Chapter 2

After that, it was anticlimactic. The next morning Tom Leech called Lydia and said he'd received her resume and when could she come in for an interview? She told him that she was available anytime and he asked her to come in at two PM that same day.

Lydia was nervous; she'd never had a formal job interview before. She had no idea what to expect; so she arrived early. The address belonged to a huge building, relatively new, that looked like a giant storage shed made of steel siding. In front was an ample parking lot, almost full of cars, and a retail store that sold electrical supplies. The store was semi-detached from the main building and at least resembled something more like a store than a warehouse. On the other side of the main building was a little concrete walkway that led to a smaller set of double glass doors with the words "Corporate Offices" above them.

Inside, out of the strong Arizona summer sun, was a small antechamber with a glass window on one side, and a set of locked double wooden doors leading inside, some chairs and a table with magazines. A receptionist sat behind the window and she looked up when Lydia came in.

"I'm here to see Mr. Leech," Lydia told her. "My name is Lydia Hernandez. I have an appointment."

The receptionist was a thin redheaded woman, not much older than Lydia, who favored chewing gum. She told Lydia to have a seat and said that Mr. Leech would be right out; then she started dialing.

A minute later a man came through the wooden doors and held out his hand, "Tom Leech, Miss Hernandez, thank you for coming." He was in his mid-40s, medium-height, with a small beer belly. He was wearing a white shirt and tie, slacks, but no coat. That was something she was used to from the University. They shook hands and he led her to the computer room.

The entrance door opened into a hallway, and formed part of a four-way junction of halls. Straight ahead of them was about forty feet of corridor ending in double swinging doors. Through the small windows set in each she could see what looked like a warehouse beyond.

Lydia was led to her left, north, past a series of smaller offices, where a number of people were working with papers or talking on the phone. Some of the rooms they passed were sizeable; others were single person offices, all seemingly jumbled together. At the end of the hall there was another set of double doors, this time with a little keypad to one side. Sure enough, that was the computer room. Instead of working the keypad, Tom Leech just opened the door and went in.

The room was large, well lit, and the center of the space was filled with a computer. She'd seen most of the computers at the University; this one did a good job of filling the middle of the floor, but still was tiny compared to what she was used to. In front of them as they came in were two workstations on desks and there was another kitty-corner across the room. Mr. Leech turned hard right and led her to a tiny, windowless office, obviously his. She sat in the indicated chair, more nervous than ever.

He ran over the duties of the position, and then reviewed her resume. Lydia had studied the copy that Jason had given her and answered every question Mr. Leech asked. After about twenty minutes he made a little steeple of his fingers.

"I'm curious, Lydia." He tapped her resume. "You've spent your entire life in school. You haven't finished your degree work and you don't have that much left to go. You don't know this computer or the programming language. I have two questions for you. Why do you think you would be an asset to Valley Electric Supply? And why do you want to start a career so very different from what you have been working towards?"

Jason had told her the key to an interview was telling the truth. So she did. "Both of my parents were killed in a traffic accident a few months ago." He nodded, but said nothing.

That was nice, after a while she'd gotten tired of platitudes and sympathy that weren't really meant.

"I have six younger brothers and sisters and one older brother. My father was a maintenance worker for the City of Phoenix. My mother stayed home to raise us. Now, thanks to my father's insurance, we have some money and I've had some time to think. I don't know what I want anymore. I thought perhaps it was time to get out of my ivory tower and see what the real world is like.

"As for the first part of your question, I guess I'm prejudiced. To me a computer is nothing but a function box. On one end you have input, keyboard, tape, punched cards." Mr. Leech grimaced at the latter and she laughed. "Whatever. There's a CPU that does what some programmer has told the computer to do with the input. On the downstream end is the output; printer, tape or what have you. All of the information is processed by the computer with some kind of computer language. I know COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Basic, some APL, some PL/1 and assembler. I don't know what language this computer uses, but I'm sure that I can learn it."

He nodded. "There are only thirty-eight operation codes in RPG. The average programmer can learn them in a day or two. The Job Control Language is a little more complicated, but compared to mainframe JCL, a Sunday school picnic."

