August 18, 1978

Randy picked up a newsletter as he came in the plant.  He looked at the front page, there was Chuck, smiling.  The caption, “Chuck Daniels named Data Control Manager at PDD.”  Randy carried the paper to the section, dropped it on the desk in front of Greg.  “I told you we had two choices, fire him or make him a manager.  Put him where he didn’t write any more lousy code.”

“That’s not nice.”

As he walked away he snapped, “It’s not, but it’s true.  He didn’t get any better.  His last program here was still shit code.”

January 14, 1987

Dennis Wright pulled his truck as close to the fence of the substation as possible.  He pulled his coat on, pulled up the hood, made sure all of his tools were in the box, put on his gloves and climbed out into the swirling snow carrying his gear.  He got to the fence, unlocked the gate, slipped it open, went inside and re-locked it.  He was now inside the fence of a medium sized substation that supplied power to one fifth of the town.  He went to a cabinet, unlocked it, opened it and located the failed switching controller.  This was going to be one of those jobs.  The old controller was just a relay, the new one was solid state, in fact it was one of the newer ones with a computer processor on board.  He found the switch that locked the breaker on, it would only now turn off if the circuit were badly overloaded.  He then removed the old controller and slid the new one into the rack.  The red light on the back of the controller came on, then went out and was replaced by a green light.  He reached up and turned the override switch to off.   The power remained on. 

Dennis retreated to the warm cab of the truck and called dispatch on the radio.  A few minutes later he got the confirmation; the switch was functioning.  He should proceed to the next substation.  He rubbed his hands as he waited for a car to pass the access road.  This was a heck of a way to spend a day.

Jerry West was on the console when the switch came on line.  The control panel had been designed for the smart controllers, they were not available when it was installed so the older dumb ones were put in.  Jerry could control the switch remotely but if he lost communications with it the switch would go into dumb mode and only shut off it seriously overloaded.  He could now do some fine-tuning of the system.  He sent some commands to the switch, putting in parameters that it would use if the communication link failed, the switch was smart enough to store some commands and decision making logic.

My site Ralph Brandt

First, Previous and Next chapters Of Y2K

Y2k Chapter One Introduction

Y2k Chapter Six They Learn The Liability of Bad Code

Y2k Chapter Eight If You Cant Program Manage