And that's not all. We got to program in FORTRAN II, not the crappy old FORTRAN I had learned at MIT, but the new improved version. I don't remember what the improvements were, but they must have been awesome. All I can remember is that we had overlays and named and unnamed common. There’s probably a Wikipedia article somewhere. Look it up if you want.
The compiler was really, really fast, too. I don't quite remember how many cards per minute it ripped through, but I remember it was impressive! And it didn’t have too many bugs. Fortunately, we had the source code and could fix it.
I was the youngest guy in the team. The rest were ten to twenty years older than me and had learned their bad habits on the job, by trial and error. I was a nerd, still living at home, and had no life. I put in 40 hours of overtime a week and got the equivalent of three years experience for every year theirs. I read all the manuals cover-to-cover because that’s what nerds did. When they ran into unsolvable problems they discovered there was a guy on the team who was able and even happy to solve them.
When the time came to deliver, we all flew out to Offutt AFB near Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the winter. We had to work the night shift because this was as million dollar computer, in high demand, and not available during the day.
Once the software had passed its first tests they needed someone for field support. The other guys were married and I didn't even have a girlfriend--actually, I’m not even sure I had any local friends--so I stayed behind. The benefits were pretty sweet for 22-year-old me. I got a hot new blue Mustang rental, much nicer than the clunker I drove at home. I got my own room in an upscale motel, much nicer than my bedroom at home. I got a generous government per-diem that let me eat steaks in the best restaurants in Omaha and still have some money left over, or to eat at the cheapest places I could find and have a lot left over.
I was, needless to say, full of myself. I’d go to work around sundown, work all night, drive back around dawn, have eggs hollandaise at the motel restaurant, put on my bathing suit, go out to the pool and go to sleep. When I got up, I’d hang around downtown (at bookstores, the library, the museum, you know, the kind of places a young nerd would be likely to hang out) grab dinner at one of Omaha’s finest, or at the International House of Pancakes where I’d sit in the section served by the beautiful blue-eyed girl who went to Berkeley and was part of the Free Speech Movement and I was way to shy to move on. Then back to work.
As a guest in the motel, I was treated with deference by all of the staff. Riding around in my mustang, I thought I was as cool as a guy could be. At work, I’d stumbled into what I would now describe as a cool marketing trick. I discovered that when I behaved in unconventional ways the people I worked with had to explain me to other people. The easy explanation was: “he's a genius.” Because you know, geniuses are weird. I was pretty smart, but the stranger I behaved, the more of a genius I had to be and the more respect I got.
So a year later I drive into the Air Force Base in my Mustang. The Air Force guys are in uniform. The civilian contractor guys are in a different kind of uniform. And I'm in my own, unique, weird uniform. I’ve got longish hair. I'm wearing shades--indoors and out. I've got on blue jeans, engineer boots with inch-high heels, a blue work shirt, and a Levi jacket. I could not say “I march to a different drum than the rest of you,” or perhaps "fuck you all" much louder.
Rules were for proles I thought. I was always breaking the rules, constantly being dinged for leaving my file cabinet unlocked, and leaving the card decks for my programs out of the locked card trays in the secure computer room in the secure building in the secure Air Force base because, you know, spies.
Finally, one of the officers, a major Duggan, had had enough of me. He took the card drawer I had left out and had hidden it. I suppose I was to perform some act of obeisance and contrition before he’d tell me. I don't know if I was supposed to apologize, bow down, or give him a blow job, and I wasn’t about to do any of that, not even the blow job. I called my boss and told him what had happened and that I was going to take some of my unpaid overtime hours as vacation. And I would be back when the situation was resolved or I ran out of overtime hours and accrued vacation, whichever came first.
Since I’d been working a ridiculous schedule a couple of years, my unpaid overtime was the equivalent of 12 years of vacation. Well, not really that much, but many months worth. And I was needed on site. So my boss called his boss, who called his boss, who called his boss, who called his counterpart at SAC and eventually they negotiated a deal. Major Duggan did not have to abase himself by telling me where the cards were without a suitable blow job. I didn’t have to blow him to get him to tell me. My boss told me what he’d been told by his boss, who had been told by his boss, who had been told by his boss, who had been told by his counterpart at SAC who had been told by his subordinate in the chain of command, recursively leading to Major Duggan who had no problem telling his superior officer where my card deck could be found, without any blow jobs.
So I flew back to Omaha, checked out another Mustang, and that evening I drove to the base, went through layers of security, to the computer room to look for my card tray. I made a show of it. I climbed on chairs so I could look on top of the tape drive cabinets. I opened the doors to all the bays that housed the circuit boards for the computers. This was in the days of discrete components, not even ICs, so there were lots of bays to house the electronics for such a shitty little computer. Finally, I said, “Gee, I wonder if it could be under the flooring?” The computer was in a climate controlled room with a raised floor under which ran the fat power cables and only slightly less fat data cables to the peripherals. It took some serious juice to run that machine and its peripherals and serious cables between them, none of this dinky USB crap.
Well, sure enough, I found it. Right under the 16th floor panel I pulled, which happened to be the floor panel that my boss had told me to lift based on reliable information he’d gotten through the up and down chains of command.
I’d started that year at Offut as a shy nerd with no life. I'd been given responsibility. An expense account. A blue Mustang. I’d changed. I’d been transformed. Now instead of being a shy nerd with no life, I was an arrogant dick with no life.
I did eventually end up getting a life and it turned out pretty good. And I got over being an arrogant dick. Now I'm a sophisticated dick.
And I turned this into one of the #warstories.
H/T (or blame) to JonathanL and SteveO and SteveG for inspiration. Typos (some fixed) are all my doing.
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