I worked for one of the large insurance companies in Hartford when I was given a project to program. Actually, I was to do half the work and a fellow programmer, Joe, was to do the other half. The interface for the user allowed for several dollar and cents fields to be keyed in for the user. I wrote a quick routine to pass all my dollar and cents fields through. The routine would strip out periods, commas, dolla I worked for one of the large insurance companies in Hartford when I was given a project to program. Actually, I was to do half the work and a fellow programmer, Joe, was to do the other half. The interface for the user allowed for several dollar and cents fields to be keyed in for the user. I wrote a quick routine to pass all my dollar and cents fields through. The routine would strip out periods, commas, dollar signs, cents signs, then align the decimal in the field and pad with zeros to the right and left as necessary. This method allowed the user to enter “1” for a dollar or “.1” for ten cents or “1,000” for a thousand dollars, and so on. With the interface that Joe wrote, the user had to enter “0000000100” for a dollar or “0000000010” for ten cents or “0000100000” for a thousand dollars. The user could not enter anything but numeric data (no commas or decimal points) or his program would abend. The boss, Bebe, told me that I had to change mine to work like Joe’s. I couldn’t believe it. I argued of course but she finally said that if users saw mine, they wouldn’t accept Joe’s. I suggested that Joe change his. Bebe said that Joe didn’t have time. I offered to do the coding for Joe. Bebe said no. Our argument ended when Bebe, red in the face, pounded her fist on the desk and said, “It boils down to this. I’m the boss and you’ll do it my way!” I cringed as I modified my code. I was eventually told that I was performing poorly on the project and was put on probation. I left the company and last I knew Joe was still there writing bad code. Data Management