This is another quickie post, not subject to my usual Sunday-night custom. The last one, Guerrila Filmmaking at Xerox, went so well I thought I’d try another!
Long ago a certain college student switched his major from computer science to pre-med, on impulse. He regretted that choice. This is what happened.
In the Before Times
Before terminals and computers were cheap enough that everyone could use one, you had to write your program on paper and then key it onto punchcards, like this;
There was a keypunch room, where you sometimes had to wait for a machine to be available.
If your program was small, you could just put a rubber band around the cards and carry them around. But for any non-trivial program, you ended up carrying them in a box, like this
If you were smart, or if you’d already been burned once, you could have your cards sequenced, so that each card had a number, so if you dropped the deck, you had some chance of getting them back into order. Or you could just get them duplicated.
People would also draw diagonal lines along the sides
which could also help in reordering them after an accident.
That Day at Dartmouth
20 or so years ago, I was talking to a middle-aged doctor at a social event. He told me about the time at Dartmouth when he was taking a basic computer programming class in the winter semester. He’d been working and working on his program, spending days and nights at the computer lab, and carrying it around in a box like the one above.
Then while walking to the lab, he slipped on the ice. His card box went flying, the box popped open, and the cards fell out. Besides being scattered all over, some of them were wet and thus ruined.
What to do when disaster strikes
Every engineer faces a crisis like this sooner or later. If you become a manager, one of your people will face it (and thus, you do, too).
Your file got corrupted, and you forgot to make a backup
You deleted the last copy of something, inadvertently
You inadvertently hit “reply-all” on some private message to a coworker.
You put a bug in the company’s web server which allowed hackers to get in and steal all the company’s data.
(My favorite) At Xerox, some prankster told you to type “edit” in Bravo, which you foolishly did, not realizing it meant, “select everything, delete it, and insert the current time.”
I’m not sure what’s worse as the cause:
It’s your own stupid fault.
Some other idiot caused it.
That idiot worked for you.
Throw a tantrum?
This is the obvious thing to do. I see kids at the playground do it all the time, if they don’t burst into tears.
It isn’t only little kids who throw tantrums. I was singing in the chorus for a community theater production of La Boheme, and the first act featured a juggler. I think he was juggling bean bags. He lost control and one of the bags fell into the orchestra pit. This is not good. Not good at all. Musicians don’t like things falling on them.
The opera manager ripped him a new one in the green room. I can still hear him berating the guy:
This cannot happen! Some of these musicians have instruments worth twenty thousand dollars! You have to be more careful!
He was throwing a tantrum. The juggler already felt terrible. He knew he did a bad thing. What’s the point of venting your rage on a poor guy like that?
Invent a solution
Here’s how the Apollo 13 engineers reacted to a “situation.”
(maybe later they corrected the problem that caused this Situation in the first place. But at that moment, they just solved it.)
What This Guy Did
He went and changed his major to pre-med.
You might say, “Good! The world needs doctors more than computer programmers!” You’d be right, and I’m sure he’s justifiably proud of all the people he’s helped as a doctor.
He didn’t completely feel that way. He wished he’d stuck with computers. The rest of us can be glad he didn’t, actually.
The Enormous Weight of Decisions
When you’re 18, or 21, you’re constantly making decisions that you know might change your entire life. At least, you should, but maybe it’s like mortality: you know, abstractly, that you’re going to die someday, but it just doesn’t seem real.
You pick a college major, you marry someone, you apply to one grad school and not another, you move to a new city or you don’t, and (if you’re lucky) you choose one job offer over another.
How do you cope with that? I don’t know how we did it. I guess your parents had to give you enough practice knowing yourself, making your own decisions, and living with the consequences. Or you had to be lucky (let’s face it; sometimes you just don’t know what a decision will lead to).
I wrote about another aspect of this a few days ago. It’s called Free Range Kids.
"If your program was small, you could just put a rubber band around the cards and carry them around."
I learned real quick, you NEVER put only ONE rubber band around your cards!
When I was a grad student, I was TA for a computer science course for non-computer science majors. This was 1981, but for some reason the University of Maryland still required the use of punch cards for some courses. I had a young lady come to me with a deck of cards that she dropped in the street. Some of the cards had been run over by cars. I took pity and told her to mark up the last printout with the changes she was going to make, and I’d accept that.