He was there to tell us about the transition. Recently our bank had been bought by another, larger bank, and departments were being shuffled. As of today, Lew Parker told us, the head of Management Information Systems would report to the Vice President of Commercial Markets Quality Assurance, whose boss, the head of Global Systems Development, was being transferred to Network Integration, where he would report to the Director of System Administration's next door neighbor's piano teacher. Or something like that. Whatever it was, none of us knew what it meant, except that Lew Parker was clearly upset about it.
Some people get real mean and scary when they're upset.
But Lew Parker didn't get upset in either of these two ways. He just started coming unglued. His collar button would pop open, he'd sweat, his eyes would bulge, and we'd all sit there feeling sorry for him. All of the programs we'd been using had just been replaced, because the company that had created our desktop software had recently merged with another company. Now instead of MaxWord and MegaSpread and WonderGraph we had SuperWord and CalcPad and PresentStar.