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I worked at Microsoft a number of years ago, and at one point, changed jobs and moved from one group to another. By that time, I knew not only how to do my job well, but how to get things like moving done, who to call, etc., so when it was time to move, I didn’t think much about emailing Facilities and telling them I had some boxes, computers, and phones I needed to have moved from one office in one building to another office in another building, I just did it.
Before that, I’d gone over to the other building, done the interview, got the tour – and was led to an office and told, “Here’s your officemate, Jae.”
Jae, hunched over his keyboard, doing some web development stuff, was in a ratty tank top, old shorts, and a pair of flip flops.
It was a little more casual than the typical Microsoft dress code of the day, but not by much.
Most of the skin that was visible was covered in Tattoos.
What wasn’t covered in tattoos was pierced.
Now understand, this was not how I’d been raised, so it was just a touch foreign to me. Jae had been concentrating pretty heavily on some code, and also had some kind of piercing between his eyebrows, so when he turned around as I was introduced, he just looked livid.
I was terrified.
Had I met him on the street, I would have crossed to the other side.
Fast.
That was the first impression on my end.
On Jae’s end, it was a little different.
When I was sure I’d be taking the new job, like I said, I’d contacted facilities to move my stuff, and they’d come and done just that. In my mind, they were gone. I didn’t think about them anymore.
On the other end, Jae was busy hunched over his keyboard, and all of a sudden these guys, without saying anything to him, came in with boxes of stuff, hooked up the telephone, brought in computers, hooked them up, brought in a chair, and in general, prepared the place for me.
Jae’s jaw hit the floor.
His first impression, he told me later, was 5 short words:
“This guy knows his s**t”
So when I got there, the office was ready for me, I had an interesting kind of respect for Jae, and though I didn’t know it, he had the same for me.
He worked on the web front end of an internal web site, I worked on the SQL back end of it, and we would often go to meetings where we’d be tasked with some level of work that, given the environment, we just said “Yes” to…
We’d get back to our office, kind of collapse into our chairs, and ponder for a bit.
Invariably, Jae would ask, “You know how to do this?”
“IIIII don’t know how to do this…”
“Alright. Let’s do it then!”
And we did.
—
Over time, we got to know each other pretty well, and we talked as only office mates can talk. We talked about our children and our wishes for their future. Jae came to see my son’s soccer games and we stood on the sidelines, two proud dads.
It was a neat time, going to work having a good friend to share the day with, having a good colleague to – well, be friends with.
At one point, he said something that startled me. “You know, Tom, this isn’t going to last forever.” – and Jae – having gone through the school of hard knocks like few people have, was right.
We did move on.
Jae’d been in the navy, and as such, had the language of, well – a sailor. He would use words that, in my life, were the equivalent of habaneros like other folks use salt and pepper. It took a little getting used to, but underneath that capcaisin coated exterior was a heart of gold.
He moved on to another company, and encouraged me to join him. I did just that, and we stayed there for some time, and then it was time to move again, which we did, and will likely repeat at some unknown interval in the future.
I thought about that first meeting many times – clearly am thinking about it as I write this, and wonder what would have happened had I allowed my initial fear to get in the way of a relationship that I treasure to this day.
Take care Jae, wherever you are.
I used to work at a local health care cooperative, and my job there was to be what they called a ‘program assistant.’ This meant I wasn’t very far up the food chain, but my job involved quite a bit of monkeying about with computers. I was developing this tool that would allow the automation of the data gathering of the department (an outbound call center) and to be honest, was using the wrong app for the job, but that’s what I was told to use. As a result, this application took hours and hours to calculate the overwhelming amount of data it needed to calculate. My work week was such that I’d work days Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, and work evenings Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Sometimes I’d have to let the machine chew on this data for the full 18 or so hours between the end of a day shift on a Wednesday, and the beginning of an evening shift on a Thursday.
I worked with, among other people, this wonderful fellow named Jim, who had both a sense of humor and a couple of quirks.
You know how every now and then you’ll leave the house in the morning and the tag on the back of your shirt collar will be stuck out?
…or how you might have returned from a ‘bio break’ with some of the associated paperwork still attached?
