Unacceptable Losses

I began my career as a computer operator for a large furniture manufacturer. One of the first surprises was the amount of physical labor involved in the job. From boxes of punched cards to boxes of printer paper, it seemed that I was always lugging something. The biggest surprise, however, was the emergency procedure.

I knew what to do, when an alarm sounded. “Immediately walk to the nearest exit” had been the mantra chanted by my teachers in elementary school and it was upheld by the sadistic administrators who favored 3am drills at my college dorm.

“First”, the lead operator explained, “you must shut down the computer.”

What? Shutting down the mainframe involved more than flipping a switch. The process took about five minutes. I pictured myself surrounded by smoke and flames, waiting for the computer to shut down. If the computer was going to melt into a puddle of plastic and metal, did it really matter if the power was on or off?

“While the computer is shutting down, use the time to fill the rolling cart with the most current data tapes. Then take them to the building across the street.”

I breathed a sigh as I saw myself racing from the building with the rolling cart.

“Return to the computer room as many times as possible until all the tapes have been removed.”

There were at least ten rows of data tape storage, over eight feet in length and reaching to the ceiling. I nodded my head, but in my heart, I knew I would run.

Thankfully, I was never put to the test. Later, I would learn that data tapes were duplicated every day and stored in a building several miles from the main plant. The tapes in the computer room were just added protection against data loss. The inability to recover data would have been catastrophic for the company and they weren’t taking any chances. Neither was I.