chris Neff. Note that he says that Anne had decided that there was to be no further development, bug fixes or enhancements to the Wage and Service Program. This was in October 2000, and implementation of the new web-based system - ePASS - did not begin until October 2004.

The "current problem" he refers to in his third paragraph is the one finally solved by customer Therese Humphrey (see third paragraph of this page).

Chris “resigned” on February 22, 2001, and on March 6, I sent Anne a memo defending the MERS Wage and Service program. There was no response.