…or how you might have, worse yet, forgotten to button, zip, or snap something in your hurry to get somewhere?
Most people would somehow be embarrassed to tell you about that.
Jim was not.
He was fastidious about his appearance and just assumed everyone else was, too, so he was the kind of fellow who’d tell you any and all of that.
And instead of letting you go through the day with people snickering behind your back, Jim would tell you.
Instantly.
And, it turned out, he would expect you to do the same for him.
But if you had some leftovers from lunch in a spot that could be embarrassing in the next meeting,
Jim would tell you that.
If you had something stuck between your teeth, or some fuzz in your hair, or that label sticking out, Jim wasn’t embarrassed to point it out to you.
Lord love him, he’d tell you that.
So one week, I’d been the recipient of several of these comments, and I figured it was time to tweak the rules just a bit.
He wandered by my desk one day…
“Say Jim – you’ve got a piece of spinach or something stuck there between your teeth there…”
“Oh gosh, thanks! How long’s it been there?”
I almost, almost felt guilty about it, but managed to keep a straight face as I lied, and said, “Oh, about two hours…”
The absolute horror as he clawed at his teeth was just priceless, but it set something in his mind, where he clearly felt the need to get even.
And one day, he did…
I had that program crunching data, and when it was done, it would say “ready” in the bottom left corner of the screen.
So one Thursday morning, I was at home, and I’d set the program to run the night before, and just had this niggling feeling that something was wrong – so I called Jim on the phone and asked him if he could go over to my monitor and just look at it and tell me if it said “ready” in the bottom left corner. If it did, then the calculations would have completed and I’d be able to move on. If it didn’t, they were still going on, and my day would be spent waiting for them to complete.
Jim seemed incredibly eager to please that day, and was willing to drop whatever he was doing to help me out…
He even volunteered to go over to my desk and call me from there while he was looking at my monitor.
This piqued my interest, because while Jim was friendly, and Jim was helpful, Jim didn’t generally volunteer to do stuff like this.
So I waited until about a minute had passed, and called my office phone from home. Jim answered.
“Okay, so does it say “ready” in the lower left corner of the screen?”
“No, Tom, all I see is this big message that says, “system error, please see your LAN administrator”
Uh… LAN administrator?
At the time, as I learned later, we were running our client programs off a central server, and every night that server got rebooted, so if you had a file open in one of the programs running from that server, there was a good chance that it would be toast in the morning, especially if it was one that was doing a lot of calculating…
So as I was thinking this through, realizing that while it sounded a little silly to be asking my LAN administrator about this, I realized there might be some truth to the message, and it started to bug me – until my thoughts were interrupted by a stifled giggle from Jim.
He knew I’d been working on that program for a long time, and the data was quite valuable, so it was important that it be accurate, and messing with the one guy in the department who actually knew the computer system was a rare opportunity, so Jim took it – he laughed this wonderful Georgia belly laugh that just made it hard to stay mad at him.
However…
It didn’t prevent me from getting even, and as I rode the bus to work that day, I realized that what he’d told me was – well, in simple terms, a lie…
And messing with the one guy in the department who actually knew the computer system, while a rare opportunity, did have its risks. I pulled out a napkin, and wrote a short program on it, in which I penciled out the logic for making his computer tell him a lie that was far more believable, far more insidious, and far, far more evil.
And I have to tell you, I smiled.
Now I knew it was possible, but I didn’t know the details on how to write the code at the time, so I did what anyone back then did. I called product support, and I’d invariably start off with something like, “Hey, I’m working on some code where I want to mess with a buddy of mine and have it freak him right out when he opens a file and have him think that his computer’s crashing…”
“Uh, sir? We’re not allowed to do that.”
Somehow I figured that would be the case…
“Okay, fine, no problem. “
– and then I completely sanitized the request, making it generic about coming up with message boxes, and what would happen when certain buttons were pushed and so on.
I could actually hear the grin in the tech’s voice as he started to help out – with an ‘official’ problem – but both he and I knew what I was really doing, and he was in on it.