Lydia suddenly realized that she had nearly blurted out the name of the computer and the language a moment before. She wasn't supposed to know them yet. Better to get that out of the way. "What kind of machine do you have?" she asked, "I saw the IBM logo all over everything."

He explained their computer system for some minutes. It was fascinating; the University had nothing like this. Then he went on to explain that there was more to the system than met the eye. In addition to this store and warehouse, the company had another store across town in Glendale, as well as a warehouse and another store in Tucson, and another store in Flagstaff. All were tied into the main computer by phone.

He talked in general about how their System 38 worked, and about their network. The university had some small networks at school, and it was tied into some larger networks like ARPANET and PLATO, but this was small and elegant!

Somehow they ended up discussing personal computers; both of them had Apple ]['s and both of them were thinking about getting one of the new generation of computers, either the recently announced IBM PC or the forthcoming Apple Lisa. Tom Leech thought the Lisa was cute and elegant; Lydia thought it was elegant but ugly. Neither of them had much use for the IBM PC -- their Apple ][s blew it away.

Suddenly she noticed it was four o'clock. Tom saw her glance at her watch and laughed. "Yeah, time flies when you're having fun. When can you start?"

"Pardon?" she asked. It had been awfully fast, right out of the blue.

"You're hired. When can you start?"

He saw her hesitate, and then laughed. "I'm too eager by half!" He started explaining the benefits, information about the company and finally, "Okay, now I'm almost back to the 'You're hired' line." He quoted her a salary that was, to her way of thinking, ridiculously high. She was going to go from $2700 a year as a graduate assistant to over $16,000? Poppa had made only a little more and he'd spent decades working up to it.

Then he added, "And a salary review after 90 days, depending on how well you've come along, you can look at another four to six percent then, another review at nine months, probably a six to eight percent boost, then twice a year after that. Now, if you want the job, it's yours. When could you start?"

He could see that she was still unsettled. "I'm sorry, Lydia. Do you have any questions?"

In truth she did. The lawyer had explained that part of her father's pension benefits included a year of medical coverage at the rate Poppa had been paying for it. The lawyer had also told her that she should try to locate other coverage sooner, because private medical coverage for so many was very expensive and her father's insurance had been subsidized by the city. She asked Tom Leech if the medical coverage offered by the company would cover her younger brothers and sisters.

"I think so. But you're right; you need to know for sure. Wait a second." He picked up the phone and dialed three numbers. He'd been interrupted a half dozen times with calls; problems that he briskly handled.

"Anna, this is Tom. A woman I'm interviewing has some questions about our health insurance plan." He explained the problem to her and listened to the inaudible reply.

"Okay." He turned to Lydia, hanging up. "The answer is, in short, yes. In long, well, like any dependents they are covered only until eighteen and they no longer live at home or twenty-two and attending school full time, which ever occurs first."

Lydia nodded.

"Can I ask now?"

She laughed. "Yes ... and yes. I'm free now. I can start anytime."

"Tomorrow?" he went on.

"Sure. When should I be here?"

"I don't normally get in until around nine. I'll have Anna get the paperwork going. When you come in, ask for Anna in Personnel. Anna will get her pound of pulp from you. By the time you're finished with her I should be in, and we can go on from there."

He picked a loose-leaf binder from a shelf of manuals above his desk. "Here, this something right up your alley. Homework." It was a thin manual titled, "Introduction to RPG." He waved at the shelf grandly. "If you get done with that one any time soon, there are a few more." There were at least three feet of manuals on the shelf.

He picked up the phone again and told the woman at the other end he'd hired Lydia and would be down shortly with her particulars. There was a short discussion and a look of displeasure crossed his face. He turned back to her.

"I'm sorry, Lydia. I'm still forgetting how to do this. We recently outsourced our Human Resources and I'm still getting used to all their procedures. Actually, I hate all of this bureaucratic BS. You need to fill out an application. In the blank where it says expected salary, put down what I told you."

He handed her an application, and then another piece of paper.

"And this. I really should have gone over this. Anna reminded me and I did have trouble on this before. It's your job description."

Lydia looked the page over; it seemed pretty straight-forward, describing what the job entailed.

