Here’s a good story that shows Thad’s character. I had moved to Clearwater, FL from D.C. and in 1991, needed access to S/W Engineering’s system to download PAL code. I sent the request in to the MIS Department (Thad) and Engineering (with the usual managerial approvals, signatures, and all). The objective was to save the Repair Department a lot of time and money buy allowing them to burn their own PALs, rather than wait for Manufacturing to fulfill their massive back-orders.
The S/W Engineers used the old Kermit protocol to transfer that stuff about from a VAX 780, a 32-bit monster of a mainframe. I finally got a message from MIS that I was all setup and ready to go. So here I am, connecting across the LAN, the WAN, then over to the big VAX up in Corporate.
Hmm. Jared and a VAX prompt. How hard could it possibly be?
Well, no matter what I typed, I did not get any useful output. But a few days later, I get a rather authoritative call from the HR Department who then bridged Thad in. It turns out that I was the “evil hacker” who deleted Engineering’s phone book, or so Human Resources purported.
I explained the story, as is written here, to the Director of HR. She left my fate up to Thad, who at that time was previously unknown to me. “What do you want to do?” she asked. Thad replied, “I’m going to send him a VMS cheat-sheet.” The next day I got it via inter-office mail and all was well.
Now this little endeavor was successful and our newly-formed Customer Engineeering Group went on to do some great things at Timeplex. To summarize, there are two points to this story:
- Little things mean a lot.
- Thad exercised patience and very good judgement.
He was worthy of his MIS Director title and worth every penny. I hope this recommendation shows you the kind of man he is.