My darling wife told a friend of mine this and he told me. No, I don’t know why she didn't tell me. She said that I am a complete optimist. I've written about this before. I will probably write again. But one thing she said that he repeated to me was that, *…because Jeff Crandall is such an optimist, he always has options.* Interesting to me. I agree, by the way. I have been given the ability to think outside – sometimes WAY outside – the box. I have a few stories to demonstrate this:
When I worked for DHI, which stands for – ehem - Dairy Herd Improvement, I was stationed in the computer room. This was a very large room in the center of the building in which were several mainframe computers and various disc and tape drives and a few card-punch machines. Yes! Card-punch machines! Age-ist! I was an operator. This job entailed sitting at the consoles of the mainframe computers and making sure the jobs and processing happening on these machines, um, happened. There were two things about that job that were the best: the climate in the computer room was VERY controlled so the temperature was always a comfortable 68 degrees, and, of course, Debi regularly brought me steak and cheese sandwiches from The Italian Place. Mmmmm. What memories! Anyway, the DHI experience was good, and fodder for another day. But, while there, there were a couple of times that I was called upon to save or save or save or save the brilliant programming staff from their blunders.
Mainframes run jobs. These jobs are submitted by programmers. They execute instructions and product output – usually in printed form. Because they could process many jobs at once, the printers could not keep up with the output. So, the print jobs went into queues. These queues held the print jobs until it was time to print. If there were a job that someone did not want printed, they could ask the operators to access the queues and, using a command, remove or delete the print job from the queue. You can see this one coming down 5th Avenue, can't you? One time, an egotistical operator issued a command to the mainframe to delete all the print jobs in the queue. Not a job, ALL jobs. The mainframe supported wildcard commands and he issued one that would clean out EVERYTHING. He typed it in just to look at it and then instead of deleting what he had typed, he accidentally pressed the equivalent of GO! He immediately pressed a big red button on the keyboard that is labeled STOP. Everyone knew that this button is NEVER to be pressed. It would interrupt so many processes as to cause pain to users and more pain to the person who pushed STOP in the first place.
He came scurrying to me and asked what he should do. I went over and saw the command he had typed and he told me that as soon as he hit enter he hit stop. So, I thought I may have a chance. I remembered that when all goes terribly wrong in mainframe world, you can do the equivalent of REBOOT. It is called IPL – Initial Program Load. I also remembered that IPL'ing also restored the queues as part of its function. The only way to stop the deleting was to IPL. So, I said, "Watch this, jellyman," and I IPL'ed the machine. Wow, it reloaded, and restored the queues and only a few of the A's were deleted from the queue. I had saved the day. Nobody else could think of any options to overcome what had happened.
Story 2: There were two mainframes. They were connected to each other. One was significantly more powerful than the other. Programmers submitted test programs or jobs on the weak machine and production jobs on the mighty one. One day, two programmers came running in with a panicked look on their faces. They explained that they were experimenting on the mighty mainframe with a wildcard program that would lock all the records on the whole machine. You lock a record when it is being updated so the same record is not being accessed and changed by two different sources. Anyway, they sent a job that locked EVERYTHING. Can't unlock it because it is locked. Can't send a job in because it is locked. Can't access it through the console because it was locked. Can't do anything but come running into my environmentally controlled heaven and cry to me and admit what you did. Waaaah! I thought for a moment and then proposed that they instead submit an unlock program reversing the effects of their lock program through the weak mainframe. They were connected together and I had seen jobs come over from weak to mighty all the time. It NEVER occurred to them that they could do this. I, the optimist with options, was the only one who thought of it or suggested it.
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