The worst job I ever had.(or was it "did"?)

When Sometime back - way back - in the late 70s. EEK! nearly 30 years ago - am I that old?

Where Kent, UK

WhatI had the dubious pleasure of working for a large nation-wide (but, from the name you'd think it was even wider!) supermarket chain. I had a team of about four contractors and a permie working for me.

Task Easy, implement a system to capture orders by 'phoning the branches and transmit them from the outlying depots to the computer centre for picking, loading and distribution.

The Players

  • The delivery driver This is a good one. Each day the truck drivers would deliver goods to the stores. They'd take a stack of blank 80-column punch cards with them to give to the store manager. The manager would look up his index of goods, choose a page & line number (representing the items) and mark on card with a pencil the page, line and number of items he needed for the next delivery - childs play! Problem was, the driver would take the cards and stuff them into his back pocket - beside his oily rag, spare condom, snotty hankie and melted Yorkie. Needless to say they got a teeny bit messy. These cards were not very machine-legible by the time he'd finished his shift.
  • The data entry clerk The cards were a mess, so they were all placed into a special device that squashed, flattened and using the guillotine attachment, trimmed to the correct size. Oh yeah! - they were fed into the card reader and submitted for processing when the holes had been added (or taken away). Chad city!
  • The Store Manager Who wondered each week why, oh why do I get 20 gross tampons (that's 2880, not just 20!) instead of 3 crates of cat food?
  • The DGBFOM computer (Dirty Great Big F-Off Mainframe - IBM S/370) It churned the data into more data: information didn't exist then, remember?). It lived in the computer centre, which resembled Kew Gardens full of electric fan heaters.
  • Some IBM series/1 minis Who they? They lived in the depots and kept quiet.
  • Jackson JSP pre-processor a translator that emulated an emulator translating a translator to emulate an emulating translating emulator - or somesuch.

    • The developers

  • Me An (even then) aging hippy, in charge of the mainframe development and liason with the software house.
  • The Software House With a name that was based on a COBOL verb that no-one was ever allowed to use - ever!
  • Four contractors 'nuff said.
  • One permie Mike: an exceptional assembler programmer who had the advantage of being deaf.
  • The DP Manager A vague sheep in wolfs' clothing (cryptic).

    • The events

    The packed decimal saga I got bollocked in front of the entire DP department by the DPM for using binary data when the mainframe they'd spent £millions on had hardware that did packed decimal (PD). All the data on the mainframe was PD and muggins here had spec'd (and started the coding) for binary. Anyway, I got a public apology after taking him aside to explain that IBM, in their wisdom (or greed) had delivered the mini with no PD capability at all (it didn't exist!). If he wanted that capability we'd have to start a long-term development to do it in software, which would make the minis sit in the corner and bark. This took weeks to resolve.

    The first compilation fiasco I hid this one from the client, by pretending to manage the project. Instead I spent three months trying to get the one program I'd allocated myself to run. Have you ever seen a mainframe core-dump? On paper? I did. For weeks I tried to figure out why I got a core dump every time I submitted a job. Really helpful diagnostics like "ABEND - AB/018810/XXH/x0880/DD-01-GG-99 - segmentation error" followed by a pile of paper three feet high with lots of numbers all over it - that's not computing! It transpired that I was trying to interpret a core dump of the pre-processor, followed by a dump of the COBOL compiler, then the assembler and finally the link-loader! Each time I ran it, it ran out of time and dumped. Each time I allocated more time, it got just a little bit further...
    Can there be any more steps to running a job, I thought - yes! The data wasn't there either, but more of that later.