It actually took a lot of work – over several weeks, back and forth on the bus, writing logic, rewriting logic, testing it out, finding the right timing, how to get it to him, and so on.
The program I was using was Microsoft’s Excel, while this was a spreadsheet program, it also had a programming language behind it that you could get to. This programming language was called VBA, or Visual Basic for Applications. It was powerful, it allowed you to automate just about anything you could do on the computer. You did this by writing short programs called macros. You could also create what were called “auto_open” macros. That meant that as soon as you opened the workbook you’d put the macro in, the macro would fire, or start running, and whatever commands had been stored in it, would run.
Now there were people out there who realized the power behind this and did very bad things, destroying people’s data. That falls into the exquisitely uncool category of things to do with code, and is why you can’t put macros in people’s workbooks without them knowing about it anymore.
But you could then.
And the thing is, I had no desire to mess with data, I just wanted to mess with Jim’s mind, and in doing so, I learned that I had to have the macro start running about 4 seconds after he opened whatever file it was in – that was enough for him to have recognized the file, orient himself to what he wanted to do, and likely do whatever the first thing was he was going to do in that file. He would then immediately associate what came next with his own actions, not mine.
However, it was me who wrote what came next.
And what did indeed come next was an alarming series of beeps, at which point an even more alarming message would come up. Given what we all knew about computers at the time (which was very, very little), it was actually a fairly simple process, from a code perspective, to totally mess with his mind psychologically, and that’s what I did…
My rule – in all of this, was to make sure that absolutely nothing on his machine got harmed, so over those weeks, I perfected it.
And this is where it got evil.
Since I’d written it – my goal was to have him experience that moment of raw terror when you think you’ve lost everything.
J-u-u-u-u-s-t like he did with me…
Only better.
The tough thing was setting it up, but one day, weeks after this initial “spinach” comment, he called me up with this innocuous question about an excel file that had a bunch of zip codes in it.
“Sure, I’d be happy to take a look at it… why don’t you email it to me?”
And Jim, not having any idea what he was doing, did just that.
In two minutes, I had his zip code problem fixed, but also had a little macro put into it so the next time he opened the file, life would get interesting.
And…
I felt like a kid on Christmas morning, just impatient as all getout, wanting him to open the file RIGHT NOW – but I had to wait, to be patient, and to just let it happen…
And sure enough… it did… about 10 minutes later, the phone rang.
It was Jim.
And Jim was calling me for “support”. Now remember, I’d been dealing with product support people on this thing for some time. I knew the drill. You sounded calm, you sounded compassionate, and you sounded confident. I took a deep breath, put on my ‘guru’ hat, warmed up my ‘guru’ voice, and answered the phone.
“Hello?”
The voice that came out of the receiver sounded far more like a dying duck, or maybe a dying chicken than Jim ever had.
“To-o-o-o-o-o-m?”
Me: in my best guru voice…
“What’s up Jim?”
“My machine just made a bunch of beeps it’s never made before and I just got a message that says I’ve got an unrecoverable hard drive error. It’s asking if I want to reformat my hard drive now. What do I do?”
“Well gosh Jim, reformatting your hard drive will erase everything… what choices does it give you?
“It says ‘yes, no, or cancel’”
“Hmmm… Are any of them – you know, like ‘emphasized’ or anything like that?”
“The ‘no’ button is.”
“Okay, given that, I’d click on either the no or the cancel button. Let me know what happens.”
The terror in his voice was just that, terror. His machine had all the departmental information on it. If it went down, there was no backup.
It would be bad.
He clicked on the ‘no’ button.
But one little note we have to remember… I was the one who had decided weeks ago what would happen if he clicked that ‘no’ button.
And it worked like a charm.
Another message box popped up.
“Reformatting your hard drive will erase all data, do you wish to continue?!!!!”
I stifled a giggle, thanked God for mute buttons on telephones, and took another deep breath…
“Gosh Jim, I don’t think you want to continue on that, that’d be bad.”
He clicked ‘no.’
