— 1994 —

After we got married, we went to live in Plymouth, England. We had just bought an apartment on Plymouth Hoe and had been there less than a year when — out of the blue — I got invited for an interview for a job in America. I didn’t want to go to America but my new wife said,

“Just go for the interview and see what they have to say.”

I loved my new wife so I agreed to go.

“Just for the interview though! No promises!”

I went for the interview in London with maybe 80 other developers. They didn’t have specific job offers in mind for us — they just hired about ten of us and let us choose from a menu of job offers all across America. I was offered a choice between Mary Kay in Dallas, a trucking company in Portland, and JP Morgan on Wall Street. If I took the Wall Street job, my salary would be 4x what I was earning in Plymouth.

Three weeks later, Mrs Clown and I were having dinner with my new boss in the Empire State Building.  Manhattan was everything we knew from the movies. It was hot, hot, hot and there was steam coming out of the sidewalk.

The day I arrived on Wall Street, my new team was launching an application that would allow traders to check if they had enough credit before making a trade. A trans-Atlantic team had been working on the app for over a year but that very first day, the app crashed and the traders had to go back to old-fashioned pieces of paper.

My new boss said he didn’t have time to get me settled in but maybe I could build a backup system while they tried to get the real system working.

Boss: Do you know Solaris? 
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know AWK?
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know SQL?
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know Excel?
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know VB Script?
Me: No.

Boss: OK. Here’s what you are gonna do. You are gonna write a SQL script that runs every night and grabs all the credit data from the database. You are gonna generate an Excel spreadsheet using AWK then write a script that generates charts and allows traders to see what credit they have available.  We don’t have a desk for you yet so you will have to share with Laurie.

I got my script working in a couple of days and rolled it out on the trading floor. The traders loved it.

When the real application was ready a week or so later, the traders refused to use it because my application was better. Most of the team that built the original application got fired on the spot and I joined a new team to build a replacement.

A few months later, the project lead of my new team left to have her baby and they put me in charge. 

This was one of the best teams I ever worked with. Joe, Nital and I worked on the back end. Chris designed the user interface. I designed the database and Peter was our boss. We had a lot of fun together with lunch every day at South Street Seaport and nights out in Battery Park City where we lived.

— 1995 —

Our new baby was born in Brooklyn in ‘95 and when I came to the end of my contract, we made plans to go home to England but JP Morgan offered to hire me and doubled my salary. We stayed.

Most weekends, Mrs Clown and I walked up to Central Park and back — through Tribeca and Soho and The Village and Chelsea and the Theater District. We chose a different avenue every week. Some weekends we went shopping in Newark or gambling in Atlantic City. Another weekend we took a bus out to Wilkes-Barre for a party in a trailer park with some random people that Mrs Clown had met on the brand new internet.

Mrs Clown had 183 relatives on Long Island (they are probably up in the 1000s by now). Before we moved to Battery Park City, we lived with Uncle Romeo and Aunty Nina in Queens for a couple of months. We often got the LIRR out to Port Jeff to see cousin Dianne and Tony and almost every weekend in summer there was different block party to go to. We got very good at the Electric Slide (It’s electric! Boogie-woogie-woogie-woogie).

JP Morgan had a big push at the time to hire contractors from India. We had three contractors working on database scripts for months but they were useless. One day, Chris and I were chatting over a beer and Chris asked me: “What are you going to do about those database scripts? They don’t work.”

“Don’t worry”, I said. “I’ll fix them.”

I didn’t have the authority to fire the contractors but a couple of weeks before launch day, I scrapped everything they had done and rewrote it. They were fired the week after that.

When launch day came, we were Champions of the Flying Wheel. JP Morgan had a massive launch party with maybe 100 people that we’d never met before. One by one, these super-high bosses got up on stage to make speeches about how proud they were and how this was the first project in ten years to finish on time and under budget.

They never once mentioned the team that built it.