In such meetings, David always tried to offer his best possible neutral looks to both Geenick and Mark -- his Boss 3 and 2. Occasionally he would recall Mark once taught him, "One way to talk to customers is to pile a bunch of technical craps to confuse the hell out of them", wondering whether that is also the philosophy Mark used to deal with developers.

"Are you suggesting that we do not make any changes to the existing processes?" Geenick countered with a sincere but stinging voice. Mark would roll up his eye balls a couple of times to indicate that he did some hard soul searching and probably got the message from the divine being living above, and then spoke slowly: "I really think we have a lot of processes in place, I don't think we need the new ones, but it's just a matter of people following the existing processes that I have written. How many people are looking at the changes that I have put recently into Software Development Help File?"

Mark Greenburg was famous amongst developers for doing two things religiously: 1) asking developers to read the "Software Development Help File" that he authored; 2) ask developers to fill in "weekly objectives" on Friday with an estimate of tasks to be performed in the following week. Not being able to attack what is wrong with these two processes, Geenick would criticize things such as "weekly objective" should not be in Excel format, because Excel is too primitive for project management. Afterwards, Geenick requested developers to enter the weekly objectives in Microsoft Project Professional version with servers support. Fairly soon, Geenick got voices from developers complaining about the new system, such as "Excel format is really out dated" and "duplicate entry into Excel and Microsoft project is really wasting a lot of time for most people, especially for managers". Another round of process changes would be discussed in another round of Wizardry contest featuring contestants "iron chef" Mark Greenburg and the "challenger" B. B. Geenick . . .

Day by day, it did seem that this one Jewish can not outsmart this one Armenian in ENS, while a group of developers largely consists of immigrants watched on. David felt like treading on the thin ice day after day while Mark and Geenick battled it out in the contest of "who is smarter" to win favor in front of developers and Ankur. It looks like Geenick is gradually gaining the upper hand and accumulating style points with his shrewdness and existing personal ties with Ankur. After all, if it was not for the dissatisfaction towards Mark, why had Ankur brought in Geenick? Sometimes Geenick would not show up at work and Mark would be running around the entire office looking for him. It turned out Geenick's wife had called Ankur's wife that Geenick was sick that day and could not come to the office. Ankur's wife would send out an email to all the poor development managers, but forget to send one to Mark. This Boss 1, Boss 2 and Boss 3 hierarchical organizational structure seems to have some poetic humor in a software development company. It is constantly reminding people that hierarchical nature of the Object Oriented programming should not be forgotten. David along and other middle managers were usually at loss when instructions from Boss 2 and 3 happen, because Boss 3 works for Boss 2 on by official ranking, while Boss 3 also could be representing Boss 1 when looking under the hood. It was usually easy to make poker faces and pretend to be making serious efforts to follow instructions from big, medium to small bosses all the time. Like the famous quote from the cartoon character Snoopy "how can we lose when we are so sincere?"

Now this Snoopy was finally going to face the reality of losing in the end, David was not sure whether to miss the comedies or feel the sense of relief. Being kicking out of the ENS means losing paycheck temporarily and all the good times at ENS will quickly become part of thrown away memory, as if sceneries along the highway -- noticed with sufficient attention as every safe driver would, but stow away immediately after passing without even a second thought. There are more urgent matters to take care of in a "pink slip day".

Since David had experienced several layoffs in his career already especially after the .com era, he initiated his usual "post pink slip emergency procedures". Step one: calling wife, warning not to disturb next generation -- his only daughter. "Let's be good liars and pretend that nothing happened while she still doesn't understand".

Back home, David's wife Jade laughed light-heartedly after hearing the news that her husband was laid off. While they were younger, she couldn't gather her laughs when the day her husband was laid off. But now they are both older and wiser, layoff is nothing but another problem to deal with. Their motto about problem has been "if you don't have problems to deal with, you are dead". Plus, Jade has always been an optimistic girl who usually does not have many worries.

She met David in graduate school when they were both trying to get their Master's degrees in Science in one "college of Art and Science", but Jade always claimed her real passions were in "art" not "science". Had she had another opportunity to choose her own life without interferences from her parents or pressures from a socialistic environment, she would have been a good artist by now. She constantly tried to convince David that science is not as interesting as art, although she had to agree it is a better way of making a living. But she kept on warning David that computers would eventually make a dull boy out of him.

David loved Jade along with arts and literatures, but he loved computers too and often quoted Will Smith saying "what, you think Denzel is the only brother who could act?" then add "What, you think Jacky is the only Chinaman who could act? One day, you are going to see an actor grow out of those Chinese programmers". Although he had renounced most of his interests related to math, physics and chemistry for fear of becoming a dull boy, he stayed close to computers and was becoming more and more addicted. For some reason, he believed that artists had something to do with addictions.

