Real IT consulting with real people

When I was working in the tech department at our local university many years ago, one of my duties was to take shifts in the computer consulting office. The format was that staff and students could drop in without appointments for help with computing or programming problems. Most of the time it was pretty humdrum — problems to them were usually nothing we had not seen before — but it was a nice break from programming, and I got to talk to real, live people.

The most interesting thing I learned was to read upside-down because clients would sit across the table from me with their continuous form printouts (yes, it was that long ago). This turned out to be a remarkably valuable skill in later life when dealing with bank managers, potential employers, and so on.

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But as with any job, there were some memorable moments.

One end of term, a foreign post-doc grad student came in to see me. He had just completed his thesis, was returning to his native land, and wanted to send a second copy of his thesis and research files home on magnetic tape for security. He had confirmed he would be able to read the tape back home. He asked how much it would cost to mail. Being a slow day, I got a blank tape, weighed it, then called the Post Office to get postage rates, which I wrote out for him.

The student was strangely upset when I gave everything to him, and I asked why. Well, I was told, I’d gotten the price to mail an empty tape. His tape would be full — with his thesis.

Programming pranks

When I first started working in the consulting office, one of our regular clients was a staff member, a programmer who happened to be blind. He programmed in PL/1 and Cobol, which, as the old-timers will remember, could be quite verbose. He would show up with a hundred-page printout and ask for help in debugging it. I would read the printout and we would carry on a discussion of the logic and so on. He seemed to have his entire program memorized, because he of course could not read it, yet he knew every line of code. I was amazed.

It wasn’t until I had been there for several months that I learned that he wrote his programs with a Braille typewriter on key-punch cards. While he was sitting across from me, he was “reading” the cards with his fingers under the edge of the desk where I could not see. Apparently, it was a trick he regularly played on the newbies.

“Debugging” has many meanings

Monday morning one summer (I should mention I dislike mornings in general and Mondays in particular), I pulled the early shift. Normally this is pretty dull period, but not this day. I filled my coffee cup and tried to stay awake while I dealt with the numerous people who came by for help.

Then I received a call from a lady wanting to know what she should do to get rid of the silverfish in her basement.

I stopped dead for a minute. What was she talking about? Then it dawned on me that this was obviously some of my colleagues who, knowing my dislike of Monday mornings, were pulling a prank. Well, I could play along.

I asked her to describe the silverfish, what they were doing, where they were — whatever I could think of, figuring sooner or later they’d have to give up the gag. Nope. She had valid answers all down the line. This seemed to be for real.

Curious, I asked her where she had gotten this phone number. Why, out of the phone book, of course, she said.

I pulled out the new city phone book, turned to the university’s pages, and right there in the first column of the first page was our consulting desk phone number, under the heading “Debugging.”

As the phone book had just been published, I could see this was going to be a fun year. We all had the direct line to the Department of Entomology memorized in short order.

The biggest lesson I learned from these experiences is that every consultation has a human involved, and all people look at things differently.

This story, “Real IT consulting with real people,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com.