Sneak preview:
ADDENDUM
Argh, why did I start reading that chapter on Assembler. I’ve never used that language. Part of the draw is that this book was published in 2008 and it ignores good advice I learned forty years earlier, such as always starting a variable name with a “v” and to hate the dreaded dot notation (when embedded). But worst is what I tagged years ago is “fall-through” code. This is code that presumes a certain condition will always occur by itself. Rather than meeting a specified criteria, the code will by itself "fall through" to the next command. One typical example is breaking out of loops by presuming the counter will always reach zero. It works great until years later some pencil-neck Google coder moves that routine or inserts a new command. I long ago learned to hard code every instance.
Now I’m itching to have a go at running a small assembler program just to say I’ve done it. One advantage I always had back at trade school was none of the other programmers, aides, tutors, or instructors during my eight or nine years back at school could type. I also learned not to key enter any code until the entire program worked “on paper”. I’ve been in many a classroom where everyone but myself immediately began clattering in code while I worked w pencil. I never missed a deadling and I handed in beautifully-documented code which often worked the first time. I wish I’d kept some for display.
Some of these classes between 1985 and 1988 are recorded in my journal, so we may see some of it yet. This was the era when courses were automatically reimbursed by the company, remember I’m the one who cooked up the phrase “to prepare for future performance standards”. Yep, that was me. I’ll overview it for you here, as we don’t know what will survive of the handwritten records.
During most of my stay at the company, they had a policy of rotating mid-level supervisors around. My department never had one for long and never one that gave a damn. They knew they would not be long, so often rubberstamped reimbursement requests as long as there were (I discovered) three plausible-sounding reasons for taking a course entered into the proper field of the paperwork. If I recall, I eventually got $48,000 in reimbursements, of which $16,000 was tuition.
Another juicy tidbit was that the school always sent some sort of notification who was top of the class, often just the receipt required to apply for the reimbursement. And I was top of the class in every course with a couple exceptions where I was second and once I was third. No supervisor was going to refuse his star performer. We are talking a lot of courses—and this is what led to my downfall in one sense. Somebody eventually noticed I had “more courses than the rest of the department put together” which I figured was a plus, but Lionel, the little round-headed man, had the opposite take.
I had never attempted to keep my performance a secret so I knew something would go wrong. Hell, whenever on some rare occasion I would recognize somebody else from the company in the classroom, I would always post the class lists in the lunch room for all to see. Invariable the other name was normally not even on the first page. But, by 1990, it was blatant I was training for another career if anything ever went wrong—and it did. Two things went wrong. One was deregulation, allowing other outfits like Sprint and Verizon to compete with the phone company monopoly, and two, the company began “hardening up” enforcing the Babbage system whereby no job in the company imparted any transferable skills. You will rarely find and ex-phone company employee working in a related type of job.
They put the department on shift work—which let to the actual reason I left the company. If you want people to work at midnight, you hire people to work at midnight. This is mentioned elsewhere, how they put only the department I was in on shift out of a company of 15,000 employees. It was to discipline others who were caught working two jobs, something the company validly prohibited as a condition of employment. While this was directed at somebody else, Lionel quickly noticed I objected and that was enough for him to commence his dirty work. (Yes, the same Lionel who, on the day I quit, walked past his office in front of the whole department and told him I honestly did not know that was his daughter.)
So, I was cut off course reimbursements, the reason given said “the company did not state there was a maximum, but if there had been one, I would certainly have exceeded it”. But by then, who cared? I had already earned two programming degrees and was completing my accounting certificate. While I never became an accountant, I became excellent office staff which paid even more. And all that is within the blog era so it’s in here somewhere.