At that point, I had several things happening… There was a very short beep, along with the simultaneous appearance in the status bar (where I’d taught him to look for the “ready” notification earlier) of a message along the lines of ‘Formatting disk: x percent Complete” – and for disk activity, I just had the file save itself a few times so that you’d hear the drive, see a percentage change, hear the drive, see the percent and so on…
“FORMATTING DRIVE!???”
“Gosh Jim, I’d shut the thing off, maybe you caught it in time…”
He rebooted.
We went through it again, he chose different options, instead of ‘no’, he chose ‘cancel’ – and all it did was get him to the formatting section faster.
He shut it off again…
“Can you come over?”
I was waiting for this.
“Sure Jim, no problem…”
I went over to his desk, and kneeled down beside him like I’d done many times before, assuming the position of helpful, friendly problem-solving guru….
He fired the machine up again, and opened the file again.
“See, every time I click on this cell right here…”
Four seconds later, I heard my little creation at work…
BEEP BEEP BEEP!
And sure enough, there it was… Subtle enough with the question mark, but the words were more than terrifying enough to get his attention.
“Hmmm… Well, Jim, something’s clearly amiss here – let’s reboot it and try again, sometimes that clears things up…”
He hard-booted the machine and when it came up, he opened the file again .
“Every time I click on that cell – it does that…”
Of course it did…
BEEP BEEP BEEP!
A striking cobra’s head couldn’t have shot out any faster than Jim’s hand did as it hit the power button of the machine.
After the machine restarted, he opened the file again, and I tried, tried so hard to keep from letting the guru persona crack.
I could see beads of sweat on his forehead, he was really worried.
“So what’s going on? Every time I click on that cell – it does that…”
“So… don’t click on that cell…”
And sure enough, next time, he didn’t click on that cell, and the message came up again, the beeps, the “unrecoverable disk error” – he clicked ‘Cancel’ and got the next message.
Sure enough… right after that, the drive started whirring and the status bar started showing a percentage increase message…
“Well, Jim – if it hasn’t done anything the last few times it’s gone through, just let it run till it’s done.”
Against everything he knew was right and holy, Jim let it run all the way through – and nothing happened…
The sky did not fall.
The earth did not quake.
But most importantly, Jim’s machine was not dead.
In fact, it was still running, and running just fine.
He was stunned.
His eyes were focused on the screen, and he was truly baffled…
“Tom, I’ve never seen anything like this before… Are you familiar with this?”
Oh, what a perfect way to ask the question.
I looked left, then right, then looked at Jim, and in a conspiratorial voice, quietly said, “Intimately…”
Time, for Jim, stopped at that moment.
He was looking at the monitor, but wasn’t seeing it – his mind had gone elsewhere.
If Tom was ‘intimately’ familiar with this – then…
He looked at me, and in that wonderful Georgia accent, asked, “Did you write this?”
The look on my face was all the answer he needed.
“For me?”
I couldn’t help but grin a little.
Then there was this literal confusion of emotions that spread across his face, one right after the other. It was clear he wasn’t sure whether to hug me (because his computer, and all his data, was okay) or whether to throttle me (because I’d just about given him a heart attack…)
And then he looked at me, and realized that this was done… over a number of weeks, specifically for him and no one else. And it added another emotion, a bit of awe.
I didn’t expect that, but it was fun, and kind of neat.
I’d written the macro to keep running for a bit before popping up one last dialogue box.
And when I left, on his monitor was one little dialogue box with a single button in it.
And as far as I know, Jim still hasn’t clicked on that one.
“You ought to shoot the EAA airshow, you like planes so much!”
“Heh – did the Yakima airshow once. Flew over there in Fifi.”
“Fifi?”
Fifi.
And so of course, I had to explain.
I’m an airplane nut, and years ago was a photojournalist, and any time I could put the two together, I would.
There was a time when a B-17 and an LB-30 (non – combat version of the plane most people would recognize as a B-24) would show up at Seattle’s Boeing field, not much of an announcement, they’d just show up. I went down there with a friend and used up a good bit of the week’s grocery money buying a walk-through tour of the planes. It was a lot of fun… I got some nice pictures – and it was fun to watch and hear the Pratt & Whitneys on the one, and the Wright Cyclones on the other rumble to life.
