Today's XKCD, and being careful what you wish for ;)
It occurred to me, after the good minute or two I spent laughing when I saw this, that I should probably start writing some of these stories down lest they be forgotten. I believe Dave told this one a few times, but recording for posterity is no bad thing.
So. At one point Dave had a job doing large, crunchy mainframe database work for the UK's National Grid. The task was to create a full database of all physical assets - you know, like telephone poles, transformers, etc., all the way up to entire power stations. Once the database itself was populated, someone (ie Dave) had to write the queries that would generate usable reports - no small task, in the days pre-SQL. Anyone who's ever done anything with trying to generate reports from a database, even at the MS Access level, knows it takes some tinkering; back in those days, it took a LOT of tinkering.
After a week or so of work, he was happy with his first version of the report, so went ahead and ran it against the live database. It looked pretty good, except for being about £250million (at the time, the value of approximately 1 power station) short. This happened shortly before lunchtime on Friday, and as he was walking down the office hallway to pick up a printout, he passed the project accountant, Mervyn, who asked how the report was coming.
"Well, we appear to be short a power station."
This is the wrong thing to tell an accountant. Mervyn promptly freaked out, and demanded what Dave was going to do about the problem.
"It's lunchtime. I'm going to go get a sandwich and a pint." As one did.
And that's precisely what he did do, leaving a squawking Mervyn in his wake. Sometime during the second half of the sandwich, as he was running through the code in his head, he figured out where the problem was (one subset of data was getting skipped in the running order, so just needed to be added back in) so all was peachy again.
Unfortunately, when he got back to the office Mervyn was still highly incensed, and demanded that 4 copies of the report be printed and delivered to him first thing Monday morning.
"Mervyn, I really don't think you want to do that."
But nothing else would do - Mervyn had to have 4 copies of that report on his desk first thing Monday morning.
Since this was back in the days of mainframes, there was a full 24/7 crew, including a print shop. They also had one of those snazzy continuous-feed printers that would automatically change paper boxes/rolls, tape the seam, and keep printing. This came in awfully handy.
When Dave walked in on Monday morning, one of his coworkers beckoned him over to Mervyn's office.
Sitting on the desk, one on each corner, were 4 neatly arranged stacks of continuous feed printout, each about 6 feet high.
When Mervyn came in, he apparently just sat down at the desk without saying a word. The gigantic printouts disappeared shortly afterward. And he never asked for a printout of the full report again.
Dave said he never did find out how they got all those printouts onto the desk.
So. At one point Dave had a job doing large, crunchy mainframe database work for the UK's National Grid. The task was to create a full database of all physical assets - you know, like telephone poles, transformers, etc., all the way up to entire power stations. Once the database itself was populated, someone (ie Dave) had to write the queries that would generate usable reports - no small task, in the days pre-SQL. Anyone who's ever done anything with trying to generate reports from a database, even at the MS Access level, knows it takes some tinkering; back in those days, it took a LOT of tinkering.
After a week or so of work, he was happy with his first version of the report, so went ahead and ran it against the live database. It looked pretty good, except for being about £250million (at the time, the value of approximately 1 power station) short. This happened shortly before lunchtime on Friday, and as he was walking down the office hallway to pick up a printout, he passed the project accountant, Mervyn, who asked how the report was coming.
"Well, we appear to be short a power station."
This is the wrong thing to tell an accountant. Mervyn promptly freaked out, and demanded what Dave was going to do about the problem.
"It's lunchtime. I'm going to go get a sandwich and a pint." As one did.
And that's precisely what he did do, leaving a squawking Mervyn in his wake. Sometime during the second half of the sandwich, as he was running through the code in his head, he figured out where the problem was (one subset of data was getting skipped in the running order, so just needed to be added back in) so all was peachy again.
Unfortunately, when he got back to the office Mervyn was still highly incensed, and demanded that 4 copies of the report be printed and delivered to him first thing Monday morning.
"Mervyn, I really don't think you want to do that."
But nothing else would do - Mervyn had to have 4 copies of that report on his desk first thing Monday morning.
Since this was back in the days of mainframes, there was a full 24/7 crew, including a print shop. They also had one of those snazzy continuous-feed printers that would automatically change paper boxes/rolls, tape the seam, and keep printing. This came in awfully handy.
When Dave walked in on Monday morning, one of his coworkers beckoned him over to Mervyn's office.
Sitting on the desk, one on each corner, were 4 neatly arranged stacks of continuous feed printout, each about 6 feet high.
When Mervyn came in, he apparently just sat down at the desk without saying a word. The gigantic printouts disappeared shortly afterward. And he never asked for a printout of the full report again.
Dave said he never did find out how they got all those printouts onto the desk.