The Man Who Mistook His Cranberry Juice for a Magnetic Tape

DATELINE:  Undisclosed location in New Jersey, 1997.  

The late 1990's marked the end of the era at Standard Networks in which developers were sent into meatspace to install software, encountering actual customers in the flesh.  On this occasion, I ventured out to a concern in New Jersey whose business was either curing cancer, or dunning delinquent debtors - I won't say which.  I will mention seeing a call center where operators spoke to "customers" while entering notes into a mainframe application IN ALL UPPER CASE, even though both their terminals and the EBCDIC character set certainly supported lower case.

My job was to install our new web-enabling software alongside their copy of one of our more established TCP-to-mainframe products.  I was a bit nervous because the job also entailed upgrading the existing product, and I wasn't very familiar with that product.  Fortunately, Dale was available to lend his expertise.

The business had a very small IT department, headed by a fellow whom I'll call Ricky.  As I installed the software, I tried to explain what I was doing and what the software would do for him.  It soon became clear that Ricky wasn't very interested, and wasn't a very technical fellow - an awkward situation under the circumstances.  

As I recall, there were a couple of other people in the department.  One of them had nothing to do with the networking side and wasn't going to be involved in the installation, maintenance, or use of the software.  

The other, whom I'll call Sven, was really the one I needed to talk to. However, Sven had been bitten by a spider a few weeks previously, and was having a hard time getting over it.  At the time I was there, he was still showing up to work only a few hours a week.  I got Ricky to talk him into coming in on the last day I was there.  Sven was still pretty rattled by the time I talked to him, and I'm not sure how much of what I said sank in.  However, I was able to complete installation of the software and show him the toy application I wrote for them.

What Ricky lacked in technical acumen he made up for in hospitality.  He showed me around and advised me on the local attractions, to the extent there were any.  

While driving around, I pulled into a gas station, and was surprised to see that there were no self-serve pumps.  I could see no alternative but to let the attendant pump the gas for me, figuring this was some old ma-and-pa station that was stuck in the past.  I was astonished to hear Ricky tell me that no gas stations in New Jersey allowed customers to pump their own gas.  It sounded so backwards to me that I wasn't sure whether Ricky was pulling my leg.

When I got back home, I decided to send Ricky a token of my appreciation for his kindness.  I  shipped him some Wisconsin goodies, including a bottle of cranberry juice.  My wife, a cranberry researcher, took delight in the fact that Wisconsin had surpassed Massachusetts and New Jersey to become the top cranberry-producing state in the nation.  The cranberry juice, in addition to being a gift, was also a jibe at a rival state.  I hoped I wasn't being too hard on poor, third-place New Jersey.

I sent off the package.  Weeks went by, and nothing but crickets from New Jersey.  Was Ricky angry that I'd insulted the cranberry-producing abilities of his state?  Finally I called Ricky on some pretext, and casually asked him if he'd received a package from me.  He said yes, and apologized that he hadn't had a chance to install the software yet.

It turned out that Ricky had assumed that the box contained a magnetic tape with a software update.  He hadn't wanted to deal with it, so he set it aside.  Further discussion revealed that, to my surprise, he spent very little time thinking about cranberries and state rivalries.

The moral of the story is:  do not ascribe to cranberries that which can be adequately explained by magnetic tapes.

Customer Testimonial

DATELINE: Undisclosed location on the Atlantic seaboard, 1998: Before MOVEit, there was a product at Standard Networks named OpenIT, a mainframe connectivity product. I wrote its FTP server using asynchronous Microsoft networking APIs that were fashionable at the time.

The FTP server tested out on our Madison mini-mainframe, so I flew out to install it at a customer site - a large financial services company. We tested successfully on their dev system, so I installed the package on their production mainframe. Within 20 minutes, the FTP server locked up and had to be restarted. I scratched my head and looked through the code. The server locked up again. This was a huge site that processed a lot of traffic, and having to bounce the FTP server wasn't good. For reasons I don't recall, it didn't seem practical to revert to the software they had been using before. The head guy, "Bob," ran around, his face beet red with anger, shouting "JE*** CH****, I FEEL LIKE KILLING MYSELF!". I didn't think he was really going to kill himself, but I was concerned that he was going to have a heart attack. Another fellow actually brought a loaded gun into the office, though this was a coincidence, as he had little to do with this project. (This guy was just showing off his new gun, and his colleagues convinced him to put it back in his car.)

For some reason, around this time I started to get a headache. I walked around the office looking for a medical supplies kit. Finding none, I eventually asked a few people, including "Mike," whether they knew where I could find some aspirin. No one could help me. As I wandered around looking for more people to buttonhole, I passed Mike again. He said "Say, would Advil be good enough?" I said yes, Advil would be an adequate substitute for aspirin to treat my headache. I also made a note to speak more precisely in the future.

Eventually I figured out that I had misunderstood one of the arguments to a Microsoft function. After a one-line fix, the FTP server ran smoothly in production.

During my stay at the customer site, I mostly hung out with my main technical contact and his sidekick. During the day, I tried not to eavesdrop when he called his soon-to-be ex-wife and young children, explaining how daddy still loved them even though he wasn't going to be seeing them anymore. At dinner, the sidekick regaled us with unsavory and, to any right-thinking individual, unflattering details of his personal life. Even though he was technically astute, I don't think he realized what an extremely negative impression he was making on me.

In order to update the dev system, I had to be logged in to a company PC with an employee account. Of course, I didn't have an employee account, so my contact let me use his account. He warned me that after he left for the day, I would have to move the mouse every 10 minutes, or the screensaver would kick in, requiring his password. And of course he wasn't allowed to tell me the password. I got pretty good at walking over to his system to move the mouse, but one night I had to quit work "early" when I got engrossed on my laptop for too long and got locked out of his system.

