From Humble Secretary to Master of the Domain
In September I celebrated 16 years as a Cuyler Burk employee, next to Marian our wonderful receptionist, I am proud to say, I am the most senior person on staff.
I started at Cuyler Burk in the summer of 1990 as a temp. I knew WordPerfect 5.1 and this firm in Florham Park (one town over from home, where I was living during summer break between my junior and senior years of college) needed someone who knew WordPerfect 4.2 to fill in. I can downgrade with the best of them…
So I jumped at the chance to make $12/hr — my earlier temp stint at an Asian clothing warehouse (”Preppy Boy!”) was only netting $8.50/hr, so this was a big bump up… and it allowed me to live my credo: no heavy lifting.
I worked for two attorneys, a senior associate and a junior associate that summer, and it was standard office work. I was told I was special since I could stand to work with this senior associate who had a reputation for being difficult; but she and I got along famously, and I learned all about clumsy Club Med vacationers who, once sobered by the mainland, filed slip-and-fall lawsuits hoping to subsidize their vacations. (Do I sound like a defense lawyer or what?)
Summer ended and it was back to college. I was a communications and theatre major with an emphasis on directing TV and Stage, so my senior year was spent directing a mainstage drama and an hour long TV comedy. Graduation came and went, and I was putting the finishing touches on my TV project when the temp agency called and asked if I wanted to go back to Cuyler Burk & Matthews. I said I was flattered they thought of me and I would love to return, but I couldn’t because I had to finish this project for Emmy submission and I was committed to do some semi-pro theatre construction work through the end of July. If they could wait, I’d be interested. They couldn’t wait, and so I missed the boat.
Or so I thought.
A few weeks passed. I was living month-to-month in a friend’s house. I had finished the TV project and mailed it to the Emmy folks; I built the sets for a couple of shows for the now defunct Studio One and I was basically bumming around, doing not much of anything when the phone rang again.
“Cuyler Burk & Matthews is looking for another temp. Can you make it?”
It was the end of the month, rent was due, I had no other work, so $12/hr sounded pretty good.
“I’d love to. Start Monday?”
And so I was off.
I showed up on Monday and was assigned to Rich Crooker and another associate. Rich had a reputation as being difficult, but I never really found out why. He was passionate, expected work to be done to a particular standard, didn’t care much for excuses and liked his secretary (or should I class it up and call myself an assistant?) to be proactive. I could do most, if not all, of that, and we hit it off.
(In October of ‘91 I found out that my senior project was awarded the John J. Facenda Award for Excellence in Student Production by the Emmy people, and I was invited to the 1991 Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards in Philadelphia. I picked up my check and certificate and expected the offers to roll in. Ha. I then made a decision to abandon an arts career for a corporate gig — predictable income, family and benefits, baby — and there was nothing stopping me from pursuing the arts on the side. In short, I accepted the Firm’s offer of permanent employment.)
I had learned even more about WordPerfect in the interim and had convinced the Firm to upgrade to WP 5.1 Once that was done, I wrote a bunch of macros that helped me get my job done — caption generators, interrogatory auto-fillers and the like. Steve Cuyler (a closet geek himself by virtue of his being an engineer in a former life) took note and asked me to help develop an electronic filing system.
Macros were designed, written and tweaked. Issues of The Perfect Lawyer were pored over. Macros were redesigned, rewritten and retweaked. And eventually, we had a pretty decent filing system broken down by client matter number, searchable on what we call “The I: Drive” broken down in each case into folders that approximated how we filed things back then (correspondence, pleadings, etc.)
As the computers became more integrated into the Firm, it was decided to drop the Xenix/Token Ring network we had and move to Novell 3.11. Steve Cuyler asked if I would become the network administrator. It would be a bump in pay and I wouldn’t be a secretary anymore.
We implemented Novell 3.11 and the office was running on mostly IBM PS/2 System 25s with DOS 6.22 and a menuing system that allowed the most limited application switching. It allowed us to implement email using David Harris’ awesome Pegasus Mail for DOS.
