Walt Hendricks

The truncation that underpaid interest for eleven years

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.…

My first mainframe job was the night shift, and a woman named Dolores taught me everything

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…