Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

Regrets

A Sunny Day in May

(Abbreviated from Shooting the Messenger,  Boreal Books)

Every morning, if the sun was shining, for a few hours the corridor in front of the small beige cell where I sat would be flooded with sunlight from the east facing windows in the section further down the hall where the bosses had their offices. I was staring into the brilliant May sunshine flooding the usually gloomy corridor when Bruce came running in.

"Do you have the 15 cents I loaned you for the bus the other day," he asked.

Bruce more than lived up to the stereotype of the penny-pinching Scot—in other ways he was not the archetype at all. He was fastidious to the extreme. Some can't see the forest for the trees; Bruce could not see the trees for the leaves.

Bruce and I were left much on our own when my first boss at Foreign Affairs, John Turley, accepted a posting as Chief Financial Officer to the London High Commission and Bruce's boss, the head of Systems Administration accepted another assignment or retired, I don’t know, but he too was no longer available.

They both became unavailable at a critical juncture in the implementation of Full Telegraphic Input of Financial Data. Bets were that it would be cancelled because testing and training on the new system was taking too long and posts were complaining. At this stage they were somewhat overwhelmed with having to maintain the current financial reporting system and having to send additional information to Ottawa via our global communication network to allow us to iron out the kinks in the new system.

The information they were sending also allowed us to test their understanding of the new procedures to be followed once the old system was abandon and the new one took over. It is difficult enough to train staff on a new system when they’re in the same building, imagine what it’s like when most of the people you have to train are mostly citizens (locally engaged staff) of another country. That is more than one hundred countries and twenty-four different time zones.

Bruce and I spent a summer and many more months, at 125 Sussex, working 14 hour days, and weekends getting staff around the world to prepare and transmit operational financial data in a manner that the central computer in Ottawa could process.

It was crunch-time when Bruce and I were asked to meet with Dave Gordon, the director with overall responsibility for the Full Telegraphic Input project.

"When can we go ahead with full telegraphic input of financial data?" he asked.

Gordon was asking us when the Department could abandon the old way of reporting financial information altogether. If the new electronic way of transmitting and managing financial information did not work as predicted after the old way of doing things was abandoned, it would be chaos, but not unmanageable chaos.

Except for a few posts, Warsaw in Eastern Europe, Addis Ababa in Africa and a handful of others who could present problems (which I felt we could easily handle) I was in favour of going ahead as soon as possible. Bruce wanted to wait until every posts had achieved perfection. A laudable but unrealistic goal.

Bruce was not into taking risk no matter how miniscule—no McDuff or Macbeth was he.

Gordon emphasized that the entire project was in jeopardy if we did not go ahead soon. Bruce would not budge.

At the end of a rather animated discussion between Bruce and me, I asked him: “Would you rather have an assured failure than risk an almost certain success?” The usually soft-spoken Bruce shouted his emphatic "YES!" I recommended taking a chance on success.

Gordon made his decision. We would go ahead with full telegraphic input of financial data the following month—ready or not. Bruce did not express any further misgivings. Somebody else would be blamed if things did not go as planned.

We went live the next month and the rest is history.

An ambitious, daring, innovative project to get a handle on the Department’s expenditures was a resounding success; a success due, in large measure, to Bruce and I (and Dave Gordon who as project manager had the most to lose but stayed the course) who rose to the challenge and saved the day when others, perhaps fearing a disaster with which they did not want to be associated, took their leave.

Getting back to Bruce and his 15 cents. He was almost beside himself. He was literally shaking as I reached into a pocket and found a dime and a nickel.

"Yes, I’ve got it," I said, and gave them to him.

Without saying another word, he ran out the door just seconds before two security guards showed up.

"Please come with us," one of the guards said.

The Foreign Affairs complex is comprised of three low-rise buildings (Towers A, B and C) which are linked by a large cavernous reception area. My little beige cell was on the ground floor of Tower C.

I was escorted down a long corridor that opened onto the reception area. We crossed the vast lobby where curious visitors waiting at the central reception desk looked on and embarrassed acquaintances exiting from the ground-floor cafeteria looked the other way.

Our destination was Tower A (the tallest of the three towers), the tower where the really important people had their offices.

We took the elevator to the floor where Canada’s former ambassador to Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia, today the capital of Serbia), Assistant Deputy Minister, Personnel Branch, J.G. (Jim) Harris conducted his business. Ambassador Harris was between diplomatic assignments keeping busy in Ottawa until he could return to the job he was trained for.

An important and pressing piece of business for the Ambassador that day was firing me. Somehow, it seems appropriate that it was an ambassador on temporary assignment in Ottawa who would officially put an end to a nasty piece of business.

With me standing in front of him, Ambassador Harris, in the manner of medieval heralds for kings, tyrants and other potentates, read a formal proclamation of the crime for which I was being terminated.

You have neglected to submit to instructions from your superiors to begin work immediately on the project which was assigned to you namely the preparation of the report on currency fluctuation. In spite of instructions from your superiors you did not produce any work as part of this project.

The crime, that of insubordination for insisting that I could not complete using only an adding machine, a pencil and paper the Currency Fluctuation Report that I had programmed into the Department’s mainframe computer to perform more than a million monthly calculations, many, such as for the Italian lira, to seven decimal points.

The Impossible Report and the Missing Millions

With my firing formalities out of the way, I was escorted out of 125 Sussex. A poster with my picture and description was put up in a conspicuous place with a warning that I was not allowed in the building without an escort. Less than a year after proclaiming the end of my career as a public servant, Ambassador Harris returned to his diplomatic duties as Canada's High Commissioner to New Delhi.