    The "going to the pub after everyone else has gone except Mike" debacle I made the mistake of completing some work when everyone else (contractors) had gone to the pub for the Friday lunch-time until about four-thirty session (People in California may need an explanation - old British tradition and it was the 70s after all!). I looked up from my desk and saw nobody. What to do, they'd all be well ahead of me. Aha! Mike was in the corner (being quiet, that was his job), saw me and made the internationally acknowledged (except in Muslim countries) sign of the "downing pint". Off we go! Ever been driven by a deaf guy? No in-car entertainment for him. How do you tell him he's crashing the gears? Make him aware of the other road-users honking at him? You can't! Just close your eyes and pray. We got there - I had several stiff ones!

    Mike, God bless him, was a really good DP guy, too bloody good. Every request was made on bits of paper, his responses were on paper, he made you sign them! There's nothing more demoralising than asking him why something has not been done and being presented with a wodge of paper detailing everything you & he'd said. Could have worked for the civil service.

    Now, Mike's main work was to get the existing programs (called legacy systems, these days) to work device independently. Remember the original data was on squished-up, chopped-up and mangled Hollerith (ha! Jacquard would be proud of me) cards Well 'cos we were transmitting the data using CICS instead, we had to make the programs read from either card or disk (or tape, whatever). This could not be done! Some crap about reading the buffer twice - Oh I dunno! So...

    The "Oh my God the systems not ready and its live tomorrow and my contract ended" panic The wind whistled, lightning flashed, owls hooted. I'd never even heard of Selcopy before (I was a mini-computer freak), never used a key-punch thingy. I'd spec'd that all the transmitted data (card images) would contain one record per card - there were eight records on the mangled ones. Because we couldn't read the data from disk (the CICS transmission bit wasn't ready either!) I had to rush around all day to arrange all sorts. The system was implemented (and probably works to this day) as follows...

  • Data entry staff at depots call branch manager - ask for orders.
  • Orders keyed to (hard) disk.
  • Days data transferred to floppy (ever seen an 8" floppy? - try alt.sex.brewers.droop).
  • Floppy picked up by Securicor.
  • Driven thru' show, hail, sleet.... to the computer centre.
  • Floppy transcribed to magnetic tape by data entry staff.
  • Tape taken to computer room and loaded on 370.
  • Tape transferred to disk on 370.
  • (My) Selcopy job to punch cards from data.
  • Cards taken from card punch and put on reader.
  • Legacy system reads cards as if they've been delivered by the truck driver.
  • Orders processed!

    • 40,000 maniacs At 23:00 hours I got a call from the operator - "We're punching 40,000 cards for you. What do you want done with them?". 40,000 cards!!! Oops, forgot I'd put one record per "card", which was fine for a CICS transmission. Back to the Selcopy manual. After a few hours (yes, I do test things!) I'd got it down to a more reasonable 5,000 cards (half a tree, instead of four). It worked!!

    Tired, hungry, far from home . I stumbled out of the office at 2AM. The wind had died, there was no lightning, the owl had obviously fallen off its perch. It was quiet. Just as well, otherwise I'd never have heard the filth hounds of Hades slobbering round the corner. I'd probably have noticed them when the spotlights all snapped on and they snapped at my heels, though. Run! (fence) Jump! (barbed wire) Scream! (long drop) Fall! Don't look back. Cab home - "Darling, I've been beaten up again", let's face it, she's credulous as hell.

    No - I didn't charge overtime.

    Postscript

    I didn't drive at the time, so I had to get the bus from my home (Selsdon, South Croydon at the time ) to the station, get a train to London, change at Victoria and get another train to Kent then walk several miles (the busses were infrequent and had milk churns & crates of chickens on the roof anyway!) to the office. One day a colleague asked me where I lived- it transpired he lived a mile away from my home. He offered to give me a lift. Fine.

    At the days end, I went with him to his car - a Robin Reliant (a small three-wheeled vannette, with the same combustibility as a Pinto). That's his company car? Anyway the trip took all of ten minutes. I'd been paying a fortune and commuting over an hour each way! Moral: check your location and don't believe London Underground maps are spacially accurate. What was your worst job - I've got a couple more like that. Why not mail me  and I'll do something with it - maybe publish it (ha!)

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