Chuck wandered around but was having little success finding Randy.  About ten minutes into his search he found him, sitting on the floor of the computer room behind a disk drive with a service manual, reading it.  “Vince wants you in the conference room.”

“He’ll have to wait. I’m looking at something here.”

“Do you want to have me go tell him that?”

“If you want to, go ahead, but if you can just wait thirty seconds I’ll be done.”

Chuck watched as Randy pulled a cover off the back of a disk drive and looked inside.  He smiled, “That’s it,” closed the cover, put the book back in the rack and started to the conference room.  Randy was as good with hardware as he was with programming.  Chuck tried to catch up as the three inch shorter Randy out paced him to the room. 

“That’s what?”

“Tell you later, it’ll take too long now.  You have to understand disk drives for it to make sense.  To understand disk drives you have to understand data format.  To understand that you have to know what bits and bytes mean.  I am not sure anyone here can grasp that.  At least you have an excuse.  You are new.”  He said as he pulled the conference room door open and vaulted inside with a big smile.  “You want something?”

Vince nodded him to a seat. “These guys claim the allocation portion of the new system needs massive work before year end, what do you think about it?”

“I think they have the same problem I told them they had when they built the mess.  They ignored me then. Why do they want to hear what I have to say now?  I think it would be good for them to bail the boat one time.”

“I understand.  They tell me they have a problem and I want to be sure there isn’t a solution other than expanding all of these files.”

“There is another solution if you wait to do anything till December 69, IBM is promising an alternate sort sequence in their sort. It might do the job.”