After the extreme disappointment I took from my time at Intel, I was resigned to not-working with an agency again, but MaryAnne called me about a gig at Hypercom, which is a POS terminal company located about 5 miles from my house (maybe closer).  I like MaryAnne, so while I would normally have said "Not Interested" right before hanging up, I listened to her story because it was her.

Now then, I had worked with smart cards while I was at SCM Microsystems, I had been to CardTech/SecurTech in Atlanta, and I had seen Hypercom there and was generally familiar with their stuff.  In fact, I had a Hypercom canvas bag from that show.  When I moved to Phoenix, I saw job postings from Hypercom, and since they are so close to where I live I would always send my resume and a cover letter every time.  I even sent mail directly to their HR contact address asking whether my qualifications were not clearly stated, as I had personally judged their job reqs to be excellent matches as far as I could see.  No answer.

Time passed.

So while speaking with MaryAnne, I told her that I had tried and tried to apply there and was sort of fed up with Hypercom thanks to their ignoring me, and I even sent one of the emails I had sent to Hypercom from two years before.  She took that email and my current resume and sent them to Hypercom, and I had an interview later that week.  Amazing.

After about an hour talking to the group manager, I got the gig and was to start the following week.  The money was $2 more per hour than Intel, but I learned later that Ensynch's agreement with Hypercom was substantially less unfavorable to Ensynch...

I arrived for my first day and was shown to my desk-- located at the end of a very long hallway in a room that held some other engineering people and some phone technical support people.  In other words, people were explaining how to make the Hypercom products work throughout my workdays, which was super-distracting.

The hiring manager was out for a while and our development system-- the software tools and the hardware itself-- were not available, so the first several weeks were spent reading docs and skimming over sourcecode that was not documented well at all.   I shared a double-size cube with another contractor who had started the same day I did, so we ended up spending a great deal of time talking about politics, since the Presidential Election was approaching at that time.

It was becoming more and more apparent that Hypercom was a mess inside.  I'll not get into that because it's not my business and I probably don't know enough to comment, but as a contractor forced to work onsite, I didn't find the organization appealing or particularly impressive, and the people-- while nice individually-- seemed to lack a certain energy that would have perhas compensated for the hospital-like atmosphere.

Two major events took place that helped to put me out of my misery there at Hypercom.

I learned at some point that Ensynch was making about 40% of the bill rate to Hypercom.  I had told MaryAnne that the pay rate I was getting was low and should have been a particular number, and it turns out that Hypercom was paying that number to Ensynch and they were taking a tremendous cut.  Recall from above, I had already applied to this company several times and my own cover letter from two years previous was used to get the gig... I was being gauged!

Second and more importantly, I learned that the man and woman on the other side of the cube wall from me were in some sort of relationship.  Now, I'm pretty liberal, and I really don't mind a relaxed workplace, but I have to say that my frustration limit with the daily tech support phone noise and the lack of goodness about the job and the abject boredom I was subjected to daily were all getting to me.  When I heard the discussion on the other side of the cube wall turn to extreme flirtation, including explicit language regarding bodily functions, I had reached my breaing point.

I talled MaryAnne at Ensynch to alert them to this latter problem, and her boss, Lou Rickley, took the ball and ran with it.  He contacted Hypercom without contacting me first, alerted them to the situation, and was told that they were already aware of the couple in question and an investigation would be started immediately.

Great.  So now I would be "That Guy Who Busted Us" and all Lou cared about was that I get back to the Hypercom site and start working again.  If I were making the money there were making off me, I wouldn't give too shits about this sort of problem either, as long as we could get back to raking in the dollars ASAP.

That would not be the case, though, as I was actually more disgusted with the way Lou handled the situation than I was with the situation itself. I also felt a little uncomfortable at Hypercom from that day on, and decided it was not going to work out.

Nor would any future business with Ensynch work out...