Posts tagged #cobol on Dynamo Geeks: 3 posts from the community, most useful first.
I have been asked a few times on here what the worst bug of my career was. It was not mine, but I was the one who found where it lived, so I will tell it. In 2009 a retired schoolteacher walked into one of our branches with a passbook and a pocket calculator. She had been computing her own savings interest every month since 1998, out of habit, and for eleven years our figure had been a few cents lower than hers.…
Some of the younger folks here asked me, after a comment I left on another thread, how a person ends up doing COBOL for thirty-nine years. The honest answer is that I needed a job in 1986 and an insurance company on the Southbank was hiring night operators. I want to tell you about that job, and mostly about the woman who ran the night shift, because I have been thinking about her a great deal since I started…
Dear friends, My grandson tells me that nobody reads long posts any more. I have told him that I am 62 and I have time, and so, kindly, do you. This is a story from my first year in the bank, and it has a lesson at the end which I believe is still useful, although the machines have changed beyond recognition. I joined the data processing department of our bank's head office in Madras (it became Chennai only later)…
