🚀 go-pugleaf

Here is a story from the time before computers, told to me by the IBM CE that
it happened to.  Although it is not strictly computer folklore, this kind of
stuff still goes on with real computers.

The IBM Customer Engineer had a customer who was leasing a 519 Reproducing
Punch, basically a punch card copier.  It had two feeds, one for reading
original card decks and the other for blank cards to be punched.  There was
a control panel which could be wired to do fancy kinds of copying.  The
machine could take options such as a mark sense reader and a card imprinter
(the 519 had a longer punch path than the 514 so this would fit) but the
customer was leasing a basic unit.

This particular machine had a tendency to jam.  Every time the young CE went
to the customer's office, he was met at the door by the DP supervisor, a large
woman with an incredible vocabulary who would yell at him the whole way from
the front door to the machine room in back, past all the pretty keypunch
operators.  About halfway along, the owner would join the party.  He was
a small whiny man who would complain about all the lost time and money it
was costing him because the machine was down.  As the CE cleared the massive
card jam in the punch feed, ripping and sawing out pieces of cards (anyone
remember card saws?), they would orbit constantly and continue the harangue.

Each time, after clearing the jam, he ran diagnostic decks with lace cards
and all sorts of hard things to copy, and the machine would perform
flawlessly.  He would close the covers, and with his entourage in tow,
make his way back through the keypunch room and leave.

He could see nothing wrong with the machine.  The jams kept getting worse.
He was starting to get pressure from his boss to find the problem and fix it.
A couple of times, he took another CE with him and they both looked at it.
Once, he took the whole punch feed out and carefully tweaked every adjustment
along the entire card path.  He kept the machine shiny and clean.  It always
ran perfectly when he was done, but the jams kept getting worse and the calls
more frequent.

Finally one day, after a particularly nasty jam, he was still in the building
when he was beeped again.  Instead of calling in, he turned around and went
straight back to the customer's office.  As usual, he was met at the door and
the verbal abuse started.  He went straight back to the machine and opened the
covers.  But this time he was to quick for them.  In addition to the worst jam
he had seen yet, there was, in the option slot in the punch feed, a card
imprinting unit.  It was dirty, in horrible mechanical shape, and crooked!
The customer had removed it each time he came so they wouldn't have to make
lease or maintenance payments.

Without saying a word, he pulled the imprinting option out, threw it
through their plate glass window onto the lawn, and left.


Disclaimer: All opinions are solely my own; any similarity to actual people
or events is purely coincidental.
-- 
Paul Pierce			|	p...@isc.intel.com
Intel Scientific Computers	|	...uunet!vrdxhq!verdix!intelisc!prp
15201 N.W. Greenbrier Pkwy.	|	...tektronix!ogicse!intelisc!prp
Beaverton, Oregon  97006	|	(503) 629-7677