WHO, ME? Rigid workplace cultures and youthful ambition do not mix
WHO, ME? The world of work is weird, so The Register records the worst of it every Monday in a reader-contributed column we call "Who, Me?" in which you admit to mistakes, and reveal your escapes.This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Terry" who told us of a summer job he worked in the 1980s."It was at a municipal IT facility, and everyone had a specific job to do, and woe unto you if you stepped over the line," he wrote.
Terry illustrated the workplace culture by telling The Register that not long before he started work, the facility had just replaced a punch clock with a clipboard on which staff recorded the times they arrived at and left the office.
"Everyone wrote 08:00-16:00, but being a young whipper-snapper, I cleverly wrote 07:53-16:01, or 08:02-16:04. That got me hauled off to face the boss for being late."When Terry wasn't tangling with management, his job involved programming an IBM mainframe. One day, he needed to move a program from one drive to another, a task that the mainframe front end didn't support."A colleague told me there was a MOVE command to do the job, so I ran it and my file disappeared from the source drive as expected," Terry wrote.But the file never reached the destination drive, so Terry's work was lost."Always one to collect receipts before taking any action, I looked into the MOVE command and found it was a batch program."