My wife has said I could start a conversation with anyone, and in this case, I did just that, and ended up chatting with the pilot of the LB-30, who happened to be a United Airlines Pilot living just 30 miles south of Seattle. He gave me his business card.
The LB-30 came back two years later – but with a much bigger friend from Boeing, this being what was then the Confederate Air Force’s (now known as the Commemorative Air Force) mighty B-29, with the decidedly un-mighty name of “Fifi”
Since I’d already seen the LB-30, I figured I’d see what the inside of a B-29 looked like, and used up a bigger chunk of my weekly grocery budget than last time to pay for a walk-through tour of it.
The plane, while huge on the outside, wasn’t made for comfort inside, but utility. As I moved through it, I’d find hand-holds exactly where I reached for and needed them. Definite utility – but there wasn’t a lot cushioning of anything, after all, it was a military plane.
…and as I went forward I saw a leather bomber’s jacket on the map table on the left.
Not just any leather bomber’s jacket – but the one that had the name of the pilot I’d chatted with two years earlier.
And thus began one of my “Only you, Tom… Only you…” stories..
See, this plane had come up to Seattle from Salem, Oregon.
The local CBS affiliate, KIRO, had driven from Seattle to Salem.
They’d gotten on the plane in Salem and flown back to Seattle, videotaping the whole flight.
Exclusively.
From inside the airplane.
It was considered a major coup at the time. They landed, they drove to the station, edited their stuff, and were on the air.
Needless to say, I was down there at the airport shortly after that.
And with that, a most evil and sneaky plan started festering – no – germinating (that sounds healthier) in my mind.
I found myself wondering what their plans were after Seattle -and it turned out they were going to be part of the airshow over in Yakima.
Hmmm….
So the day they were heading over there I went down again, and found the pilot I’d talked to two years earlier…
“Hey, Dick, you got anyone from the Yakima paper covering this?”
(Note: Evil, festering germinating plan being: “I’m planning on doing what KIRO did.” – not because I was brilliant, not because I had permission, but because nobody had told me I couldn’t, and I didn’t know any better than to think I couldn’t just wander down to Boeing field and talk my way onto the only flying B-29 just because I had a camera…)
So I went to the pay phone inside the Museum of Flight, plunked in a few quarters, and called the Yakima Herald Republic, where my friend Jimi Lott had been the photo editor, and asked them if they were covering this. They said yes, they were. So I figured my chances were slim, to none. But about 15 minutes before scheduled takeoff, the photographer still hadn’t shown up, so I called them back and was a little more specific in my question.
“Do you have anyone in Seattle covering this? Someone who’s going to get on the plane and fly with it, shooting all the way?
“No.”
“NOO?”
“No.”
Then I got all young and stupid and just about yelled at the photo editor there for not having a photographer ready to fly back there on the plane…
They didn’t have anyone in Seattle covering this?
They didn’t have anyone in Seattle covering this…
Gad… Didn’t they know what a piece of history this was?
Didn’t they realize they were missing a once in a lifetime event?
Didn’t they –
–the photo editor finally had enough of my attitude and said, “Now what did you say your name was again?”
“Tom Roush…. Jimi Lott’s a friend of mine.”
Jimi used to be his boss.
“Right, so what do you want me to do?”
The light went on…
THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANYONE IN SEATTLE COVERING THIS!
“Well, you don’t have anyone here, right? So here’s what I’m planning on doing… I’m gonna walk out there and see if I can talk my way onto the plane. If I can, I’ll be over there in about 45 minutes or so…. You want color or black and white?”
<stunned silence>
“Uh… Color, I guess…”
“Right. I’ll call you when I’m at the airport.”
“Um… sure…”
I got off the phone with the photo editor, left the Museum of Flight, and walked out toward the plane, which was surrounded by this teeming throng of people, just in time to hear someone yell, “Okay, where’s the photographer?”
And I, Tom Roush…
…who’d driven down there on a whim, and had just convinced the photo editor of a newspaper I’d never seen to buy a picture I’d only be able to take if I could get onto a plane I’d promised the pilot I’d get onto the front page of a newspaper that…
I’d…
never…
seen…
(yeah, I still have to read that sentence a couple of times myself – still working out the catch:22ness of it all)
…called out, “HERE!”