Tom tapped the part that he wanted her to note. "This part about helping with the operation of the computer, changing forms in the printers, helping with user problems around the net." He laughed sarcastically.

"Even after a year of this we still get a couple of calls a week from one location or another. 'The printer isn't working!' whereupon you ask, 'Have you turned it on?' and the clerk on the other end goes, 'Oh yeah, I forgot.'"

Lydia laughed, but he shook his head. "Seriously, it's true; it's a real problem you are going to have to deal with. Worse, the turnover in some of the stores is so bad that as soon as one person is trained, there's someone new."

"I don't have a problem with answering questions or helping out any way I can," Lydia told him.

"That's good. A person I hired a couple of months ago thought that since he was a programmer, he was above that sort of thing. He couldn't be bothered to change paper even on the printer in here and that he didn't have to help with net problems. We're a small company; we don't stand on formality here.

"Everyone pitches in when there's a problem. I change paper in the printers, I tell the users to turn the printers on; one of the women from the credit department gets in at six AM, and she checks to make sure all of the phone lines are up for the various stores and warehouses. Some mornings the Comptroller gets here first and he does it. Like I said, we all pitch in."

Lydia filled out the application and initialed the job description, while sitting at one of the desks in the outer room. After a minute Tom came out and sat down on a chair next to her and handed her a blank slip of paper. "Write down the password you want. I've about got your user profile set up. You'll be able to sign on in the morning."

She wrote down the first word that came into her head, which was a mistake, she saw, when she handed it to him.

"SPECTATOR, nice and long," he told her, but gave her a strange look. She couldn't believe she'd done anything that dumb. "As a programmer you'll have to change yours once a month."

Lydia nodded, and asked as casually as she could muster, "Do you know everybody's password?"

He nodded. "Yep, a weakness in the security, I know. IBM says that someday they'll fix it. As security officer I can change anything I want on the system. That's too much power, but right now there's not much I can do about it, except keep the security password locked up."

She didn't get home that night until nearly six, and it wasn't until nine that she could sit down with the books Tom had given her. More and more she was learning how much work Momma and Poppa had done in raising a brood like them.

The others were not happy to hear that she was going to work when she told them over dinner. Only Rico asked the "why" question. Partly she told the truth.

"I can't sit around the house all day. I'm not Momma. I want to have a life of my own. I don't know what to do with it right now. This is an experiment. If I don't like it, I'll quit. But I'm not going to sit around the house for the rest of my life!"

The boys looked at her and she realized she was crying. They'd lost so much! For all of the gains, she'd give it all up in a second to go back to the way they had been. Except there was no going back. She found herself being hugged by four warm bodies. It felt very good.

"I'm sorry," she said with what dignity she could muster. "I am getting to be an old woman already!" The boys protested that she was the most beautiful girl they knew. Her two sisters merely hugged her tightly. They all missed their parents!

Lydia had spent a couple of hours reading the night before, nearly finishing the book on basic business and reading a few chunks from the accounting book. It wasn't as easy as the other, by a long ways, but still it wasn't very complicated. The programming book wasn't very complicated either, but she had enough experience with programming languages to know it didn't take many options to make a language very powerful.

The next few days went quickly, as there was a great deal to learn. Tom spent considerable time with her, showing her the basics of where program files were located, how they were organized, and how to compile a program. It was fairly straightforward considering what you had to do on the main frames she'd worked on before.

Tom agreed. "The whole IBM System 3/X line has been designed to let the computer do most of the scut work for you. The system handles how much memory programs are going to use and much more besides." It was incredible what the machine did, in fact.

The computer was designed to be a relational database computer; relational and database were two of the current crop buzz words you heard everywhere. But this computer actually did a lot of what other systems only promised -- and did it well. It had been one thing to study theory; this was the real thing. She was deeply impressed by what was clearly a real world solution to what she'd learned about in her classes. The learning curve was steep, though.

On her third morning, Tom surprised her. "I have a program change for you. I apologize at the outset that it's so trivial, but you have to start someplace." He showed her a report that had a misspelling in the title. "We can't have report titles misspelled, you know," he joked. "The users start thinking they're better than we are. So, fix it, please. Make the changes, bring me a copy of the changed source, with your changes highlighted." Lydia nodded. He hesitated, then turned and left.

