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The Early Programmers

No person in their right mind would think that they were going to sit down and write an entire medical billing system on their own. I, however, was not in my right mind. I had accepted the project as the next task given to me by the flow of life. That was a very holy thing to me. My entire spiritual path was focused around my experiment with surrender. In order to keep my distance from the inner chatter, I still maintained my regular meditation schedule and continued my moment-to-moment practice of centering myself. Every time I sat down at the computer to work on the program, I took a breath and remembered that I was writing this as a gift to the universe. I was sitting on a tiny planet spinning through outer space, and this was the task that had been given to me. It never even occurred to me to ask for assistance.

The program was about half complete when my guardian angel sent me unasked for, but much needed, assistance. Some moments in our lives are marked by destiny. Such was the brief moment in time that occurred one fall day in 1980. I was navigating through the Sunday morning crowd on the Temple porch when a young lady approached me. I did not recognize her, and she spoke so softly that I could hardly hear her above the crowd. As a way of introducing herself, she said that she had just graduated from the University of Florida where she had taken a few programming classes. She had heard that I had been programming and wanted to work with me, even if it meant no salary to begin with. Her name was Barbara Duncan.

I certainly needed help, but I couldn’t imagine how anyone could help me. I had been writing the program directly from my mind into the computer. There were no hook points where someone else could tie in. In addition, I didn’t know this person, and she seemed very shy. Fortunately, I was well trained in watching these thoughts pass through my mind, rather than blindly listening to them. I simply stopped for a moment, took a breath, and recognized all this negativity as my mind’s initial resistance to change. I immediately let go and surrendered to the reality of the situation: this person had sincerely offered her services, and I was certainly in need of help. I told her that because I was used to working alone, I couldn’t make any promises. However, I was willing to give it a try. We set up for a meeting in a few days, and I told her that she should think about a reasonable starting salary because I wanted to compensate her.

The level of talent and competence that was hidden inside this person who just happened to show up at the Temple is beyond my comprehension. Barbara was definitely very scared and shy in the beginning. Then for the next twenty years she kept stepping forward to accept and excel at whatever was asked of her. She also started coming to all the Temple’s daily services and moved in shortly after starting to work for me. Barbara was really Personalized Programming’s first full-time employee, and she became a foundation block of both the company and the Temple community. It turns out that this shy young lady I met on the Temple porch that day had a brilliant mind and the heart of a warrior.

When Barbara started working for me, I was already halfway done with the program. I had never actually verbalized my thoughts to anyone, so sharing my vision for the overall system with another person helped tremendously. We made a wonderful team, and it was clear that Barbara was perfectly capable of taking my vision and running with it. This became essential once the number of programmers began to grow. In short, Barbara was a gift from God. She showed up exactly when I needed her, at a time I was not even wise enough to know that I needed her. I never looked for her; she just appeared.

In truth, it was the same with Radha. From day one she took responsibility for all the accounting and office management functions of the businesses and the Temple. Thirty years later she is still living at the Temple and managing its affairs. It was as though these people were handpicked for the disciplined spiritual lifestyle of the Temple and were also perfectly suited for the highly skilled jobs that were being created. I saw this happen again and again as the businesses expanded. It felt like I was dancing with the perfection of the universe. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but witnessing the results of my surrender experiment was doing more to get rid of the burdensome sense of “me” than my hours of spiritual practices. I was well aware that I was not causing these events to unfold so perfectly, but I was deeply honored to watch the perfection of life unfold before my eyes.

We brought on a couple of additional programmers over the next year. By the time we were done with the first version of the software, there were four of us working full-time. We needed the additional help coding mostly because the designs Barb and I were turning out were never the simplest way to get things done—they were simply the best way. For example, one of the most interesting and important modules we wrote was the one that printed the insurance claim forms. I remember the days I spent with my clients going over their insurance billing needs. You basically had to be a rocket scientist to understand all the minute differences between how these practices were filling out the supposedly standardized forms. But they insisted that each of these differences was essential in order to get properly paid by different insurance companies.

Barb and I managed to develop a very sophisticated, template-driven system that would allow the practices themselves to specify how they wanted to fill out the forms for any particular insurance company. We were committed to developing a system that would perfectly handle a practice’s insurance billing needs, and this became one of the main reasons for the rapid acceptance of the software. In a very short period of time, Medical Manager practices would be defining hundreds of different templates needed to handle the nation’s insurance companies.

This provides a glimpse of the level we went to with The Medical Manager, even with the very first version. We kept bearing down and doing everything to the best of our ability. I had never in my life been involved in anything that demanded the level of perfection of that program. It was like a polished diamond by the time it was done. To me it was a living entity, and I felt tremendous respect every time I touched it. Just look at the amazing flow of life’s events that created this program. I felt like it had a life of its own, and we were just here to serve it.

It was the beginning of 1982, and after two years of intense development, we started installing the program for my original two clients. Given that none of us had ever written such a comprehensive program before, the installations moved along very smoothly. I never once thought about what would happen after those sites were installed. We were completely focused on writing and delivering the absolutely best system we could because that was the task life had given us. The program’s destiny after the initial installations would have to unfold completely on its own—exactly as had happened every step of the way so far.