Moses himself couldn’t have parted the crowd any better.
I waved my hand, and “Fwwwwooomp” – Instant walkway. I walked through, feeling simultaneously embarrassed at the attention, and elated beyond words that it was happening.
I tossed my itty bitty duffel bag onto the plane, swung the camera bag up, climbed up, and in 5 minutes we were gone.
They’d started up this noisy little air cooled V-4 Wisconsin motor like my Grampa had on his hay baler – but this was attached to a honking generator. (If you ever saw the NOVA: B-29 Frozen in Time special, it is this generator that broke free and started the fire.) They used the V-4’s generator to run the starter for the number 3 engine. Once that was running, they used the generator on that engine to start up the rest. I could see the tops of the cylinders vibrating a bit through the open cowl flaps as the propellers blew the smoke from starting those big radial engines away.
We taxied out to the runway, and I was treated to one of the smoothest flights I’ve ever been on.
But we didn’t just fly up to altitude, fly over, land… No, we played tag with the LB-30, buzzed a few airfields, and flew past – not over – Mt. Rainier. I hung out the side bubbles and shot up, down, left, right, directions you simply can’t see in a normal airplane.
There was a little stool that you could sit on that got your head up into another little bubble so you could see out the top of the plane. I sat on that and looked out there for a bit – until one of the crew members asked me to let another fellow up – who’d paid $300.00 for the privilege of this flight.
I’d completely forgotten that this might be something people would pay to do, much less be ABLE to pay to do. I got down and was just amazed at where I was and what all was happening. (remember, I’d gone on that $10.00 tour – which had used up a good chunk of my weekly grocery budget.)
As we came close to Mt. Rainier, I asked the crew back where I was if they could get the LB-30 between us and the mountain. They called up to the pilot, he called over to the other plane, and as he flew underneath us, I got some shots of the LB-30 beneath us with apple orchards beneath it
But then, then I got the shot of the only flying LB-30 in the world, taken from the only flying B-29 in the world in front of Washington’s tallest hunk of rock.
And… and it was kind of special…
The next thing I knew we were on approach to Yakima, and we buzzed the Yakima field once and then came in to land. I hurriedly said my goodbyes and explained I had to make a deadline. I found a huge bank of temporary pay phones (this was BC, before cellphones) and called the paper, got the photo department, and got the photo editor I’d gotten all stupid over less than an hour before.
“Hey, this is Tom, I’m here.”
“Here… Here? Where’s here?”
Billy Crystal couldn’t have said it better.
“The airport.”
Exasperated pause…
“WHICH airport?”
Which airport – what kind of a question was that? I mean, I’d just talked to him, I’d told him where I was going to be – where did he expect me to be?
“Well Yakima, of course.”
<more stunned silence… >
…and in a voice tinged with resignation, I heard, “I’ll have someone there to pick you up.”
Ten minutes later, a white Toyota, driven by the same photo editor I’d been talking to on the phone, arrived to take me to the paper, where while we chatted, the film was processed, edited, and then, with a press pass to the airshow, returned to me.
I didn’t really know what to do after the paper went to the printers – so I found a hotel, a Super 8, I think, for $35.00, had some dinner at a nearby restaurant, and went to bed.
The next morning I walked to a nearby Denny’s where I found a whole bunch of Air National Guard photojournalists who were covering the airshow sitting at a table looking at the front page of the local paper.
A picture of an LB-30 in front of Mt. Rainier.
The picture had made page 1.
We talked and laughed and told war stories to each other over coffee, and they, realizing that my car was about 150 miles away, kindly invited me to ride out to the airshow with them. They gave me a press pass, too. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store. I could go anywhere I wanted. I could get photos of planes I’d never seen before, or since. I could watch the aerial demonstrations of the A-10 Warthog, I could watch things blow up, and I could do it all from in front of the front row.
There was NOTHING between me and the airplanes – in fact, anyone taking pictures of the planes got the back of my head in the bottom of their pictures.
