Posted on 03/20/2005 by cobolGuy
Viewed: 735 times
How a brash new employee defied the odds and saved the day
As a young brand new employee at a large Insurance company back in the late 60s, I had just completed a six month Information Technology training class, and had all of three months actual computer programming work experience, but all the confidence of youth, when a major problem arose involving the year end mailing of 1099 tax documents to insurance agents.
The problem was urgent, because the first mailing had gone out at the end of January, when we started being flooded with calls saying the dollar amounts were all too high. There was now only a week left before the federal mailing deadline, and it looked like a full year’s worth of rerun processing of a major computer system, involving hundreds of hours of computer time was going to be needed.
An urgent large planning meeting was set up with high level management personnel from all involved areas, to lay out all the processing efforts that would be needed. My supervisor invited me to attend the meeting, saying: "This will be a good learning experience for you. Sit in the back of the room, stay silent and don’t attract attention".
At the late Friday afternoon meeting, the first speaker explained to everyone what had gone wrong. It seemed that in two different months, a certain input stream on tape (just one of many tapes) had been inputted twice, causing the 1099 amounts to be inflated for the year.
The "plan" called for a complete rerun of all weekly and monthly programs, a task that would take over a calendar week to complete.
I was absolutely bursting with a better solution. The answer was SIMPLE! All that was needed was to make a minor change to one program in the monthly series, to reverse the signs on the amounts, and just run in the two doubled tapes, which would back out the inflated amounts. The whole process could, in my opinion, be done over the weekend. They REALLY didn’t need to do what they were planning!
Finally I could contain myself no longer.
"Excuse me." I said.
The leader of the meeting, Bob Heckler, a scary looking chain smoking white haired man who most people feared, looked up, saw who had spoken, - and continued on as if nothing had been said. My supervisor frantically motioned for me to be quiet.
"EXCUSE ME, BUT I REALLY CAN FIX THIS PROBLEM FOR YOU EASILY." I said again.
Again, I was ignored, and the meeting continued as if nothing had happened.
I stood up and put my hands on the table.
"EXCUSE ME, BUT I REALLY CAN FIX THIS PROBLEM FOR YOU EASILY AND QUICKLY." "YOU DON’T NEED TO DO ALL THIS." I said.
The entire room went suddenly completely silent. Bob Heckler turned to look at me and smirked, "YOU can fix this problem for us?"
I said Yes, that all that was needed was to change the monthly program to reverse the signs and just process two tapes in. The full year’s rerun was not needed. I could fix it over the weekend.
Bob Heckler again smirked. "Go do it right now then" he said, "while we will continue our planning meeting." I got up and left the room.
Within an hour I had identified the changes to three different programs in the monthly processing run, and had begun work changing and recompiling the programs. The meeting was still in process.
I called computer operations and told them I had been authorized to make an emergency fix to the 1099 system and would need a few hours of computer time. I was told I could only have time Friday evening, because the entire weekend starting Saturday was going to be tied up with some major reruns that were still being planned.
I called my wife and said I would not be home tonight, as I had to fix a major problem in the 1099 system.
By late Friday, I not only had the changes made, but was starting the two partial reruns, which ran until early Saturday morning. I spent all day Saturday checking the numbers on thousands of 1099 forms, and all day Sunday getting the forms printed. On Monday morning, after working over 40 hours straight, I carted all the 1099 forms, ready for mailing, up to Mr. Heckler’s office. It turned out that their planning efforts were more complicated than thought in the Friday meeting, so another meeting had been planned for Monday, and no actual reruns had yet been started. Instead of the second meeting, the user area spent several hours verifying that I had indeed fixed the problem for them.
Needless to say, the eager young man had "made his spurs". I received a 15% raise, and a promotion with another raise 3 months later. Never after that was I ignored when I spoke up in a meeting!
POST A COMMENTHaveADamnNiceDay(01/26/2006)
HOLY CRAP! Way to go, dude! It's nice to see a young and capable person take a bold stand when it really counts! Kudos for refusing to be ignored! ^_^
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