We bought a batch of Gateway 486/SX25s and loaded up Windows 3.1. We upgraded to Pegasus Mail for Windows and stuck with WordPerfect 5.1 since the Windows versions just didn’t have the same spark… and we would have to rewritten all those macros.
In 1994, we were transferring mail using dial-up and Compuserve’s MHS gateway which passed mail off to our Pegasus Mail system… Back thenI had the sexy address jef@cuyler.mhs.compuserve.com. Of course, making sure that the MHS gateway talked to internet and the PROFS and Notes gateways our clients were using is a topic for another time.
In 1995, shortly after ICANN’s formation which allowed us to do so, I registered cuyler.com, making me the master of our domain. We aliased the hideous Compuserve address to cuyler.com and my current jknapp@cuyler.com was born.
In 1997, we jumped to Windows NT 4 on the desktops of our shiny Gateway Pentium IIs. We also dumped WordPerfect for Microsoft Word — a decision I swore I’d never make… but when a gigantic multi-national insurance company who contributes a not insignificant percentage to your employer’s bottom line strongly suggests you change platforms to be more compatible… concessions need to be made. So Word 6.0 it was.
We upgraded to Pegasus Mail for Windows, and I had to write a routing program to handle the filing and routing over our new shiny Windows network. We had been sending faxes from our desks since 1996 or so via WordPerfect(one of my finest macro programming jobs ever), and with the Windows world (and no WP5.1) we needed a new way to integrate things, and save them centrally. So, the FaxRouter 1.0 was born. That program is still in use today (now up to version 3.x), and if not for the slow steady death of faxing, I’d still be pretty cool for having written it.
I should interject at this point that I didn’t do this alone. Steve Cuyler was the second half of the technical committee. He’d have grand dreams (fax from our desks!) and I’d go off an implement them. Or I’d come up with something (this email thing is pretty cool) and we’d discuss and I’d go off and implement. For quite a while, Steve was feared throughout the office. I never understood the fear since Steve and I have one of the greatest relationships around. I feel very lucky to have been taken under his wing, and I feel quite like an adoptive son around him.
In 1999, times were changing. The network was stable, my programming was pretyy much done… I was bored and there was a dot.com boom happening, I approached the partners and told them I was looking to move on. I was spending 7 hours a day playing Solitaire and a half-hour fixing paper jams, and I wanted to try to ride the tech wave.
(I’ve glanced over my stint as office manager / hr director… the less said about that the better. My philosophy of “you need to fire someone to set an example, since without repercussions they’ll do whatever they want” was never adequately explored.)
Rich Crooker, Steve Cuyler and Jo Ann Burk took me out to lunch and they generously suggested that I try to hang out a shingle as a consultant. Steve and I had formed a corporation a few years earlier with the hopes of marketing the fax router/viewer package I wrote, but it never took off. (These were the days when a software publisher was expected to provide tech support.) They’d keep me on as an employee so I could keep the benefits (with a wife and kid, my biggest fear was not having benefits) and we’d adjust my hours so I could spend part of my week off-site helping clients of my own.
One of our associates who had recently left to become in-house counsel for a factoring firm called shortly thereafter and asked if I could come out to help them out. I did, contracts were signed and Jephens Technology was an active consulting firm, and I owed it all to the generosity of Rich, Steve and the other partners (who stopped asking “What does Jeff do, anyway?” long ago.)
A half-decade after that — once we wrung ever last drop of computing power from the PIIs and NT4, we jumped to nice Dell Pentium 4 machines running Windows XP and a Small Business Server backend… which is where we sit today… a fully searchable repository of all of our corporate knowledge from 1996 to the present. We can pull up any fax we got from 1994 or so. Any email that’s come in, even if it was deleted from Outlook, is retrievable from our mail archiving system. I can get into any system on our network securely and remotely, so I am able to provide support wherever I may be as long as I have an internet connection. Pretty cool stuff, and I’ve had a hand in implementing all of it, and for that I’m really proud.
I’ve taken the things I’ve learned here and implemented them elsewhere for my own clients; and things I’ve learned from other clients I have been able to bring back with me.
I’m forever grateful that I remain a part of the Cuyler Burk family.
Tags: anniversary, jephens, Technology