On the last day, I gave a presentation on the new software I had installed. As I wrapped up, my laptop died. I found that even though I had plugged it in, it had been running on the battery, which had fully discharged. Unbeknownst to me, in that recently-remodelled conference room, the only power outlet that worked was the one powering the digital projector. My audience thought it was hilarious that I hadn't realized that I was running on the battery throughout the presentation. I left amidst great merriment. Always leave them laughing.

My boss had once remarked that financial services people were more interesting than one might expect. I never doubted him after that trip.

How a Dearth of Coonhounds Led to My Meeting Bill Joy

DATELINE: East Lansing, MI, ca. 1992. 

In the early 1990s, the Michigan State University Physical Plant oversaw a huge and in some ways sophisticated physical campus infrastructure.

In the 1980s, the Physical Plant had wired nearly all of the buildings on campus for cable TV, foreseeing that instructional video was the wave of the future. Instructional video may not have panned out quite as they had predicted, but more importantly, while installing the cabling the Physical Plant had strung additional dark cable, for future unspecified purposes. Soon enough, high speed local area networks became all the rage, and MSU was able to be on the forefront by attaching broadband Ethernet cable modems to the existing cabling. The modems turned out to be very finicky, requiring frequent tuning, and eventually we had to restring fiber optic. However, we enjoyed good service 98% of the time, when other campuses lacked an integrated high-speed campus-wide network.  

Another aspect of our first campus Ethernet network that wasn't great was the fact the entire 42,000-student campus was served by a single, unrouted network. Students using word processors in the public microcomputer labs sometimes suffered poor performance due to the PC's CPUs being interrupted frequently by the unsophisticated network adapters to handle ARP requests. Eventually we were forced to bite the bullet and install routers in place of the Ethernet bridges in each building, reducing campus-wide ARP flooding.

The Physical Plant was also an early adopter of CAD systems to manage blueprints of buildings and of the extensive outdoor plantings for which the Michigan State campus is well known. My plant scientist wife told me of a seed time capsule planted on campus in the 1800's by botanist W. J. Beal.  Only three living persons knew where it was, she said, and she wasn't one of them. She was taken aback when I told her that I knew where it was, as a result of working with my colleague Alan, who had consulted with the Physical Plant on a setting up and running their CAD system.

A less modern part of the campus infrastructure was the campus-wide network of steam tunnels. These became notorious when the campus newspaper published an article about a student's suicide attempt in a steam tunnel.  The poor fellow had been an avid player of the mysterious and likely subversive game Dungeons and Dragons.  The resulting media furor led me to become skeptical about the very existence of the steam tunnels.  (I was incurious about how campus buildings actually were heated - odd, given that prior to college I had worked at an architectural firm, writing code to calculate the size of steam pipes.)  Years later, a colleague at the Computer Center showed me how to access the steam tunnels, and I was suitably impressed at the size and extent of the tunnels.  They really do exist.

This brings us to the campus electrical service.  

MSU had its own power plant.  It had sufficient capacity, as I recall, but fell short in the reliability department.  There were frequent power outages on campus.  They were a particular pain to those of us who worked at Computer Laboratory, as after a power failure, the ancient mainframe computer had brought back online slowly and painstakingly.  

Inevitably, it seemed, power failures were blamed on a raccoon having wandered into the power plant and committing an act of self-immolation.  It baffled me as to how this could be allowed to go on year after year.  I pictured an angry confrontation with the Physical Plant director the day after a power failure:

Provost:  Tomlinson, there was yet another campus power outage yesterday.  This is outrageous!  I've half a mind to have your job over this!

Tomlinson:  But boss, it was a raccoon - there was nothing we could do!

Provost:  Oh my god, a raccoon?  They're a force of nature that no man could possibly stop!  Very well, then, carry on, Tomlinson, carry on.

Years later, I came to be the owner of a Bluetick Coonhound. With no training or encouragement, this dog would willingly chase away raccoons, and have fun doing it. All it cost was a $75 adoption fee, some dog food, and occasional broccoli stalks as a treat.  (Note to readers:  you may wish to rethink your dreams of being reincarnated as my dog.) Evidently the Physical Plant, advanced though it may have been, was unfamiliar with coonhound technology. Either that, or there was a chronic shortage of coonhounds at the time.  

                                       #   #   #

One summer day, BSD Unix guru Bill Joy was due to give a lecture on campus. I decided to attend not because he and I grew up in adjoining Detroit suburbs, but because Michigan State was an avid user of BSD-derived Unixes. Our hardware included not only Sun workstations and servers, but also NeXTs, a Convex minisuper, and even an exotic BBN Butterfly - all running BSD-derived OSes, or at least BSD userland.

Because of the anticipated popularity of his talk, Joy was scheduled to speak in B-108 Wells Hall, the largest classroom at Michigan State, and the scene of many a stultifying American Thought and Language lecture. Unfortunately, fate - most likely in the form of a 10 pound masked critter - intervened, and the campus lost power. Knowing what the huge windowless classroom would be like without air-conditioning, the authorities declared the presentation cancelled.

Joy let it be known that he was willing to hold forth outside Wells Hall if anyone was interested. Strangely, though hundreds were willing to listen to Bill in a stuffy lecture hall, few were willing to hang out with him in the light of day. (I guess they must have been true computer nerds - more power to them.) Thus it came to be that Bill Joy and I and a small handful of others spent part of the afternoon sitting on the grass under an oak tree outside Wells Hall, near the Red Cedar River. I don't recall what we discussed, though I think this was before Joy's Luddite phase. But I do remember thinking that this is what college was all about. And just one coonhound could have prevented it.  

Greetings!

Hello, folks.

This is the place where I hold forth on history-related topics.

The first one is coming soon...

Mark Riordan