Re: What do you do in real life?

[winston19842005 <bjjlyates@NOSPAMbellsouth.net>]

Wow. I'm depressed.

I started out about 20 years ago as a computer operator.

Later, I rose to the level of "Infrastructure Analyst", working for EDS on
the GTE/Verizon Wireless account. I worked with the vendor and the customer
helping to turn the vendor's POS application (double entendre!) into
something worthy. This was from 1997 to 2002. Our application was chosen as
the one POS app to take them through Y2K.

Not only vendor management, but supporting code, including code that ran
monthend reports (through "keystroke files"), ftp's, IQ ad-hoc reporting,
technical support, 2nd (and later 3rd) tier problem resolution. Wrote a lot
of back-end code in awk and C to manage application issues like the "invoice
underwrite" issue (stores are assigned ranges of invoices - if store A runs
into store B's range, their invoices are not recorded in favor of keeping
B's, even though B's may be several years old).

Did QA testing, installation, responsible for backup&recovery planning.

Did a fix to the IQ ad hoc reporting tool after a Y2K "patch" produced
missing data and reports went from 20 minutes to 5 hour run-times. Basically
rewrote a routine that did date calculations/conversions from file i/o to a
simple table-lookup. The file i/o introduced file-locking issues (and the
overpaid programmer did no error checking). Mine was elegant. All I got was
my name in the source code...

Also, became part of the account Systems team, doing OS installs
(VMS/Alpha), multinet upgrades, disk maintenance, etc...

Today, I'm a computer operator.

Now you know why I'm depressed...