Tonight, Jade started her "first day of the rest of my life" preach again. "I told you not to work in computer industry any more. You are a bad luck for those techie companies and they are bad lucks for you. Look how many companies that you have ruined. It seems every other company that gave you a job ended up: having no new customers to buy, having no new products to develop, getting closed down by parent company, or merged with others -- in short, belly up -- what have you done to them? You should really be happy not to work for those high-tech companies and they should be happy to get rid of you. Try to be a chef tonight, you can cook the dinner by the way, or try to be a postal worker tomorrow. Doing anything is better than what you have been doing. You will find a better career in no time". "If I am interested in starting any new line of work, I am interested in being a standup comedian in the technology industry. You know, there are not many people making jokes for those software engineers, system/network or database administrators. I don't know how high the demand is, but the supply is definitely close to zero, I know that. In many technical conferences or product promotional events, I have seen Hula dancers in entertainment programs, but never a standup comedian. Come to think of it, our offices are filled with jokes in my line of work. If people think one geek biting off a chicken's head is funny in a circus, imagine a circus with 50 geeks running around everyday. What a wonderful world would it be?" "Don't know much about history, don't know much about trigonometry, but I do know that I love you, what a wonderful world would it be . . ." David ran on with the song which he wasn't exactly sure had the right lyrics.

Jade seemed to be suddenly interested in his husband's newly discovered career and pitched in ideas: "don't forget the time when Geenick booked the flight ticket for you to Stockholm". "What ticket?" "Remember that time when Ankur wanted either you or Geenick to go to Nord Kia?" "Nord Kia" David corrected with an exaggerated Swedish version of the company name. "OK, Nord Kia" Jade conceded on this minor difference, "You told me that Geenick asked you if you could go to Stockholm, since he didn't want to go and wanted to stay with his family, and you said you also wanted to stay with your family, but would consider it, but didn't want to go either. Then you went to the restroom on your way back to your office. Once you got back, Geenick had already called Ankur telling him that you agreed to go and Alice was asking you for airline preferences." "Oh yeah, I remember that now, that was the travel I made on Chinese New Year's Eve and I was the only one with an Asian look in airport lunges from Vancouver, Frankfurt all the way to Stockholm." "That is like a sitcom, don't you think? Especially considering that was the only time he so kindly made travel arrangements for you. If it is not good enough to be in Seinfeld probably, but it can probably make into an episode of The Office". "Oh, you are sounding like George Costanza suggesting plots to Tonight Show guests now, but I just want to start with comedy clubs, not venturing into television business yet", David nodded. "What I had in mind were more along the lines of this". David held up a loosely gripped fist in front of his mouth and started imitating Jerry Seinfeld tone: "Have you seen the commercial run by IBM about the Linux operating system? A 9 year old boy, traveling the world "what he learns... we all learn. What he knows... we all benefit from … The boy's name is Linux". "What can you say about Microsoft?" "A 30 year old boy, who is still staying in school and becoming a big bully, (Laughing machine) He beats you up and takes your lunch and then flip a middle finger at you". "When you flip the middle finger back at him, he said: Hey stop that, that is my move, you are infringing on my copyright. (Laughing machine again) If you want to do any gesture that looks like mine, pay me for $80 a copy or I will sue your ass off". Jade made a timeout gesture and said: "who do I pay for this timeout gesture? Stop, no one knows what a Linux is except techies". "But I am talking about doing comedy shows for technical conferences" David answered. "I don't think tech people will be interested in your comedy during their conferences. Here is another idea, you better learn to dance…" they went on talking about wonderful days ahead of them after layoff.

Back to reality, David still had to continue working in computer programming at least for the not-so-distant future. He started looking for other high-tech jobs next day during office hours. He knew this was against his preaching of: "don't lower your professional standards, just because other programmers do not want to maintain theirs". But as a lame duck employee at ENS, he could no longer focus his entire attention to Nord Kia and ENS any more, and nobody expected much out of him by asking him to do anything purposeful. For better or worse, suddenly he found himself becoming the type of employee that he loathed, but couldn't help it. Since looking for a job is not the first time for David, it did not occupy every minute of his day. He still managed to wonder around to transfer remaining responsibilities of Nord Kia project to his successors, and discuss with other developers on how to do small things as usual. He thought "maybe it is better to be escorted out of the office and see how many ways ENS can escort employees out of this building".

Usually, ENS layoff an employee and then immediately ask Jenny to stay with him or her until he or she is completely out of the company perimeter. David did not exactly figure out whether it was because of highly classified documents in ENS or fear of employees deleting source code that prompted the company taking those super cautious approaches. The funniest story about escorting one high-level software development manager -- Craig Johnson -- out of ENS was this: Craig was working on his desktop computer with Windows 2000 Professional version, and all of a sudden his monitor screen went blank. He called IT manager, Allen Palmer, to come upstairs to "fix" his computer. While waiting for his computer to be fixed, Geenick and Jenny called him and carried Craig through the entire "whole nine yards" until finally getting him out of the building. Then Allen Palmer confessed to other employees that he used the Windows "remote shutdown" technology to blank Craig's computer screen and prevented Craig from deleting important files to alleviate worries from Geenick and Ankur. All the techies in ENS had a good laugh about the "remote shutdown" capability of Microsoft Windows 2000 and praised Allen for being so knowledgeable and cool. "That Allen really knows Windows inside out" as Jack Pennington, a.k.a. JP, praising with an imitation of strong US Western accent, although he is really a lad grow up in Belgium and labeled as a graduate from Cambridge UK, "he knows many advanced handy tricks that can protect important source files for us, and we should thank him for that".

Since David has no intension of deleting any files, he felt like hoping for a blank screen in any minute so he could get escorted out of the building and get on with his new lives.