فصل 35

35

Preparing for Launch

Along with the great strides the program was making, I was pleased to see events unfolding that benefited those around me, especially Barb, who was working really hard. Around this time my neighbor Bob Tilchin decided to move, and the Temple purchased his property. Barb got to move into that house, and she also got a well-deserved new office when Personalized Programming relocated its five employees into a new building on Temple grounds. I got a nicer office as well, and some very important events were destined to take place there—none more important than a destiny-filled phone call I took while sitting at my computer one day.

We had just finished our first installation of The Medical Manager, and I was finishing up the manual for the program when the phone rang. It was Systems Plus, the distributor of the accounting program we were selling. I was a very small dealer of theirs, and they didn’t generally call me. I had placed a call a few days earlier to report problems with a new piece of software they were releasing.

The customer representative at Systems Plus introduced herself as Lorelei. She was very apologetic for the problems they were having. At some point in her apologies and assurances, she told me that I should remain receptive to their new software releases because they planned on being the leading company for small business software. She said they were expanding beyond general accounting and were currently looking for a top real estate package, legal package, and medical billing package.

When I heard her say medical billing package, she caught me by surprise. At first I was too embarrassed to say anything. Systems Plus was this big, Silicon Valley computer company, and I was a guy in the woods who had taught himself to program. Sure, I had spent the last two years writing our medical billing program, but it had only been installed in one small doctor’s office for a few weeks. Though the voice in my head was assuring me that Systems Plus would have no interest in my little software program, I took a breath, surrendered to the moment, and informed Lorelei that I had just finished a medical billing package. She started to say something and then stopped. After a brief pause she said, “Wait a minute, my boss just walked by; let me see if he’s interested.” I had absolutely no idea what to think.

When Lorelei returned to the call, she told me her boss was very interested in reviewing any software that could do a medical practice’s billing. She encouraged me to send in the system along with the manual I was just completing. We got off the phone, and I was stunned. What had just happened? I had never even thought about finding a software distributor. Then one of the industry’s top business software distributors calls me in the middle of the woods in Alachua, Florida, and ends up asking to see my system. I found out later that when Lorelei mentioned her boss, she was referring to the president of the company, Rick Mehrlich, who had just happened to walk by her desk at that exact moment. Perhaps now you can see why I have learned to so deeply honor the flow of life.

It took me a week or two to pull everything together and ship it off to Systems Plus headquarters. There was something very surreal as I stood there offering the finished package up to the universe. I had simply been following the flow. I hadn’t had any expectations, hopes, or dreams about anything. For many years now, I had just been putting one foot in front of the other serving whatever was put before me to the best of my ability. To me, I was not a computer programmer; I was a yogi living in the middle of the woods. I had bought a tiny toy computer for $600 some years earlier, and I had played around with it. I got tricked into spending two years of my life writing a medical billing package after my mind had already decided that writing software was too time-consuming. Now, without my making a single call, I was about to send something I had programmed off to the president of a successful software company out in California. How does such a thing happen—even in a fairy tale?

A few weeks later, I got a call from Systems Plus informing me that the company president wanted to fly out to Alachua to meet me face-to-face. I agreed, and in no time at all Rick Mehrlich was sitting on the couch in my office telling me that he wanted to distribute my software. He said it was about the best he had ever seen, and he could do a great job representing it in the marketplace. I enjoyed both his frankness and his positive praise, and I immediately felt comfortable working with him. It is important to understand that the way I viewed the unfolding events was that this man sitting before me had been handpicked by the Universal Force to take my child out into the world. Just as Barb had shown up out of nowhere and turned out to be the absolutely perfect person to help me, so this man might as well have manifested out of thin air and told me he had been sent to distribute the software package.

I neither contacted another distributor nor viewed any other options. I surrendered to the perfection of the flow. As Rick and I shook hands on our intent to enter into a distribution arrangement, we couldn’t possibly have known that for the next few decades of our lives we would be involved in a fantastic voyage together. It should come as no surprise that Rick and Systems Plus turned out to be the absolutely perfect distributor for The Medical Manager product. Life had worked its magic once again.

Systems Plus informed me in September that the company was going to launch The Medical Manager in November at the upcoming 1982 Computer Dealers’ Exhibition (COMDEX). Held in Las Vegas each year, COMDEX was the largest computer trade show in the country and the second largest in the world. Systems Plus was planning to feature the product in its huge booth, so the pressure was on to get the distribution agreement signed and to ship the finished version of the software out to California.

It turns out that the Temple had a large retreat scheduled for first of October that year for Ram Dass. That was exactly the deadline Systems Plus had given me to send them the finished version. Since I didn’t get the software shipped before leaving for the retreat, Ram Dass ended up with it on his lap the entire drive down. At one point he asked me in his very no-nonsense way of speaking, “Is it any good?” I answered him by saying that I had no idea; it could be worth nothing or it could be worth a million dollars. Turns out I was off by a few zeros. I always had tremendous respect for Ram Dass, as do all of us who grew up under his aura of absolute honesty with one’s self. The perfection of circumstances that had him holding that piece of software just before it launched into the world was amazing to me. Who knows how these things work? I certainly don’t claim to know a thing. I watched how this software was conceived, and I saw it attract exactly what it needed to not only get written but to be a leader right out of the gate. It then magically attracted its own first-rate distributor and was now sitting on the lap of one of the most-respected New Age spiritual teachers in the world. This program had a destiny of its own, and it was about to take us all on a journey, the likes of which we never could have imagined.