When I was hired by Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. in the fall of 1986 I had never even heard of the “Big Eight” accounting firms but my wife had, being she was an administrative assistant for the CIO of Convex Computer Company (a Cray rival in the scientific processing arena). I was brought on board for the City of Dallas Water Utilities project where I was handed over the AR sub-system.

By spring of the next year, the City of Dallas project was winding down and I began a series of travel assignments, the first of which was to be in Modesto, California, but was changed to Houston at the second. By summer of 1987, the merger had finalized between my employer and the European firm Klynveld, Main & Goerdeler creating KPMG Peat Marwick, the larget public accounting firm in the world at the time.

The result of the merger affected the Dallas office in a way that passed control of much of the consulting side to KMG partners and there was quite a bit of animosity between our Peat Marwick people and the KMG folks with the KMGers getting an upper hand in our office. Many of our veteran consultants seemed to coerced out as a result of the change of power and a decline of business in the Dallas office – I was one of the last to go after declining offers to relocate to Scranton, Pennsylvania and Chicago.