Lord, How Will You Get Me Out of this Mess!

I am a Sabbath observer. Pleasure on the Sabbath is a "mitzvah". In fact, we say "Shabbat Shalom" - peaceful Sabbath - as a greeting. One of the more humorous explanations of "Shabbat Shalom" is that on a normal week day, your evil inclination tries to coerce you to indulge, while your good inclination is begging you to resist. But on Shabbat, indulgence is a "mitzvah" so your good and evil inclinations are at peace.

The explanation is rather tongue in cheek but the point is accurate - part of the Shabbat celebration is to have extra festive dining beginning on Friday night and continuing throughout Saturday day and evening.

I told you that to set the context for something that happened to me around the summer of 1991. I was in Hong Kong, and I was invited to my friend Saul Levy for Friday night dinner. Sauly lived with his family on the mountain somewhere about the HK Hilton where I was staying. If festive dining on Shabbat was a mitzvah, then you would go straight to heaven after dining by Sauly.

That would have been the first hot kosher meal I would have had all week, and I was looking forward to it with great relish. Unfortunately it was not coming that easily. You see, that afternoon I got detained at a vendor factory, and then got stuck in traffic coming back to the hotel. With just 30 minutes remaining before sunset, I ran up to my room, threw on my Shabbat suit, grabbed 10HK Dollars to pay the cab (once Shabbat starts, no mor carrying or spending) and ran back down to the taxi stand where I hoped to grab a cab and get up the mountain, a 10 to 15 minute drive.

But when I arrived at the taxi stand I was shattered to see a line about 30 people long, and only 1 taxi arriving every few minutes. The prospect of going back to my room and having tuna fish for Sabbath dinner was not too enticing.

After a few minutes, and just about ready to throw in the towel, I looked up and said to myself - "Lord, how will you get me out of this mess?" Just then, the dispatcher called out to everyone on the line - "this cab is going up the mountain - is anyone going that way?" I guess everyone was heading to Kowloon for a night of lively entertainment, so luckily, I was the first one on line going up the mountain. I looked up, said "Thanks Lord", jumped in the cab, and arrived with 3 minutes to spare!

True story! These things really do happen!

Careful what you share

I recently stayed late at the office one evening, tweaking a "Chalk Talk" presentation that I was going to deliver to our division the next morning.

As usual Stephanie was working late as well. Stephanie is a PM with too many bosses who all invariably want their reports yesterday. Therefore what mortal men consider extended hours are to Stephanie just business as usual.

Anyway, we paused for a brief dinner and got into a conversation about our children. Stephanie mentioned a great series of books for young people called "Outrageous Women". I browsed to it on Amazon.com and sure enough it looked like an excellent series about the accomplishments of some of history's greatest women such as Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, and Harriet Tubman.

Anyway, dinner ended and I finished my presentation and headed for home.

Next day I came in bright and early, and fired up the presentation for 150 or so live and internet attendees.

Of course the presentation gremlins were the first ones present as usual, and I had a great deal of difficulty setting up the sharing on our MeetingPlace meeting (MeetingPlace is our enterprise WebEx type presentation application).

After a good 15 minutes I got the sharing working, and started looking for Power Point and the other applications I needed to share.

To my horror, one of the applications listed in the sharing selection pane was "Outrageous Women". The implication suddenly occurred to me, but I didn't say anything, just hoping that no one would notice.

Next day I was told that my entire division was talking about my Outrageous Women snafu.

So stuff this in your fortune cookie - Confucius say - alway check your process manager before doing presentations!

In the Beginning

I am Victor Grazi, Vice President of Application Development at Credit Suisse Research IT. The title sounds more illustrious than it really is, I manage a small team of software developers, mostly Java.

People consider me a technology whiz-kid. Okay, that's a bit exaggerated but I do love Java development, and there has not been a day in the last 15 years that I have not written some Java code, so I have the experience. I have an affinity for some of the esoteric stuff such as concurrency, thus the moniker.

Thinking about how I got here, I was always a pretty shy kid. My shyness must have been interpreted as insubordination because once upon a time in first grade the school principal unilaterally decided I had earned a spanking and delivered it to me in front of the whole class. But more on that in another chapter. 50 years later I still remember the incident vividly so it must have taken its toll.  I guess by my teems my shyness would cause me to become scholarly but as a child it was painful.

