Way back in the 1980s, my third real job, I worked at a government department in Information Services doing what could only be classed as menial labour. Once a day I'd take a trolley down to the 2nd floor at Cumberland House (now student accommodation for Vic Uni) on Willis Street in Wellington, pick up a dozen, or more, boxes of printed line flow paper from the page printers down there and dragged them back to the 8th floor. From there, I'd open the boxes and split the piles of paper into smaller stacks by Public Trust Office branch. They were then checked, the numbers balanced at the end, and if so, they were wrapped and posted to those branches, NZ wide.

Hardly computers in those days, more paper. So much paper. Another part of my job was to take some of that paper and feed it into a huge paper shredder in the basement of Public Trust head office down on Lambton Quay. It was a fun time seeing how many boxes of lineflow paper I could have feeding into the shredder at the same time until it jammed. So many boxes of paper lined up in the basement.

At some point after an appropriate apprenticeship I progressed to being allowed to do some real IS stuff, writing reports. That involved me writing some arcane query language, long before SQL existed for the data we were querying. SAS. I'd submit my report, wait for my turn on the shared govt computer, then look at the output that was only available as a printout. If there was a bug in the query, typo, dumbness, I'd fix it, and submit again, wait my turn, look at the print out. At the end of the month, my boss would be sent a bill for the seconds of CPU time consumed by the printing and the report writing.

After some small amount of training I was given some requests for information. One of which I struggled on, resubmitting over and over to get the data needed on the half box of paper. Being young and dumb, rather than asking for help, I persisted writing my SAS until I got it right. Only to be very embarrassed when Ms Dunlop called me into her office for me to explain the $300 something computing bill for that one report.

First, yes, all my managers where called Ms or Mrs or Mr. It wasn't until I'd been working at PT for about 3 years until I was brave enough to call any of them by their first name. And secondly, from memory I was being paid about $7 an hour, so I'd burned more than my weeks pay in a couple of days on CPU time. Lessons were learned.

Now, I smoke through way more than that in AWS Compute every day.

The Photo
It's a seat on the rather nice boardwalk at Awhitu Regional Park. We really recommend taking a picnic lunch and spending some time. If for nothing else to go see the world's biggest macrocarpa tree

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Posted: Sunday, 12 January, 2025 19:35

Captured: Sunday, 22 October, 2023 12:54

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