How unutterably cool.
I shot and wandered, and wandered and shot, got sunburned, had a cheap hot dog and chatted with pilots and crew and just had the time of my life, and when they started firing up some of those big engines to leave, I knew it was time for me to head out, too, so I walked into the terminal, found the Horizon Airlines desk, called Jimi to see if he could pick me up at SeaTac, and then bought a ticket back to Seattle for $45.00.
As we flew back, I saw the same scenery as I’d seen coming over, but it was different, and I was different.
Jimi came to pick me up when I got to SeaTac, and we talked and laughed as he took me back to Boeing field and the Museum of Flight where I’d left the Saab the day before. In a few days the paper sent me a check for $35.00 (the same that the Super 8 motel charged me.)
For the price of a flight back and a couple of phone calls, I’d had a weekend to remember, and the experience of a lifetime.
A number of years ago, in my first job in IT, I worked for a local health care cooperative automating the data gathering of an outbound call center.
That sounds nice and sophisticated. What really happened was that I worked in a group with a bunch of little old ladies –meant in the dearest sense you could mean it – they were little, and old, and ladies. Imagine working with your mom or grandma to get the picture. They made calls to new members in the various regions to inform them of the possibilities they could expect with their new membership. My job was to automate the data gathering of the department. Each telephone call was logged, categorized, and eventually summarized so the region could be billed for the work done on their behalf.
How this was done was simple: Paper, pencil, and a bunch of little hash marks: IIIII IIIII IIIII. Each hash mark represented one telephone call – which could take place in seconds, or many minutes. They were valuable hash marks.
My job – summarize it so those hash marks could be turned into money at the end of the quarter.
I was given the process, and as I sat there with a solar powered calculator adding hash marks for weeks every quarter while a $2000.00 computer sitting on my desk burned electrons, I had this strange idea that “there’s GOT to be a better way than this.” This is where the automation came in. But automating it so a bunch of little old ladies could use it – correction – would use it – was key.
I’d been told that for this data gathering project, I would not be allowed to use a database, I would have to use Microsoft’s Excel. (that’s another story for another time) And so, technically, I had to make Excel look and act like a database, but more importantly, I had to get these little old ladies (who can be mighty stubborn, I might add) to go from things they could see and feel (pencil and paper) to things they couldn’t (electrons).
One of the little old ladies was named Georgiana. She had been diagnosed with ADD, and was quite aware of it, so she worked hard, with stacks of post-it notes all over to help keep herself on track. She also was an absolute delight to work with, and would tell me any time some code I wrote didn’t make sense. Conversely, if it did make sense, and she understood it, she would let me know – and then I knew everyone else would understand it as well.
So Georgiana became my canary in the coal mine. She would not only tell me when she didn’t understand how some functionality was supposed to work, she would also tell me when the others had trouble.
And as a result, that trouble, whatever it was, would get fixed. In human terms, they’d understand it better. In business terms, their productivity would go up. In human terms, they’d have less frustration. In business terms, there’d be fewer impediments to them doing their jobs.
All because the code was written with the customer in mind.
I wrote thousands of lines of code for that project. It eventually became a distributed data repository, on two separate, totally incompatible networks, that could quite literally only communicate via email, so the calculations happened via Excel formulas, daily reporting happened via distributed Excel and Outlook macros and Novell Groupwise automation, and summarization and reporting at the end of the quarter was done with Excel macros and linking and embedding the results into Word. This took the generation of the report down from weeks to two hours, which I thought was a bit of an accomplishment – but it became very clear to me that no matter how wonderful, how exciting, how shiny, sparkly or technically brilliant the code was, if I didn’t listen to my customers – if my code didn’t solve the problems they were facing on a daily basis, then they wouldn’t use it. If it didn’t do what the customer wanted, then all the effort I put into it was a complete and utter waste of time, both mine and the user’s. I’ll tell that story some other time – but over time, I realized that more and more, the code I wrote was written with one little old lady in mind.
It’s been 15 years now, but in every line of code I write now is a little bit written for Georgiana.
(c) Tom Roush 2009
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