On Mon, 21 Dec 2015 22:40:15 -0500, Micky
wrote:
**I might have been called a math trainee, but I didn't do any math. I
was an errand boy, but they did give me time to read the manuals that
went with two early business machines. I forget the second one but
one was the card sorter, the one you saw on the $64,000 Question. It's
manual is really less than 2 pages but one paragraph is not
obvious,and it relates to another story from 13 years later when I was
working at the Office of Workers Comp.
I'll tell you the story here. As I said in another thread, I was a
claims examiner for the federal Office of Workers Compensation, at
45th and Broadway in NYC. Claims examiner sounds a lot better than it
is. At training they said we'd make decisions involving hundreds of
thousands of dollars (for permanent disability cases) but in fact,
they're never going to let someone in the first couple/few years make
a decision like that. we were basically pencil pushers.
To show how we were regarded, at one time there were stacks of
something that had to be put in numerical order. I didnt' want to
create 100 piles, but 11 years earlier I had read the manual for the
card sorter, and it gave a better way. First sort on the 1's column,
then on the 10's, then on the 100's, and so forth. This way you
only need to make 10 piles. It's counter intuitive to start with the
right hand columns, but it works that way and not the other way.
After the first step, the 221s, 131s, 541s are all together. After
you sort on the 10's column, the 721s, 221s, 521s are all together.
After the 100's column, if the numbers are no more than 1000, they are
all in the right order.
Four or five of us were on loan to a guy in an office 50 feet away,
and he came by and saw what I was doing, and he was nice enough, asked
me about it. I assured him it would work, but he didnt' believe me
and told me to do it the obvious, harder way. So I did. I think we
only spent 2 more hours on this job, but it's an example of how
arduous it has to be to be smart and work in a lowly job. It's
clear from reading biographies that some smart guys either go out on
their own or are in business where they can get promoted, but this
entry level job wasn't one of those
afaik. I was only there for about
3 months.