It wasn't much of a report, a short sales summary, titled "SALES SUMMERY" that listed the sales by customer from the biggest customer to the smallest. She spent an hour going over the program, which wasn't very long, before she made the change to "SUMMARY". She carefully documented the change in the program, printed up a new copy of the source, used a yellow highlighter on the change and was about to get up to hand it to Tom when she stopped.

"Whoa, Lydia!" she mumbled to herself. "What's wrong with this picture? Is this how you did it at school?" The answer to that question was: sort of. Usually you just fired off the test and checked the results. But had she ever worked on someone else's stuff before? No.

You owed them a test print out to show what you had done actually worked. She suspected that in the business world, they were at least that careful. Thinking about it, she realized that with money at stake, they were probably more careful. How careful was careful?

She looked at the program again. There was nothing hidden; it simply read the file and wrote the report. It should be safe to test, but she didn't know the testing protocol. Were there test files with known data? Should she create test data? She checked the production file. There were nearly a half million records in it! She picked up her work and went into Tom's office and told him she was ready to test.

Tom looked over the changes without comment and then asked, "How would you go about testing this?"

Lydia explained that since the program didn't update any files she felt confident that she could run it against production. The problem was that the file was awfully large. She was used to having to pay for CPU time and using up so much at once, just to test, was alien to her. Tom was patient, showing her how to point the program at the production files and still call the test version instead of the production version of the changed program.

When she tried to call the program manually she got a message saying that there was a parameter error. Lydia remembered that there had been parameters that the program required. She remembered, vaguely, how to do that, and tried for half an hour to get it to work. It didn't work; her test program kept crashing. Finally Tom took pity on her and told her how to get to the Comptroller's menu where the program was called.

"That's the menu option to run that report." He pointed to the screen.

She selected the option without thinking, and got a little prompt screen to ask her what month to run the report for. Lydia filled in the blanks and was about to start the program running, when a little warning bell went off in her head. Tom was standing next to her, not saying anything, his face expressionless (Poppa would have loved playing poker with him!). She suddenly backed off. She was doing something wrong! She had to be. She looked carefully at everything that she saw on the screen; everything was filled in right, she was sure of it. Still, there was something amiss. She looked everything over again.

"I'd like to go to lunch here sometime, Lydia," her boss said, the merest hint of impatience in his voice. His face was still expressionless though. Something really was wrong!

She smiled at him. "Sorry, one last question. I notice the program number on the screen is different than the program I'm testing. Is that important?"

He nodded. "How do you suppose your program works?"

She explained to Tom what she thought it did.

He nodded. "That's accurate enough. However, the software package Valley bought when it first acquired the computer is fond of generic parameter programs. This one gets a month and year and validates them. In this case, it doesn't do anything else. However, sometimes it might not. An extract program might be needed and that might update files. So maybe it wouldn't be a good idea. You have to check and see. And, of course, there is the length of time this will run -- about a half hour. You must remember that the programmer's jobs are single-threaded; that is, only one runs at a time. User jobs may or may not be, depending on their individual requirements. If you run this test, you and I might as well go to lunch because we won't get any compiles or other tests done in that time."

Lydia moved to cancel the test but Tom shook his head. "On the other hand, it is lunch time, and I make it a point to take new programmers to lunch after their first few days. Now's the time for us. Kick off your test run and let's go. There's a Mexican place down the street that has good chips and salsa. Putrid everything else, but good chips and salsa. Come on!"

Tom drove an older Datsun hatchback. He had to move a pile of papers from the passenger seat so that she could sit down. The restaurant was more her style and she promptly ordered some green chili enchiladas and a glass of ice tea. Tom looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "Here it is, the first time I've ever taken a Mexican to a Mexican restaurant, and all you do is order enchiladas and tea?"

It wasn't the first time she'd heard something like that. "Tom, I was born in this country. My father wasn't born here, but he came here when he was a baby. My mother was born here, too. I'm as Mexican as you are." She was a little curt.