High school began as uneventfully as elementary school ended and I was turning out to be a pretty mediocre kid. Then the strike - at the end of September 1968 (first month of my freshman year) there was a teacher's strike in New York City. At first nobody believed the strike would sustain. But after a few weeks it was becoming clear that mayor John Lindsay was failing in his negotiations and the gap was widening. There was little hope the strike would end any time soon. So about 15 parents got together and hired a math teacher, a history teacher, an English and a science teacher. (The girl who would become my wife 10 years later was in that class, and I love her today beyond love itself.) I had already learned the intro math all through September, and now I was getting a good review. But the math teacher was weak so he was replaced with a pretty excellent new teacher who started from scratch. That was my third review. And when the teacher's strike finally ended in November, we went back to school where they taught it to us yet again. I don't know if all that review was what sparked my interest in math. If it was, why wasn't I also similarly sparked in those other subjects? And why weren't the other kids equally ignited? I think I just had an affinity for math that was somehow jarred during that period.

In any case, I was considered a math wizard throughout high school. I went to Brooklyn Technical High School where the emphasis was on math. My math teachers used to leave time for me to demo some elegant proof at the end of my classes, just as a basketball team might single out a star player to present some globetrotter maneuvers in the pre-game. I was a member of the math team since my sophomore year. Sophomore and junior years I was on the junior Math team, then as a senior I moved to the senior team. My math professor was Mr. Isidore Glaubiger, probably one of the greatest mathematical minds of our century. No other person outside my family had a greater influence on my life and career than Mr. Glaubiger. He taught me rigor. In my junior year I came in number 2 in New York City. In my senior year our math team came in number one in the USA and I was number 2 on the team - always number 2 - we try harder! Not to worry - number one was Sheldon Katz - and believe me, no matter how good you were you weren't going to beat Sheldon Katz!

I had a hard time rising in a school system that was designed to hold you on course. By the beginning of my sophomore year I had already finished all of high school math on my own and was working on calculus. Although I got 100 on every single math test, my math teacher refused to give me 100 on my report card - it was against her policy - 100% means you know everything, and just because you got 100 on ever test, you do not know everything.

I had to get out of that class before a 99 would blemish my perfect record, but how?! A trip to the library would put me back on track - I scoured the math section. Who says you can't judge a book by its cover? I was seeking the book with the largest and boldest "CALCULUS" title on the cover. I picked out one, tested it for fit in my attache case, and checked it out of the library. Next day back in math class, I left the book innocently on top of the case, cover propped open, on top of my desk. When my teacher walked around the class as she usually did, she saw the book from a distance, stopped short and interrupted her own lecture to ask me "Mr. Grazi, how much calculus do you know?" I answered that I pretty much knew all of the basics. She challenged me on a few items - mean value theorem, some basic derivative, etc, and immediately had me transfered out of her class. I was placed under Mr. Glaubiger's tutelage for the rest of that year and got 100. I had many other math teacher since then and got 100 on my report card for every math class since then as well as a perfect 800 on my math SAT.

Math wasn't the only place I was singled out - I remember once in English, the teacher gave an unannounced test. Next day he called out the results in front of the whole class - Ferraro - 30, Feckner -0, everyone was like that - one guy got a 62, everyone else was between 0 and 40. He left me for last - Grazi - 100! Finally I was receiving validation after my first grade spanking. English and Math were my domain!

In high school I was a math snob - it had to be pure math - the only numbers in my math book were the page numbers. Nothing applied would do for this techy! I had an infatuation with logic and math was pure logic. But as soon as I got to college I realized that if I wanted to master logic, computer software was the only way to get there. People may or may not listen to you or understand your logic, but if a machine didn't do as you instructed then you had only your own logic to blame.

Syracuse University had a policy of providing every student with $50 per semester of free computer time. I didn't know anyone else who took advantage of that, so when I used up my $50 bucks, my peers were happy to give me theirs. And so I went through college, spending Saturday nights in the computer lab when everyone else was partying.

My geekdom was inaugurated!