When I started at Rapistan, I loved my job. Barb thought I was possessed by aliens because I never enjoyed going to work before.
We had an aggressive manager and worked hard at putting projects together efficiently and accurately. Rapistan was on the top of the industry and our office was at the top of the company.

After a couple of years, they had a change of management in the office. The pace slowed down and we had to start worrying more about the process than about the outcome.

November 1993 to December 2008. Rapistan was in the material handling business concentrating mostly on conveyors. They were the premium provider of conveyor in the US in 1993. You can tell that there were a lot of changes in the 15 years that I worked there by the number of business cards and company names shown on this page.

Eventually, Siemens bought the company and demanded layers and layers of paperwork. In addition everything was compartmentized and it became extremely difficult to run a project because each department had different goals. Most of these goals were not about pleasing customers.

Even after Siemens sold the company, this philosophy never went away completely. The last few years there were sheer drudgery. When they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to retire (Godfather style), I had the one of the best days of my life when I left that office and knew that I never had to go back.