I was talking to Stanley, the new guy in the team, and I got to relating the history of the Call Center group, from my perspective. Some is from what I've been told and a lot is the stuff I experienced, so it's got inaccuracies and some fanciful make believe that my mind has made up or distorted. So don't take this as the gospel.

It started in the summer of 1997. Dave Pickering was a developer at Scopus Technologies. Scopus sold some sort of telemarketing software, front-end agent applications. Mark Barranechea was a VP there, but he had a falling out with the higher ups, so he left and wound up at Oracle. Mark brought Pick to Oracle (they have a pretty good relationship) with the object of creating a proper Customer Relationship Management product suite.

Back then telesales and customer service were part of the Enterprise Resource Management Division, in the Applications group. Dave had to put a group together to create a Call Center application. To help start the group, he could choose one person from any other group in ERP. So Dave went around talking to developers and being quite discouraged by the PL/SQL developers in other groups.

Then he talked to Prasad Kodur, who was willing to tell Dave how stifling his group was because they wouldn't let him do what he needed to do to contribute to a great product. Now, I know Dave and he respects people who speak their mind and show some fire. So Prasad was transferred to the group. Then Dave started looking outside for more people.

Now, I'm not really too sure why he wanted Slick and I. Slick he had met as a Freshman at Cal, in the dorms where Slick was a Resident Administrator. So there was a friendship there. He had also worked for Scopus as a tech support specialist, but he didn't have any real CS education, which would prove unfortunate later on.

As for me, well I hadn't really done much since graduating. Sure, I had an EECS degree from Berkeley. But I had been working four years in tech support. No programming. Pick was kind enough to say that he considered the same as any other recent graduate. I knew better. I had forgotten a lot in four years and I wasn't anywhere near as capable as someone who graduated in the Spring of 1997.

I remember going to the interview. Oracle was this huge place, five shining buildings (with a sixth almost completed) towering over anything nearby. I was afraid to park in the parking garage in case you needed some sort of pass to get out. I was wearing my one suit and I felt way overdressed among all these casually dressed people.

I interviewed with Prasad, some other manager, Pick, and eventually Mark over the phone. The one thing I remember telling Dave was that after four years of high school I was tired of it. After four years of college I was tired of that. After four years at West Coast I wanted to leave. I couldn't guarantee I'd be at Oracle more than four years. Kind of stupid if you know the high turnover rate in Silicon Valley, but I didn't know that.

There was another warning. I said that if I lost respect in my superiors I wouldn't be a good developer. Not that he had anything to worry about since it had long been established that Dave was the Alpha Male in our gaming group. As I write this I realize that the warning did come true when I worked under Biao. I lost faith in my manager and lost faith in the project too.

Anyway, Slick was the third person hired and I was the fourth. I got a nice cubicle with high walls, roughly about as big as my work place at West Coast. We were on the 12th floor of the 300 building, and it was a nice view from there. Dave's office was right in front and the office to the left was empty and was used as a meeting room. I used to go there at night, turn out the lights and lie on a table. Look out the window at the stars and think about whatever. It was a nice time.