Thursday, October 04, 2007

Changes in and around

I felt like having a new template for this blog. It forewarned me that I'd lose stuff in the process. I'll have to put in some sidebar comments when I get the chance. And now, for the links...

I have a hard enough time with coding. I can't believe that I ever entertained thoughts of becoming a computer programmer. I have a certificate from an 18 month program at a vo-tech training school sending me in that direction. I did flow charts, and wrote code in BASIC, RPGII, and Cobol.

With vo-tech diploma in hand, I got a job in the N.O. CBD - operating a WANG mainframe. The CPU, and reel-to-reel tape drives had a big room of their own. I was responsible for giving people logons and simple putting out the small fire programming tasks. It's all I could handle of programming. My boss expected more, and had to settle for less.

Other details of my operations job (a one person operation), printing and distributing copious amounts of reports, keeping track of data as it cycled through three different offsite storage facilities (in case of disaster striking any area, backups were spread out), and retrieving data for lading it back onto the system for programmers and end-users of the large insurance corporation I worked for.

It was a little reminiscent of "Office"; cubicle city. Depending on your job title and importance in the hierarchy, the height of your cubicle and the view you had was a reward - window views were the most sought after.

I did backups daily, and took care of the mainframe which was always acting up. I had to very frequently have the technicians out, or work on it myself in tandem with remote WANG fixers in another state.

If that wasn't enough technical responsibility for an actress/astrologer type, I was also in charge of maintaining and fixing peripherals; 3 different types of printers. I was capable.

I am far away from that field, and in the land of groceries now. Oy.

I have had some very different jobs, but I still marvel that I ever was in the computer industry. That is so NOT me. At least, it's not the me I am now. I am Jupiter's Girl. Forget details. Let the Virgo/Geminis handle the details and be perfect about it. What's the bigger picture?

2 comments:

Kim Ayres said...

Can't you forecast when a computer's likely to crash by drawing up it's birthchart?

Now that would be handy :)

Jupiter's Girl said...

About 5 days ago, I downloaded a screensaver. That caused me nothing but headaches, so I downloaded a new browser. Here it is 3 days later, and a system restore (which took 2 hours), and I have caused myself much more work. These glitches are very frustrating. I am going to spend a lot of my day off tomorrow restoring software and files. Like I wanted to do that with my free time...

No predictability with user-unfriendly pc's, I'm afraid. Maybe Uranus is squaring it's Mercury. If I could discern by it's chart how to fix it, that might be handier :) I am just glad to be up and running again. Yay for tech support - which is me.