Moments

Do not ever forget to log off a shared terminal; not doing could have terminal consquences
I recently had a discussion with a friend about working in an office in the 1980s. I recalled an experience in 1983 when our word processors were shared IBM terminals.  

I was writing a fairly detailed summary of how our field support offices would be brought up to speed with docs and training before the release of the next software release for our computerized PABX product.  I was called away for a moment, then returned and completed the report, saved the file, then sent to the noisy shared teletype printer.  Our admin then picked up the printout, made copies, and distributed it to the project team and several layers of management. These were the days before email, you see.

The next morning my boss called me in and asked how I dared mention that I deserved a 10% raise, which astonished me.  He pointed to that phrase, which had been tacked on to the end of some bullet points.  Apparently a co-worker stopped by the workstation and saw my report, then innocently added the comment.  I had been royally screwed.  The lesson learned was  to always save and log off when you step away from a workstation, even for a moment to answer somebody’s question.  Ahhh, the joys of early Silicon Valley.

Sometimes simply relocating elsewhere has amusing consequences
Shortly after moving from the San Francisco Peninsula to Bloomington, Indiana, I needed to set up refills for some prescriptions.

I made an appointment with a local doctor’s office and was checking in with his assistant.

She was facing down, looking over my forms, asking me questions and filling in my info. It was difficult to understand her because of other noises in the area.

At one point it sounded like this:

“And your (mumble) dressed?”

To which I plucked at my shirt and exclaimed, “I sure hope so!”

The other clerk, who understood my distress, said in a slow clear voice, “She was asking you for your address.”

Clearly the mistake was mine – out West we say ADD-ress but here the accent is on the second syllable – uh-DRESS, which sounded to me as if she were asking, “And you are dressed?”

Never follow a set routine
Our neighborhood is served by a community mailbox where all of our mailboxes are contained in one large box on a pedestal where the mail carrier delivers our mail.

Since most snail mail is junk mail, I normally walk up there twice a week: Wednesdays and Saturdays. Most of our neighbors know my routine.

Neighbor George F. likes to kid me about my peculiar habit, and today was no exception as he pulled his car over when he saw me walking our dog.

“Today’s Wednesday so I s’pose you’ve picked up your mail, huh?”

“No actually, this week it’s Thursday because there was no delivery on Monday .”

You can never pull a fast one on a 1st Sergeant – they will eventually catch on
I was in the Army in the mid-60s, stationed in Berlin as a telephone repairman / switchboard operator. Our outfit was a Signal company, which included any job pertaining to communications – telephone, radio, microwave, crypto, whatever.

Our sergeants and officers were not the the strict gung-ho types you see in war movies or accounts of life in the Infantry. We bunked three to a room. Each of us had a tall closet and a footlocker, where all our worldly possessions were kept.

Every Saturday morning we peons headed to a movie theater for a couple of hours of training in some obscure military course. During that time the outfit’s sergeants would go room to room and inspect our gear and the general cleanliness of our quarters. The basic idea was that nobody’s perfect, so each room would get a demerit for one very minor infraction or another (such as one sock was gray from too many washings). You get the idea.

At one point I found a fake dog poop in a store downtown and I placed it in a corner behind a couple of footlockers. There it remained for months – so long that I’d forgotten about it…until one day the list of infractions that was posted named our room with the following: “Dust on fake dog poop in corner.” The captain knew he’d been had as the layer of dust on it must have been there for a long time and none of the previous inspectors had noticed it. His note of infraction was priceless. And he knew exactly who to discipline over it!